Unabashed

I have just returned to South Africa.  I went to attend a dialogue of Anglican bishops on the subject of reconciliation.  It was a great blessing.  While I was there I also had the chance to spend some time with Holly Milburn, Cameron Spoor, and Steve Smith, all of them Young Adult Service Corps volunteers from the Episcopal Church serving in South Africa.  As profound as Anglican bishops can be talking about reconciliation, and indeed they were, having the chance to be inspired by these three young people was, without a doubt, the highlight of the trip.  Indeed, they were the greater blessing.

On my last day, one of them, Cameron, asked to have our picture taken together.  I stopped by the school where he and Steve work, and one of the teachers was kind enough to take a picture of the three of us.  He sent me a copy, but with it he sent some other, much more important, pictures.

The other pictures were of the students at Holy Cross School. Some of them show the younger students excitedly looking through their new books about Clifford the Big Red Dog.  Ginger, who along with me has been involved with the educational ministry of the Holy Cross Monastery in Grahamstown for a number of years and has been a recipient of the blessing that is, carefully packed the books and sent them with me.  Clifford, you see, was one of the characters we read to our own children about, and we have long since come to think of the children at Holy Cross as ours, too.  I had delivered the books to the school the day before, one book for each of the children to take home.

The funny thing about that was that the teachers sent the books home with the children.  All of the children brought them back and returned them the next day.  They couldn’t believe something so precious could be theirs to keep.  The teachers explained and the books went home again the next night.  I hope they stayed this time. 

The real point I want to tell you about, though, is about Cameron’s email and the way he signed it, which was this:  “Servant in Christ (and unabashed about being a missionary!).”  Unabashed for good reason.

Missionary is a word that has taken on some very negative connotations, and not without justification.  There have been times when missionary and colonialist were very nearly synonyms.  There have been times, good intentions notwithstanding, when missionaries have fostered dependence and may have done more harm than good.  Cameron’s insight, though, is that it is not only possible to reclaim the word from its misuses, it is important to do so.

Being a missionary, of course, is not truly about colonialism or short-sightedness in our strategies.  Being a missionary, in truth, has very little to do with what we do for others at all.  It has to do mostly with being who we ourselves are.  Mission is a matter of identity for us.  Mission is just simply who we are.

And who we are is human beings, created like all other human beings, in the image of God, and born for the purpose of loving, of loving God and loving one another, which are really pretty much the same thing.  That purpose is what our mission is.  What Cameron and all the YASC volunteers know, I think, is that in loving the poor, they are loving Christ himself, and what makes that mission work, as opposed to doing good, is that it fulfills our very basic identity as human beings, children of God, which is to love.  Trevor Huddleston, a missionary who preceded Holly, Cameron, and Steve to South Africa by 70 years, put it this way:  “You cannot love an unseen God until you perceive Him in those you are sent to serve.”  Doing just that is what being a missionary is all about.

So, I am deeply grateful for Cameron’s reminder about that mission is about being who we are.  And in that sense, it is not only acceptable to be a missionary, it is imperative.  Cameron, Holly, and Steve are missionaries on our behalf in South Africa.  There are other YASC volunteers in other places doing exactly the same thing.  And that makes all of us who work to support them in our various ways missionaries, too.  I’m so grateful for the small opportunity I have had to do so.  It has left me unabashed about being a missionary.

Peace,
+Stacy

Archbishop and Missionary

There is an inherent tension in the life of the Church, and it is very much one in which we live today.  It is the tension of stability and change, of being settled and being a traveler, of safety and adventure.  It is this, the tension between safety and adventure, with which I am most concerned.  Ministry can, if one is not careful, be more about being stable and settled than about change, traveling, and adventure.  Mission is the counterbalance.  Being a missionary is inherently about change, traveling, and adventure.

I refer you to a medieval saint of the Church, Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg and Missionary to Denmark and Sweden.  This tension between safety and adventure played out in Anskar’s life in an interesting way.  In the course of his ministry, in 845, the Danes sacked Hamburg, rendering Anskar’s nascent archdiocese unviable, thus leaving Anskar without a base and, more importantly, without revenue for his work.  Here is where it gets interesting.

In order to solve this problem, the king decided to combine the more prosperous district around Bremen with the now ransacked diocese of Hamburg.  It was a sensible solution except it did not make the Bishop of Cologne, whose diocese had included the wealthy town of Bremen up to that point, happy.  It was no small controversy in Anskar’s day, and it finally required the intervention of the Pope himself to resolve.  My guess is that the Bishop of Cologne got a cash settlement from someone.

Now, here’s my point.  Archbishop and missionary.  The reason they do not go together without tension is that one can be very much about vested interests and the other is always about upsetting vested interests.  Fundamentally, the missionary effort is about upsetting vested interests.  It is about upsetting vested interests in a distant place by the proclamation of the Gospel.  Even more importantly, it is about upsetting those vested interests within ourselves by living it.

The fact that vested interests resist the missionary imperative of the Gospel was not new in Anskar’s day, and it is not new in our own.  It has always been so.  But that being the case, we must not let it be the last word.  We must, like Anskar, be willing to, indeed insistent upon, upsetting the vested interests in the service of the Gospel.  Here is the difficulty.  The Gospel and the Church are not synonyms.  The Church is full of vested interests that prefer safety.  That’s the archbishop part of Anskar.  Not so the Gospel, which prefers adventure.  That’s the missionary part.  And it’s why salvation is in the Gospel, even more than it is in the Church.

 Peace,

+Stacy