Cross Cultural Missions: Some of us seem set up to fail

A friend sent me this link (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/13.26.html) about Bruce Wilkinson’s failures in Africa. Bruce, as many of you know is the author of several books, the best known of them being The Prayer of Jabez. This book which elevated Wilkinson to something of a celebrity in many evangelical circles expounds on the idea of praying for God to “expand our boundaries” and bless us with more that we can bless others more. In our materialistic, suffering ignorant American Christianity these ideas sold very well. Which is not to criticize the book, or its author, only to point out one of the many reasons for it’s success. According to the article and others in NY Times and previous Christianity Today articles, Wilkinson decided to use the profits of his book to go and make a huge impact in Africa. Much like Rick Warren’s use of his fame and money to better support pastors and repay his church, I applaud Wilkinsons efforts at taking the blessings which God brought to him through Jabez and use them to help others. I won’t go into the whole article, but essentially Wilkinson went over to Swaziland and like Wesley on his first missionary journey, experienced unexpected hardship and failure in his venture. According to the article the failure of his missionary enterprise has left him shaken and seeking restoration.

Sometimes we have fantastic visions from God that fail. Sometimes we are at fault. Sometimes life just happens. Sometimes they weren’t ever meant to really succeed. I have zero knowledge, aside from what I have read, about Wilkinson’s efforts which seem well intended and funded. Yet this failure leads us once again to reexamine our visions of what cross cultural missions are. For so long our Eurpean Colonial Heritage has lead us to missions enterprises that are doomed for failure. Even well funded, well intentioned missions efforts often fail when we don’t understand the dynamics of the culture we are trying to help. Africa in particular has such a long history of chewing up missionaries and taking the best efforts of our churches and rendering them moot. I am not sure what the answers are for our efforts at spreading the Gospel internationally and bringing relief, but their origins have to be far more organic than our efforts of the past. No longer can our efforts at missions resemble colonizational efforts of centuries past or franchise expansions of our corporations. How can we as the affluent North American church bring aid and grace to the world without also bringing a condescending superiority that insures our failure. Whatever the answer is we will have to figure it out locally as we build bridges cross culturally in our cities and communities. Maybe we often fail across the ocean because we fail in our backyards as well. In my work in Urban areas and other cross cultural missions I have found that humility, authenticity and a lot of time are really the only ways to bridge the gap between cultures. If you are only trying to help someone to make yourself feel better, they will know it, unquestionably. If you believe that you are better than them, even on a subconscious level, they will know it. So no matter who you are, how much money you have, or how big your dreams are for changing the world, if you don’t come in humility and grace to another culture, you are predisposed for failure.