Dancing with God : 
Global Mission on the Edge

What happens when you gather about 75 Presbyterians and let them loose for six hours to create their own workshops, decide their own topics, lead them or just listen as they choose, wander off to something else, and finally write up their own reports?

What we found was that lots of people had concerns and ideas and projects to talk about, and lots of others were interested enough to sit for a few minutes or an hour, working through some issue and putting together some kind of report for the whole group – some with very significant recommendations (to the Worldwide Ministries Division, or to Witherspoon, or to themselves).  Topics ranged from evangelism to advocacy for social justice, from accompaniment in Colombia to advocacy for the people of Sudan, from how Young Adult Volunteers can share their experiences to "futbol/soccer." 

It was a fascinating venture in a free-for-all-approach to things people care deeply about.  And it worked.

A offer a sampling of the workshops, and some of the points they reported to the whole group.

Vice Moderator reflects on Global Mission on the Edge – after Katrina
[10-31-05]

The Rev. Jean-Marie Peacock, who was elected Vice Moderator of the PC(USA) by the 216^thGeneral Assembly, was a very special participant at the Witherspoon conference on global mission, not only for who she is, but for where she came from. She and her husband live in New Orleans, where she is Associate Pastor of Lakeview Presbyterian Church.  By the second week of September they were staying with family in Illinois, since their home in New Orleans had been destroyed, and her congregation was scattered to places mostly unknown.

She was asked to talk with the conferees about the church’s mission, out of her first year of experience as vice moderator, visiting congregations around the US, and churches in many other parts of the world.

She began by giving voice to her own situation, as "a jumping off point for my dance with God into global mission on the edge."

Witherspoon mission conference ponders different views of dancing with God
[9-11-05]

The Witherspoon conference opened with about 75 participants on Friday afternoon, September 9, at the Presbyterian Church’s Stony Point Center, just north of New York City. Focusing on the ways mission provides support for peace and justice in the US and around the globe, a few speakers and many small groups talked and listened and weighed various understandings of the church’s mission, and a wide range of ways that mission can serve the world.

Marian McClure leads opening worship, calling us into the dance of grace

Marian McClure, Director of the Worldwide Ministries Division of the PC(USA), gave the sermon in the opening worship, opening with her thoughts on the "dancing with God" theme. The first step in our dance, she said, is our experience of God’s grace. And we, like Zaccheus "the tax collaborator," are spun around into a whole new direction in life – a new life of love and forgiveness and justice.

She told of seeing this power of grace in a visit to Haiti, where she visited a coffee plantation project in Haiti which had been sponsored by a Catholic parish, whose well-trained young catechists had transformed their peasant community into a center of resistance against the dictatorial Duvalier regime. She soon realized that one small, uneducated young man, Jacques, was providing strong leadership as his people faced danger from the government. Talking with him one day, she asked what gave him the strength to play this role.

He told his story of being seriously injured as a child when he fell off a mule. For a very poor family, keeping their small child in the hospital was terribly expensive, and to keep providing his meals, as patients’ families had to do, was forcing his father to sell their farm animals one by one, until they were all gone. His brothers and sisters were going hungry so their little brother could be kept alive. Jacques slowly realized that he had been a recipient of grace – extravagant, undeserved care. This grace changed his life, moving him to care freely for others, which meant working for justice.

This, said McClure, points to the false dichotomy between evangelism and justice. Some evangelicals, she noted, see beyond that dichotomy and recognize that when Jesus called his disciples to "go and baptize all," he really meant all were included. She reminded us too that there are liberals who see their commitment to justice as standing in contrast to the call to spread the good news. But, she said, "mission unites us across the theological spectrum." But, she added, "it’s a little more complicated than that."

Still, our false dichotomies are "popping and imploding all around us" as we encounter so many instances where the Gospel message gives oppressed people a new sense that they are people. She told of two Pakistani church leaders who had come from very humble backgrounds and the bottom of society. They explained to her that "you made us people. We were worse than nothing. We were irrelevant." But the message of God’s grace, and the education and other support that the church provided – the experience of grace – had made them into full human beings.

So, she concluded, "God’s grace is sufficient. It can turn us out onto the dance floor to join god’s dance of grace and justice."

The text of Dr. McClure’s sermon >>
 

Tracing our contexts – past and present

Following opening worship, Marian McClure and Gary Cook, Associate Director for Global Service and

 Witness in the Worldwide Ministries Division, presented a quick survey of the history of Presbyterian involvement in mission, with its consistent focus on evangelism, health and education. McClure pointed out that in Presbyterian mission during the 20^th century, missions were critical of the empires whose damage they were working so hard to overcome. But now, "we’re the ones with the power," and the role of mission workers is shifting.

