Called into Mission . . .
. . . to learn a better way

No single event of my life signaled a ‘call to mission,’ but a few influential experiences gave me purchase as I navigated the cultural crosscurrents my youth:

At the 1984 Annual Conference Roger Schrock, newly returned from Sudan, led a Junior High session.  Divided into continents taped off on the floor, most of us stood shoulder to shoulder in Africa and Asia.  The lucky few in North America had several chairs apiece.  Being good Brethren, we grasped the lesson and played along, until Roger broke out the M&M’s.  The playing stopped and fighting began.  The unwillingness of the rich to share their candy with us seemed to leave us no option but resistance.  On the world stage, the unfair distribution of life’s most basic resources leads to much more serious violence.  I learned that being in mission means bringing justice to the poor and oppressed.

With eyes opened to injustice, I soon learned of the CIA’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors.  I struggled to understand why my nation would support the ‘contra’ insurgents in their violence against teachers, pastors and health care workers.  A few years later, I traveled to Nicaragua with other Brethren.  We didn’t go to build a church or distribute Bibles, but to learn to know our brothers and sisters.  We spent three weeks with peers from Misión Cristiana and Iglesia Cubana Pentecostal and came to see that in the effort to eradicate the ‘cancer’ of communism, US intervention was widening desperate social iniquities.  Together, we harvested coffee on a cooperative farm.  Many workers were on the war’s front lines and every family’s income depended on what their members could pick, so we picked the least productive plants and left the most productive for those with greater need.

Working together, we discovered that each of our denominations had been forged by leaders who stood courageously against cultures of greed and violence.  Each had survived persecution to proclaim a Gospel of love for all people; each had claimed the responsibility of living according to Jesus’ example.  The cultural differences between us were greater than those which create high tension within the Church of the Brethren; yet working together was one of the most joy-filled experiences I’ve ever had.  Being in mission gave me the courage to come home and add my voice to the growing numbers of Christians calling on our government to end its violent intervention.

The call to love all requires a radical transformation, a surrendering of our pursuit of ideological uniformity, political expediency, and social privilege.  When our culture stands silent in the face of injustice and human tragedy, the call to mission requires that followers of Jesus allow God to begin that change in us.  We don’t need to know in advance what that change may be.  Our brothers and sisters near and far can help us learn a better way.