International Gospel Sensitivity

I am not an international missions expert but am learning some helpful things year after year as our relationship with a local Cuban church in Havana deepens and continues. It seems that much of God’s teaching is less about your quest to learn than it is about how God seems to wisely stumble us into situations that we are clueless about. Providence shapes and moves and lays out the tracks that you walk, and as you look back, you see God knowing you more than you are knowing Him by your own pursuit. After three years of regular trips to Cuba, God opened the curtain and revealed how He has been knowing our church and teaching us about our international folly unbeknownst to us. So, here’s my attempt at explaining what I’ve learned from the last three years that was not truly clear to me until this point.

International Missions Are About Relationships Not Trips

Often times international missions become nothing more than a string of isolated events seeking to create and experience significant global impact in a 6 to 12 day period. Since churches are made up of complex image bearers, it becomes hard to produce and experience this kind of impact with merely isolated, international events, with a revolving door of diverse groups. What has made our international missions in Cuba mutually fruitful has been the fact that we have sought to see our primary task to be that of building an ongoing relationship over time. This means that getting to know names and stories and being known in the same way over the years is vital to biblical efficacy....international effectiveness goes hand-in-hand with relational depth that is built over time. This means we are not merely going to Cuba or other places to do things but to be with people. This means that much of what we do is less action and media worthy events and more relation and conversation. Said another way, what is most essential is not tweetable or Instagram-worthy. You may say that seems hard, long and impractical and I would agree with the difficulty and complexity of such an approach. However, I would strongly affirm that international effectiveness goes hand-in-hand with relational depth that is built over time. Don’t plan trips! Plan to cultivate an on-going relationship with trips as the means to do so.

International Missions Are About Inquiry Not Agendas

As Americans, we often have pre-existing agendas that drive what we desire to do in the world. We want to teach, or we want to build things or want to give certain things and or provide certain services and so we look for places to be able to be our outlets. However, there is one important thing to assume when you engage the world for the gospel and that is that you may know what you desire to do but still do not know what is specifically needed. God’s purposes are universal and yet they are unfolding, uniquely contextual. Much of what is needed in international missions is to spend the needed time with the people in the church to learn what they need in order to do effective gospel ministry. One of the most selfish and frustrating things that can happen to any church in need is for people to help them in a manner that is more about what the helper wants to do and less about what is actually needed (I know this from my experience as a church planter very well). We need to see their needs as taking priority over what we “need to do.” We went into Cuba wanting to help and serve for the glory of God but open to letting the church inform us as to what that particularly meant for them. We knew that God had already set an agenda for that church that was not subject to a pre-existing American churchianity one. Missions are about listening and learning well about what the gospel needs of a church are... Over time, we learned their actual need rather than actualizing a pre-existing agenda. Missions are about listening and learning well about what the gospel needs of a church are rather than seeking to find an international suitor to scratch the pre-existing agenda itch of those in the States. I often get inquiries about partnering in Cuba and find myself very hesitant to connect the people I know in Cuba with people in the States given this particular issue. Everyone has a marvelous American plan that they would love to use Cuba for.

International Missions Are Holistic Not Partial

There seems to be a one dimensional view to engaging the nations. We are either solely about teaching or solely about giving resources or solely about doing projects. Generally speaking, every church in the global world has holistic needs. Meaning that they need relationship and brotherly affection and financial support and other material resources. Meaning, they need teaching and counsel and gospel conversations and practical hands-on work. Meaning, they need tools and equipment like projectors and crayons for kids’ ministry and they need theological resources for shaping thought. In the same way that our truest friends are those who spot us for rent on a bad month, come over to fix our house issues, and speak truth to us, such it is in the church-to-church relation in global missions. Our work in Cuba has been one in which the totality of the church has been the holistic concern as we partner with them. This is challenging as the American way is one of compartmentalizing all to the specialists. We who are teaching and relationship experts abdicate giving things and money to those mercy experts and those who are mercy experts abdicate teaching to those theology experts. Let me say emphatically that our material partnership has empowered our teaching and relational investment and on the other hand our teaching and relational investment has empowered our material investment. A comprehensive and holistic interest in the good of another church in another country is a compelling witness to the holistic scope of the gospel.

