"A couple of years ago a leader of a British mission agency asked me, 'What can we do to help Korean mission movements?' and I told him, 'Nothing!' He looked rather shocked but it was a truthful answer - he came 50 years to late." KeungChul Jeong was in my office today and that was his frank comment on the attitude of western mission movements towards Koreans. KeungChul, who leads the work of Interserve in Korea, was, of course, right in most respects but I still wished we had a little longer to talk - he had to rush for a train or something. He was correct in that a lot of us from the West underestimate Korean missionary maturity. He also saw that we have a difficulty in receiving, we prefer to give. He was also rightly reflecting the self-understanding of Korea as a nation which now sends more cross-cultural missionaries than any other except India and the USA. But then he might just (if I may be allowed to suggest it) be making the same mistake as the British. Collaboration, partnership, sharing (call it what you like) is important for the strong as well as the weak - Koreans need Africans, Indians and Peruvians as partners in mission, just as much as do we Brits.
Well, I'm in Seoul in October so perhaps we can talk some more then. We discovered we have a mutual friend there - Henry, a Korean mission leader from whom I learnt much in Southern Russia ten years ago. Perhaps we can enjoy Kimchi together and discover some new recipies for partnership.
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The remark of the person from the British mission agency you mentioned brings to the serface a perrennial problem.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what happened to the Anglican "Partners in mission" idea, which I mentioned in a post on my blog Notes from underground: Mission is a two-way street... or is it?.
I was once involved in organising a Partners in Mission consultation for the Anglican diocese of Zululand, and a visitor from a British mission agency came along and told me we were doing it all wrong, and that in fact we shouldn't be doing such a thing at all. It all needed to be done by some centralised ecclesiastical bureaucracy far from the diocesan level.
It seemed to me a somewhat swivel-eyed concept of partnership, or perhaps similar to that of Roy Welensky, erstwhile prime minister of the erstwhile Northern Rhodesia, who said that partnership must be like the partnership of horse and rider -- with whites firmly in the saddle, and firmly holding the reins.