Two key rules for mission that come from Deuteronomy 31:8 and Matthew 28:18-20

I studied the mission and values statements of Mennonite Mission Network carefully before agreeing to serve on its board. They sound good to me, even though “mission” has not always been a positive word for me.

I don’t remember a lot about the concert itself, but my parents bought the album, and that album captivated me. I remember lying on the living room floor listening to it. When the album played to the end, I got up and started it again. Over and over and over.

Floyd Red Crow Westerman sang with passion about how the white man had come to this sacred land and conquered the Native Americans. One of the songs was called “Missionaries.”

Here are some of the lyrics:
“Spread the word of your religions
Convert the whole world if you can
Kill and slaughter those who oppose you
Its worth it if you save one man
Go and tell the savage native
That he must be christianised
Tell him end his heathen worship
And you will make him civilized.”

And after several stanzas of passionate critique, the last stanza instructs:
“Missionaries, missionaries
go and leave us all alone
Take your white god to your white men
We’ve a God of our own.”

Westerman’s signature song was entitled “Custer Died for Your Sins.”

Fortunately, I also had good models of service and mission work growing up. We often had presentations at church by Mennonite Central Committee workers or mission workers on furlough.

I had cousins who served with MCC in Brazil and Jordan and married women they met in their assignments. I owe a lot to my parents for the exposure they gave me to many different types of church service.

I was also fortunate to meet and marry a wonderful woman at college. We shared values and wanted to do Christian service after graduating. We applied to the mission boards and to MCC.

I still remember when we told my parents we had accepted a three-year assignment in Haiti. My mother said, Yes, we took you to programs about service and mission workers and helped develop a broad perspective of the world, and we support workers who go overseas, “but we didn’t mean you.”

I knew that she meant, We’re proud of you, and this will be hard in some ways. But of course, we meant you. She said something similar when we later decided to go to Bolivia.

In our overseas experience, we saw many positive models of mission. In Bolivia, the Spanish-speaking Mennonite church had started when local people meeting with MCC workers in Bible studies in their homes said they wanted to start a church. Service work in the name of Christ led to the formation of new churches.

In my regional role in Bolivia, I also interacted with mission workers throughout South America and visited the Argentine Chaco. The mission board sent missionaries to work with the Toba indigenous group in the early 1940s.

But the missionaries got more and more frustrated. The Mennonite missionaries were frustrated as they tried to start churches and learned that after people left the Spanish mission service, they held their own services in Toba. An evaluation team that came in 1954 had one main recommendation: The missionaries had to “get out of the way of what God is doing.”

I can hear Floyd Westerman singing: “Missionaries, missionaries, go and leave us all alone. Take your white god to your white men; We’ve a God of our own.”

But in 1954, the Mennonite mission did heed the recommendation, and they did try to get out of the way of what God was doing. Rather than try to plant new Mennonite churches, they changed their approach to walk alongside the local expressions of spirituality.

As my thinking about mission has evolved, I think I can boil mission down to two key rules:

First, make sure you recognize God in the other. This is what is missing when mission becomes conquest. Deuteronomy 31:8 instructs that, wherever we go, the Lord goes before us and goes with us. We forsake our God if we don’t recognize God in all people. We should recognize God in the loving acts of others and recognize that God does indeed go before us. That must affect how we think about mission.

Sometimes we talk about experiencing God in nature. That’s easy. The hard part may be seeing God in other people.

The October 2013 issue of The Mennonite had a quote from Lillian Daniel that struck me: “Any idiot can find God alone in the sunset. It takes a certain maturity to find God in the person sitting next to you who … voted for the wrong political party.”

It may not always be easy, but it seems to me that the first rule of mission has to be that we recognize God in the other.

What I call the second key rule about mission is similar: Make sure others can recognize God in you. I gained a new insight about the Great Commission Scripture in preparing this message. It came through the worship resources on the Mission Network web page.

Sandy Miller provided this insight: “In Matthew 28:19, the Greek verb poreuomai (por-yoo’-om-ahee), or go, is a participle, not an imperative, and notes ongoing action. A better way to understand this Great Commission is to consider ‘go’ to mean ‘as you go.’ In other New Testament texts, this Greek verb is interpreted as how one should conduct oneself, or how one should live and walk in faith. The Great Commission is for the entire congregation.”

I like that. It means that a key rule for mission is to make sure that others can recognize God in us.

Willis and Berdalene Horst demonstrated these two rules in their 38 years of service in the Chaco of Argentina. At the memorial service for Willis on Sept. 19, 2013, Lindy Shelly shared these words from Willis: “The indigenous people themselves taught us the profound value of intercultural theological dialogue. The format of the circle for the conversation with the biblical texts permits us to hear the voice of God from the indigenous perspective. In the Bible Circle, everyone teaches and everyone learns.

Together with the indigenous people, the Mennonite team continues learning to be present without conquering—neither for the Christian denomination that sends us nor for the culture in which we were formed.”

There are many ways to share the Good News—through preaching, through sharing, through serving “in the name of Christ.” When we seek to proclaim the Good News in mission, it is key that we first recognize God in the other and that we make sure others recognize God in us.

I like the way Stanley Green puts it. He offered these thoughts in his column in the November 2013 issue of The Mennonite, titled “From a ‘crusading mind’ to a ‘crucified mind’ “: “The great new reality of our time is the shift from subject-object relations that have characterized missions in the last two centuries to a new era in which every church can embrace and live into its own identity as a subject of mission.”

He goes on: “What we need is not a moratorium. Rather than indulge a withdrawal syndrome, based on our sense of guilt because of past failures, what we need in Western mission is a continuing conversion from what Koyama calls a ‘crusading mind’ to a ‘crucified mind.’ ”

We need a commitment to participation in the global mission community in the spirit of servanthood, humility and relationships.

We like to describe it as Third Way Mission or, simply put, mission in the way of Jesus.
My understanding for and appreciation of mission has evolved. Willis Horst got it right.

Linda Shelly shared these words of Willis at his memorial: “I went out to help others convert to Jesus and discovered that I was also converted in the process. … I realized that those to whom I had gone were already engaged in a spiritual journey long before western missionaries ever arrived on the scene.”

And this last sentence sums it up the best: “God wants to save people by redeeming their own story, making it possible for [people] to keep their own identity.”

I have often felt reluctant to respond to a request to serve the church, and I engage in some form of discernment process. When you hear that voice saying, “I can’t do that,” maybe you need to hear someone say, “Of course we meant you.”

I can hear God best when I am able to open myself to say, “Here I am, Lord.”

Barry C. Bartel is a member of Glennon Heights Mennonite Church, where he gave this sermon on Mission Sunday in November 2013.