International Missions Are a Contextual Not American Experience

Often when Americans go to do some kind of ministry in a second or third world setting they seek to--as far as they are able to--replicate American amenities and living. Meaning that they do not live like those they are ministering to while they are there. They simply do their best to live as they are used to (and then they post how much they “roughed” it). Part of effective partnership and missions in the world is to truly experience life as it is normally is in the context. Part of knowing people well is in knowing their daily experience in a first-hand manner. For example, how people sleep and eat and get around and clean themselves is all part of what it means to truly know your international missional context. One of the easiest ways to subtly create and keep distance from your missional partners and your church is to live there with a subtle functional elitism that refuses to enter into their experience for even a moment of time (when I say enter their experience I don’t just mean eat their food). The more you know about how life is the more you will be wise and discerning as to what it means to partner for the gospel in the context. The closer you are to where people normally are the deeper the relational bond will be. You come to live with and not above or around them. Do not merely live in their world while clinging to yours but enter into it with them. For me having sweaty conversations in rooms without air-conditioning and taking showers with buckets of water and taking showers without hot water in local homes and sleeping on uncomfortable mattresses has done more for me in understanding the plight of the people than a thousand pages of reading on cross-cultural missions. Get over yourself for a period so you can get into the reality of others. Our redemption is, after all, all about the contextual in your face-ness of the incarnation.

International Missions Are About Empowerment Not Self-Aggrandizement

When an American goes into the international missional context, it is often to be seen and known concerning what it is that they are doing. An example of this is bringing in needs for kids or medicine or food and then scheduling events where we are the ones who are seen giving these things to the people. The idea being that we make sure that we are seen as the providers and givers of the good things that the church has received. Having spoken to Cubans about this practice, I have come to see that from their perspective it is seen as condescending, dehumanizing, disingenuous, and self-promoting. By God’s grace we have thought it wiser to put resources in the local church’s hands and trusted them to be the ones who give things to people in need. We are there to empower people to do what they are doing well, not to come in and be the weekly power from the imperial evangelical powerhouse. There is often a complex of inferiority in the needy international context that is not helped by Americans parading in as the visible providers. We must function in such a way that we affirm the church on the ground that they are the solution to their local context and we are merely equippers in the background. We are not looking to impress our fellow American church goers with how radical we were for a few weeks in the third world; we are seeking rather to help the local church be tangibly seen and felt in their community for the sake of the gospel. Another way this can be seen is in how you teach in the context. Instead of doing kids’ ministry for a week, train the people there as to how they can do kids’ ministry with the things you are bringing (maybe you do a mixture of modeling up front and behind the scenes equipping). Instead of doing a big evangelism event, gather some leaders to think through gospel-centered mission. Make yourself invisible while you seek to improve the day-to-day visibility of those who are regularly there. We do not need to sound the American church trumpets as we do the Lord’s work in the international context.

International Missions Are About Exporting the Gospel Not America

Our church had a simple purpose in whatever context or conversation that we have had in our missional involvement in Cuba and that is to export gospel clarity and connection not American Christianity. When you go into other countries you often see other Americans bring their American values rather than apostolic Christianity. Sadly, it seems that much of what is brought there is some packaging of how to do theology, church, evangelism like the American church with all its humanistic baggage. Said another way, we bring the way of church from our country rather than the who and the head of the universal church from God’s heavenly sanctuary. For example, the American way of getting people in by appealing to the humanistic desires of men to bait and switch the gospel will be much of what is seen when Americans have missional activity in an international context. We bring teaching on the latest evangelical trend and concern in our context as if it is transcultural and translatable. Our desire however has been to help our brothers in Cuba see the intrinsic appeal of the gospel in its multifaceted fullness rather than show them all the appealing things Americans do to make the gospel appealing. Our desire however has been to help our brothers in Cuba see the intrinsic appeal of the gospel in its multifaceted fullness rather than show them all the appealing things Americans do to make the gospel appealing. We have tried to give them textual (biblical) categories not American buzzwords. Here is what has been invigorating to see through these gospel-exclusive interactions. The gospel itself is truly transculturally effective, sufficient, and compelling wherever it is let loose in its profound-bare bones simplicity. Americans must distinguish between the American gospel from the gospel that is biblically believed by Americans. International partners do not need our Christianity but they do need an ever growing depth and awareness of our Christ who is also theirs. If there is one thing I have seen in every international context I have been in, it is that the greatest and most consistent need is not money or things but gospel depth.