Introduction: Niche Discipleship and Mercenaries of the Church

    When I served as a missionary in “world missions” I was a hero of the church by crossing a body of salt water and reaching a foreign people for the Gospel. Missionary service was often heralded as the epitome of the greatest sacrifice one could make as a disciple of Jesus Christ. I cut my teeth on biographies of mission pioneers, some of them who were martyred in the cause of Christ. The great exploits of missionaries (and me by following their example) accomplished, and the costs paid in commitment to the cause–like leaving home and family, crossing borders and immersion in a new culture for the Gospel–put us all in the “exceptional” category of Christianity. It is not my objective to denigrate what missionaries do or have done. I was one of them. However, I have come to conclude, the result of this whole system has made the mission of the church an adjunct activity and clearly extra-curricular in Christian discipleship. Along with this approach to world missions, the journey of discipleship in the broader church of modern Christianity, endorsed acceptable tiers of commitment and faithfulness. There were the radical disciples¹ and all the rest—mostly standard church goers.

     This endeavor of crossing boundaries in mission was a unique calling, exotic and romantic to my supporters. It also encouraged a system that accepted the bifurcation of engagement in this kind of work from standard Christian discipleship. There is another consequence that I see at this juncture. Discipleship has become extremely watered down and Christian identity, especially of the evangelical brand, has become fused with certain ideological tenets of conservatism that rarely align with Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God. The task of calling people today, for instance, to the important work of the Kingdom or the ethics of Jesus, like racial reconciliation, peacemaking, advocacy for Black and Brown lives, and an array of many other social justice issues is often met with a blind stare, or direct opposition. There may be some mental ascent in some churches to these activities, the stuff that radicals engage in, but you do not necessarily have to sign-up to do anything about it. Efforts to try and make a difference in the world outside the four walls of the church, especially in suburbia, are behaviors taken up by a select few, or they find expression by supporting a very narrow agenda in the culture wars and voting for the right candidate. Supporting a World Vision child or giving to the World Relief offering every Thanksgiving are the high bar in expectations but even optional.²

     There is another consequence of this way of thinking and behaving. Besides objectifying the people who are carriers of the “mission endeavor” (missionaries), those on the other side of the mission-sending and mission-receiving enterprise become opaque, at best pictures we hang on our refrigerator, images of people in need of our benevolence and financial contributions. When I was a missionary for over many years, we would often talk about people, or regions we serve on the field as targets and we developed strategies for reaching them. Sadly, in this construct, I served as a mercenary for the church. I was the designated specialist who trained for years, learned a foreign language, raised money for the mission work God had called me to, and went out for sequential “terms of service.” This all subverted the mission of the church under the banner of missions.

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NOTES:

[1] And we even have our specialized devotionals like “Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals” by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro. Zondervan. 2010.

[2] Many of these premises derive from the juxtaposition of serving as a missionary to Mexico for 10 years, followed immediately by serving as a Pastor of Missions and Outreach in a suburban church for 5 years. The tragedy of 9-11 occurred 2 years into the second season of ministry and formed some of my sense of the conclusions I have drawn in this paper, or at least observations that give me pause and force me to dig deeper.

Andrew Larsen is a peace activist serving principally to build bridges of understanding and collaboration between Christians and Muslims. He works directly as a consultant in peacemaking with Serve Globally and Love Mercy Do Justice, national departments of the Evangelical Covenant Church. His extensive travels to the MENA region, specially to Israel/Palestine have given much fodder for two movies on peacemaking in the I/P conflict, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: One Man’s Journey to the Heart of Palestine,” and “Make Hummus Not Walls.” Andrew is an accomplished photographer, having been published in the Nat’l Geographic Traveler Magazine and considers photography a piece of his contemplative lifestyle, seeking to be present to God’s beautiful creation as well as the peoples and stories he encounters in his peacemaking work. For more stories, pictures and prompts for the inward-outward journey see his blog http://worldlyholiness.com/

Movie links can be found here: http://worldlyholiness.com/movies-study-guide-from-peacetalkers-to-peacemakers/