The next place I really remember being shaped in what missions is to me happened shortly after getting into volunteering at our church to work with Jr & Sr High youth. One of the guys that helped us with the youth group was an OB/GYN (aka “The Good Doctor”), & had a history of being a part of of a mission to Baja. So, we ended up backing into an opportunity that sounded really good – & was an opportunity to get our feet wet in cross-cultural missions.

The mission was to a little town on the coast of Baja, below Ensenada about 90 minutes, called San Quintin. The place was actually a combo of a church, hospital, & home base for the pastor & doctors at the hospital. The Good Doctor volunteered his time & skills for a week a year to help the hospital out with mass numbers of cases in a short period of time – cases beyond the experience of the local docs, & also non-emergency cases that just didn’t have time to get done otherwise. This environment allowed any students/others on the trip that wanted to check out working in a hospital to do so, often in a very hands on way (baby delivery, stitches, etc. Yes.)

The rest of us did work projects around the home base every morning – for the local church, helping out with clean up of the grounds, & some very amateur (yet very skillfully designed by the locals) building projects. In the afternoons, the majority of us would go to a nearby “migrant workers” camp – a fenced in collection of housing units, made up of row after row of shacks, made of corrugated metal, each sharing a common roof & dirt floor. The only plumbing available was a pump handled water spout in the middle of the camp, & the primitive latrines were often a trench at the edge of the camp.

Most of the people staying in the camps came from Oaxaca & Chiapas, the southern tip of Mexico, in the Yucatan peninsula. Most, if not all, came from an indigenous-Indian heritage, meaning indigenous dialect/language, very few spoke some rudimentary Spanish, & none spoke English. They lived a poverty that was poorer than poor… poor to a level that I’d never seen. I can remember as clear as yesterday thinking about what Jesus said, “The poor we’ll have with us always…” & crying out inside “dear God, the injustice…”.

It wasn’t uncommon for both parents to be working in the fields, chasing the harvest of whatever happened to be ripe at the moment – (hence the name “Migrant” ) – leaving the camps full of kids taking care of kids – 3 year olds taking care of babies, & the occasional nursing mom caring for the rest.

We did a VBS (vacation Bible school,) meaning we attempted to contextualize the gospel using hand motions, & acts of kindness; knowing all the while that we weren’t understood – but that the clothes & shoes we provided went to good use. Made me wonder if Jesus comes through in situations like this… the images are burned into my memory… the poverty & our helplessness… what could we do? Provide free labor, meet felt needs, & try to help in a seemingly hopeless situation?

One of the clearest pictures of the love of Jesus I’ve ever seen happened in a migrant camp. A teenager, a beautiful young lady from our church, (AP) came upon a little one that couldn’t have been older than my niece (13 months) – the baby was wearing a diaper that she had to have been wearing for several days due to the state of the diaper, the duct tape that had been used to secure it to the baby, & the very obvious overflow of dried excrement & urine all over the baby & her clothes.

AP gathered 3 or 4 other girls to help her, & they spent the better part of an hour soothing the baby’s tears, then cleaning the baby up, putting on a new diaper, fresh clothes, socks & shoes. Finding a sibling of the baby to give more diapers to, more clothes. Wipes. I watched & wept. They didn’t care about the mess, getting dirty. They jumped into a hopeless situation & didn’t ask, “where are the NEXT diapers going to come from?” They just did what they could – & loved that baby. I believe that we will have a reunion in heaven with that baby, & that AP & the others will see her again, & they will know each other, & rejoice.

Over the next years, we took several trips to San Quintin, & saw great relationships built within our team. Each time, we came away with a sense of gratitude for what we have at home; having been confronted with an incomprehensible poverty & how others live; questioning what we call necessities for our Christianity to be lived out, personally & corporately.

I always found myself comparing the message of the gospel as preached in my American context, to what is preached where we were – would the gospel message of the USA be understood or even relevant? It seemed to me that outside of our local, 1st world context, a lot of it just slipped through the cracks… If that was the case, that was not ok… wasn’t the gospel something that is applicable & real to everyone on the planet – regardless of background, education, culture, country of origin etc? & shouldn’t the stuff that was ‘important’ cross-cultural barriers?

