The following reflection was written by Manu Ward. Manu and his family recently returned to New Zealand after living in a slum in Asia for 4 years.
“Your best strategy: borrow something!” That’s what a friend once told me. “It doesn’t matter what it is, but on your first day when moving into a new neighbourhood you need to borrow something from your neighbours.”
When we think about mission, we often think of ourselves as the ones with something to offer. But, as it turns out, the best way to enter a situation of need or ministry is not as superior benefactors with resources and answers, but as vulnerable fellow humans who ourselves need help. That way bridges are made right from the start.
Moving into the slum
When our family first moved in a slum community in an Asian megacity three years ago, we were so clearly out of our depth that it was easy to find ways to be vulnerable. With barely any language, everything was a cooperative effort. Our neighbours helped build our plywood shack. They found us old planks and banners for our home-made furniture. They taught us how to cook. They took us to markets with fair prices. They protected us from prying officials and pushy evangelists. Even today, our strongest friends are those that became our language-helpers. They remember with pride how they – uneducated village migrants! – coached us – affluent Westerners! – through the first awkward months of learning how to talk.
Even as we became established, we kept looking for ways to need our neighbours. We didn’t have a fridge for two years, as purchasing ice from various neighbours was a valuable way to build connections (though having a baby eventually made that choice unsustainable). For similar reasons we still refuse to buy our own washing machine, bicycle pump or spade. The inconvenience of simplicity is worth the relationships, weaving us into the community with cycles of mutual indebtedness.
Westerners often struggle with adopting such inter-dependence. We are trained to exude competence and self-sufficiency. But, as Henri Nouwen observed during his time with the poor in South America, gratitude becomes the “central virtue of a missionary”:
It is hard for me to accept that the best I can do is probably not to give but to receive. By receiving in a true and open way, those who give to me can become aware of their own gifts… As long as someone feels that he or she is only the object of someone else’s generosity, no dialogue, no mutuality, and no authentic community can exist.
When the power goes out
I remember a visiting intern in our neighbourhood who was finding it particularly difficult to impose on others for help, determined to survive in this strange new world alone, and exhausting herself in the process. One hot night, sleeping in her host family’s shack beneath an oppressive mosquito net, the power went out, and the electric fan stopped. The next morning she woke with a dreamy recollection that somebody had been fanning her manually. I visited the next day, and we established that, yes, her host sister was worried that her guest would be robbed of badly-needed sleep, and had sat by her bed flapping with a hand-fan for several-hours until power returned. Our visitor was stunned and humbled to tears. “It is you that has become Christ to me” she said to her host: a poor Muslim squatter. Such profound gratitude becomes love, and provides glimpses of God in the guise of the poor. What better basis could there be for our visitor’s later return for long-term mission?
Serve but also be served
Reciprocity is the life-blood of genuine relationships. And if we believe that poverty is by nature relational – broken relationship with God, deficiency in relationship with self, dysfunction in relationship with community, and estrangement from the environment – then the solution must have relational reciprocity at its core.
Consider Jesus. As a Jewish male, he scandalously sat down at the well and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water, opening the relationship with an expression of his need of her help (John 4:7-9). Jesus established himself with Peter with a request for help: Jesus needed his boat and his skills to control it (Luke 5:1-3). Jesus sent out the disciples with nothing but a walking stick, to go reliant on the people they met (Mark 6:8-9). And of course Christ’s advent as a baby is surely the most profound illustration of God’s self-emptying incarnation among us, coming in utter dependence upon the humanity he came to save.
Sri Lankan theologian, Daniel Niles, wrote “the only way to build love between two people, or two groups of people, is to be so related to each other as to stand in need of each other.” Too often, he observes, mission teams establish their efforts with secular strength, foreign funding and international expertise, such that the community learns to look on the church with jealousy or fear. The Christian community must serve, that is true, but it must also be in a position of being served. Like Paul wrote, our weakness is actually our strength (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).
We’re in the process of experimenting with an income-generating enterprise with our neighbours, rescuing material destined for the rubbish dump to create useful new products. As a business it’s organic, messy and fragile, and will never compete with the faceless textile factories pervading our province. Our longest-serving worker loves to tell everyone who visits: “I’ve never had a boss who’s needed me so much. My ideas matter here. We’re all important.” It’s in communities like this, where everyone gets to give, that we believe God’s Spirit can grow his Kingdom.
For discussion
Have you ever seen receiving kindness, gifts, help or assistance from others as mission? In what ways does this idea challenge you?
