Mennonite Weekly Review

Outcasts join the church first, as in Jesus’ times. In his novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe — whose parents converted to Christianity — portrays missionaries to his own Igbo people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as succeeding only after the tragic ruin of leaders once revered in the culture.

The Bible teaches God’s love does not depend on social status. Yet, so often in history, mission workers have disrespected cultures other than their own. They sought places of power for themselves — or colonists they aided — over the people they evangelized.

Even today, as Stanley Green, Mennonite Mission Network executive director, wrote in Beyond Ourselves, “Sadly, many ministry relationships have tended toward dominance by those with either the money or the expertise.”

The summer 2008 issue of MMN’s publication describes an opposite model: building global mission partnerships of mutual respect across cultural and economic differences.

Beyond working to build partnerships when a power differential exists, we must look at why mission work so rarely takes place in situations lacking those differences.

According to Conrad Kanagy’s 2006 profile, 41 percent of Mennonite Church USA members are in business and professional occupations, 38 percent are college graduates, and 28 percent of households make more than $75,000 a year.

There are numerous examples of Mennonite church planters from new immigrant groups who evangelize people also newly arrived in the United States, enriching the broader church with their gifts and their success.

So what would it require to have mission efforts to higher-income people who resemble a third of MC USA? Can we see the golf course, instead of the trailer park, as a mission field? The downtown business district instead of the poor inner-city neighborhood?

It will take more than handing out tracts with cartoon drawings about salvation.

Mission efforts geared toward lower-income people often address physical and spiritual needs at the same time, hosting a meal for the homeless or providing free health care in a church basement. Conversations and relationships follow.