Disconnecting to connect

In response to my yesterday thoughts on 'Short Change?', Martin came back to me saying, "I'm not sure if the harder questions are the financial ones?" Thanks Martin, that gives me the excuse to write more on this topic. (Plug .... In fact I have already written quite a lot more which will come out at the end of the year as a chapter in the Edinburgh 2010 report.) But back to our discussion now ....

Short-term mission is costly but I agree with you Martin that there are harder questions. I hinted at one of these right at the end of my last piece. I have just been rereading Tom Sine's The New Conspirators (2008 sequel to Mustand Seed Conspiracy) where he invites "followers of Jesus to do the hard work of decoding the cultural influences in our lives" (Pg.90) and I strongly believe that one of those cultural influences is short-termism and its consequent devaluing of sustained relating. It is becoming counter-cultural to have a two-hour conversation with one person - the 'cool' thing to do is to Tweet the world. This buying into cultural short-termism is one of the hard questions but there are others. Perhaps I have space here for just one more ....

Disconnecting in order to connect. Jesus would never have cried "My God, why have you forsaken me" if he had stayed at home, but he disconnected in order to connect - with us. That's tough and it takes time. When I look at the design of most of what goes for short-term mission today I see very little disconnecting. The umbilical cord of text messages and "my life in Africa" blogs back to the home church, the bonded group of fellow short-termers (sometimes 100 strong!), and the return ticket tucked into the passport ensure connections are maintained. So what space (time, emotional, spiritual, etc.) is left for connecting in the host culture? To parady scripture, "My home church, my family, why have you forsaken me?" might be an important step on the road to a deeper participation in the relationship building cross of Christ.