Gary Cook highlighted a wide spread of current programs around the world that support programs in education, health work, hunger needs, and much more, with the aim of equipping other people and communities for mission – so today 46% of the Worldwide Ministries budget goes for grants and scholarships for partner churches, which 41% supports mission personnel.

After those presentations, the participants spent an hour in small groups getting acquainted, but it was much more than "what’s your name and where do you come from." As they told one story of where they are engaged in mission, they also thought about some aspect of mission concern that impacts their communities or their lives – issues such as globalization, or environmental problems, or poverty. Getting to know one another, we began to see, may involve getting to know our own situations in deeper ways.

Philip Wickeri – Ecumenical Mission in an Age of Empire

Dr. Philip Wickeri, who teaches evangelism and mission at San Francisco Theological Seminary, provided the conference with a keynote address which raised serious issues as he put the church’s mission in the wider context of American empire.

Reminding us that Marian McClure had referred to the problem of colonialism, he added that "it’s not just a problem of arrogance; it’s about a system of domination." He cited Presbyterian examples of this: Sheldon Jackson, whose famed mission work in Alaska was linked with growing American control of what had been a Russian territory. And Leighton Stuart, a missionary to China, then became the American ambassador there during the Chinese struggle for liberation.

Wickeri pointed to COEMAR, the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, as an example of Presbyterian mission at its best, as it brought together the church’s commitment to unity and mission, proclaiming that "the whole church brings the whole gospel to the whole worlds." In this understanding, he said, there was no separation of evangelism and action, between church and mission.

But COEMAR’s existence ceased in 1972, probably due to a variety of factors: the rise of thePresbyterian Layman with its attacks on programs and people of COEMAR, the channeling of funds increasingly to independent missions, the decline of interest in mission among justice-oriented people, and more. COEMAR’s wholistic approach to mission was further undermined in the 1980s and ’90's, with the rise of conservatism in the Reagan era, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the American empire.

So, he said, "mission has been reconfigured" – not revived by a new vision for its new role in a radically different world, in which globalization and militarism are the main realities.

As steps toward such a new vision, he offered glimpses of two very different documents: the Accra statement by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, issued in 2004 at its General Council meeting in Ghana, and two recent statements of the U.S. government’s National Defense Strategy. Comparing some of the language in the recent Presbyterian statement, "Presbyterians Do Mission in Partnership," with language in the defense policy statements, he suggested the similarities in terminology (such as "partnership") seem to suggest some similarities in ways of thinking about the world and the mission of the church or nation.

He urged the group to study the defense documents, as well as the Accra statement on globalization and American power, as ways to become aware of the context of our mission, and the ways in which the church in mission is called today to resist empire.

The full text of Dr. Wickeri’s address >>

On Saturday morning of the conference, the Rev. Tony Aja, Associate Director for People in Mutual Mission of the Worldwide Ministries Division, led a time of Bible study in which he introduced the group to the idea of reading Scripture from the perspective of the "underside," the people who are marginalized by both their church and their society.

He has kindly shared the text of his presentation, along with the specific passages he used, and the questions he raised about each one.

A mission coworker writes from Spain, urging that we use this time of crisis to rethink the ways we engage in mission.   [10-4-05]

Dear friends,

As a mission co worker in Spain, I look upon the moral state of our nation as crisis after crisis, and I lament what is happening to my brothers and sisters, the poor, the elderly, the underclass we have created over many years. It is all exposed to us, and we ourselves are exposed.

So, maybe a major change in our mission must take place, and we should put into place once again the great CRISIS IN THE NATION program done by the northern stream in the sixties. We brought in church leaders from other countries to look at ourselves, and to help us see ourselves inside out. This helped us to define a new approach to urban ministry, and to help our presbyteries and synods to structure meaningful ways to communicate and to rearrange ourselves, so we could respond to God́s call to us in the midst of our problems of racial injustice and the war in Vietnam.

That is a project that needs to reinvented for our times. I pray for our presbyteries on the southern coast, and support all the actions that are taking place there. Maybe once again it will be from the poor and oppressed of our own nation that we will find a way to find our own soul.

Rev. Donna Laubach Moros, D. Min.
Professor of evangelization and Liturgics, SEUT, Spain