“ I think we have to question deeply the assumptions with which that discussion proceeds. One of the assumptions is that the mission is ours. We do it. That assumption is defective. We don’t do mission, we live in God’s mission. It’s a definition of our life. We live in God. Mission is life in God.
The way we read Matthew 28, the Great Commission, is not completely biblical. We think mission depends on our fulfillment of the Great Commission? No, no, absolutely not. That plays into our power paradigms. We love the idea of Go and Make, because it is in our charge and our control. The 10/40 window, and the emphasis on mapping unreached peoples, may assume that nothing is happening there. No! God is there! He has been at work there all these years. The problem has to do with a defective doctrine of God. He is the Creator. There is not a space beyond his reach and claim.
I think we have to go back to the fact that God calls us to be his. Jesus’ first personal words to Peter were, “Follow me.” And his last personal words, after the resurrection, were “follow me.” It is his mission.
Quite recently we started using the word partnership to describe the various “mission”, development and charitable work that we are doing in the world. Niringiye challenges the use of that word. “ I don’t want you to be partners. You should be brethren first[sisters and brothers]. The two are different.
You have a family. There are younger and older siblings, there are tall and short. Do they fail to be family?
The problem is that the typical Euro-American goes to Africa and feels that Africa is a place that has problems. But you come to Africa bearing a bundle of problems of your own. Share your problems. Share your tears. Confess your sins to one another. We are parents, and parenting is not a European thing or an African thing. We have wives and husbands. We all have difficult relatives. Talk about those things.
We will not hide that we have money. But money is the last thing the world needs.
Let me tell you about my American friend. When two people don’t know each other, they operate on stereotypes. He feared I wanted some of his money. And honestly, I did. Because Americans have money. Something remarkable happened in our relationship when we both had to confess our fears about each other. My friend told me, “Zac, I hope it’s not for my money.” I said, “Let me be honest with you. We can’t be in this relationship if there is no money in it. But I’ll go further and say, it’s not your money I want.”
We then ask, what things need money? And when we agree about it, we know where the money will come from. But we have mutually agreed what the need is. It’s not me who needs money. It’s us together.
So many people we meet in Kampala, all we discuss is mission. And we get nowhere, because we do not get to know each other as brothers and sisters. I believe that what the world wants to see, the witness of the gospel, is not what we do. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”
Over almost 20 years of our developing friendships in Africa, beginning with our six months of teaching in northern South Africa in 2002, I can say that I have many whom I call brother and sister and my worldview has and is being reshaped through them. I am humbled and grateful for these relationships, wonderful folks whom I love.