Interesting to look back on my own thinking – missions clearly in that context had a felt-needs application. Often it seemed that there was no real connecting with those that we were ministering to/with… part of it was due to the language barrier, but to me it seems that it may have been more of a ‘great white hope brings their stuff, $, & resources” relationship… an unequal relationship based on superior/inferior economic status; a dependent relationship.

Made me think & wonder: How do the locals think about us after we’re gone? What sort of things do we ‘help’ them to learn in order to get our $/resources, to have a team come & visit? How often have we downloaded our ministry methods, (aka “the right way”) that people do things in the States that they should be doing too – stuff that is 100% method based, not about message?

I am eternally indebted to the “Johnson” family for a quantum leap in my formative missions thinking process. They were an American missionary family that had relocated to the Baja. From my observation, it seemed that they’d found a good life – one where they could minister to the locals by serving as a liaison for teams (& $) from the US to the local churches & pastors;to get missions support from the US, from those that couldn’t/didn’t come to save the locals. All the while living a very comfortable life in the Baja – satellite dish, fishing & skiing boat, & nice cars. At the same time, hosting the occasional American team (at a cost of $50/head,) so that the team could do some VBS work… & also be a part of the beautification, landscaping, & clean-up of their property, affectionately dubbed the “Johnson Family Compound.”

BTW: Lest you think I’m treating this too harshly – a couple of our days of VBS work in the migrant camps were cancelled because our guide, Mr. Johnson, decided to take the boat out for some fishing instead. And to watch game 7 of the NBA Finals. Truly. And in place of going to VBS, we got to listen to Mrs. Johnson talk to us for 3 hours about “putting on Christ.”

I know that I saw through this – & that the students on the trip did too. Made me feel sick – people working a system of inequity, for personal gain (didn’t Paul write something about that.?)

I determined that I wasn’t going to be a part of something like this in the future – & therefore, needed a clearer guiding philosophy to be able to know what to say Yes & No too.

Here’s some things that came up:
• Every trip needs a ‘scouting trip’ – where the details of the time in-country would be checked, double-checked & worked out, leaving as little to interpretation as possible.
• Coming as equals, not as financial saviours
• Has to be giving & receiving – from both sides.
• Based on relationship – not a one hit wonder (going 1 place, 1 time, then looking for another place to go “next time’)
• And what else???

Coming up:
• Adventures at Street Church in Vancouver, Canadia
• The Russian mob in Romania
• A chance meeting in Germany

Rather than type the whole title out every time, I think I’ll just call it the ‘Missions Development’ series… Also, this isn’t going to be a blow by blow of every “missions experience” I’ve had – more like the Kodak moments that have been most instrumental in crystallizing my ‘philosophy’, values, & manner of living it out – so I’ll spend some good time in some places, & completely ignore other stuff. But that’s ok, because really, blogging is for me & my processing. If others read it & get some sort of insight into me, life, &/or other things of significance or minutiae, so be it. English-language dictators beware: there is a lot of tense & person jumping ahead…

I was there in June ’86, very shortly after the big E earthquake that happened on my (& Jeni’s!) birthday, 1985. Mass destruction, buildings in rubble everywhere. And a bustling city, full of life, all around it. I’d never seen “modern Mexico” before… I was used to the 3rd world-type portrayal of the country/people seen in pop-culture, Zorro, & the Tostitos/Doritos commercials. Which existed, usually right alongside a 1st-world city. What blew me away was the seeming absence of any sort of middle-class at all. People seemed to either be filthy rich (marble garage floors? Yes. I kid you not.) or filthy & poor, without access even to life’s basics, & I’m not talking about cable. Gross generalities to be sure, but this is seen through the lens of memory.

What sort of gospel is applicable to both extremes? The rich & the poor? My preconceived ideas failed me. The largely cultural, method, & technology based gospel of the “world inside my head” was exposed for what it was – a little of Jesus, & a lot of personal preference. A Christ, & a Christianity created in my own image. I am lost. Inadequate. Exposed. Finally seen in a mirror that shows all the details, excruciating though it may be.

I don’t remember how many people were on the mission trip, but I know that I was in a bit of a fog – confronted with my small Jesus, knowing that I needed a completely different world-view, & more importantly, to see Jesus as He really is, not just captured on the pages of my Bible as a series of anecdotes & historical events. In retrospect, I think one of the main things that I struggled with was how impersonal our ‘relationship’ was shaping up to be – with the people we had come to ‘minister’ to, let alone minister with.

We stood in a group & handed out tracts outside the soccer stadium where the semi-finals & finals of the Copa Mundial were held. I watched many of the people, people from all over the world, throw away what they’d been given, often without even looking at it. I thought about what we were doing, in the 3rd person, & wondered: if a group came to Reno to do what we were doing, what would I do? I’d probably ignore them & if I took their material, I’d throw it away too. Because the message, separated from knowing the messengers, was really, really hard to hear, esp. when it was spoken/delivered in a culture & language irrelevant to the receivers…

We did a couple of work projects in a ‘small’ (150K) suburb of La Ciudad. Did a few open air presentations, meaning we sang some songs in Spanish, did some skits (which I remember as both painful & awesome somehow), & then a fluent Spanish speaker would give a short message & an altar call. And then we’d pray with any people that wanted it. In the poorer areas, people hung out for ‘prayer,’ which meant that they were looking for a handout – something to meet their very real physical needs.

One thing that really was truly awesome was the soccer games. They started in one barrio when my cousin John & I were hiding in the neighborhood around our whole teams ‘home base.’ We were hiding so we didn’t have to do the manual labor at the main house (latrine duty) – & came across about 10 guys playing soccer on a ‘field’ strewn with rocks – but with two very real “soccer goals.” We played, sometimes well, sometimes not so well – & ended up attracting a massive crowd of locals that wanted to see the two ‘gabachos’ playing their national sport. The noise from the game ended up drawing a large chunk of people from our team, people that had been sent out to find the two lost Americans. Our team leaders frustration turned to joy when he saw that in the soccer game, more people had gathered than we’d seen in our previous week of ministry ops. Interesting…

In my rear-view, it looked a lot like American Christian Imperialism, where a brand of little “c” christianity was exported, message, style, & methods, to a less-fortunate (read: poorer) group of people who needed to have our good news brought to them. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looks or sounds – I know that the motives of our team weren’t evil or bad – more ignorant, or naive. Definitely self-serving, without realizing it. Like a baby is self-serving because she wants pastries all the time & will use what/whomever to get to where the pastries are. I see/saw our mission as a way of serving ourselves, to have an experience, stories to tell. Knowing that what we were doing would ‘play well’ in the context of the christian world. Because we were helping those less fortunate, & bringing christianity to the natives. Whew.

I had, & maybe others did too, feelings of fruitlessness – where were the masses flocking to Jesus? We were doing it “right,” right? I had lots of questionings: is this what missions is? And what happens to the people who HAVE responded while we’re here when we go home? Is there any people or place that they could be connected to, church-wise? Hmm.

On that note, fortunately for me, the “Reno team” was staying with the brother of a dear friend that had relocated from Mexico to Reno… having 10-15 Americans staying at their house was a major opportunity for hospitality for them, & they absolutely relished it. We’d have breakfast together, us & about 4-10 members of their family, all of whom took time off of work at their very real, just as important as we had at home, jobs. To be with us, spend time together, & to shuttle us around the biggest city in the world. Then, late at night, we’d get home (after they picked us up from the mission site, of course,) & it was snack time – talking around the living room, getting to know each other in a way that only happens when you’re cooped up together in the same house/place for an extended period of time.

Our last night together, we even put on a cross-cultural talent show & spent the evening cracking each other up. How surprised was I to find that two family members ended up giving their hearts to Jesus as a part of the evening – not from our presentation, but because of the relationship (one that still exists,) & tangible love of Christ that had somehow leaked out over our two weeks there.

At the time, I didn’t see the stark contrast between the two ways of life – maybe because the hanging out with the Mexican family was too normal – & fun. Definitely not the kind of thing that people in the US would give you money to sponsor a “mission trip” for.