Missions and Social Justice
The Hypocrisy of the American Church
Zachary Vincent
Issue date: 11/19/09 Section: Opinion
Mission Awareness Week has come and gone. Chapels have ended. Ministries have packed their tables and headed back to their districts, and many are left with this jubilation of opportunities to serve in distant lands. I too was once this hopeful, this excited, and this optimistic, and I long to feel this way again. One of my dreams was to go to India and work with children that have been rescued from slavery. But over the past four years, missions have lost their luster. In fact, I am now sick to my stomach when I hear about another overseas short-term mission opportunity.
My disdain with missions, and eventually social justice, is the emphasis we put on reaching communities that are either underdeveloped or poverty stricken. Not to be misinterpreted, these are good things--incredible things--but if they are our only focus, we become apathetic to the things around us. While some people are genuinely called to overseas missions, there are those of us who choose short-term missions because of the sense of instant gratification they provide. I like to call these "feel-good" missions: they make the participants, who never learn what it's like to live among the people, feel good about what they do during a short amount of time.
To be sure, good things are done on short-term mission trips. Then we return to comfortable suburban life where things are "much better" than the poverty-stricken inner-city, the war-torn Sudan, or the myriad countries that exhibit human rights atrocities. We live in comfort and ignorance of the dire needs right in our own community. We either choose not to notice them or do not look hard enough to find them. In order to find them we must look at the ugliness that surrounds us and our communities.
Here at Messiah Collage I have noticed a general focus on urban and cross-cultural missions, yet our focus is not on the very community that we are a part of. When a speech is given on AIDS in Africa you can't find a seat in the room. When we talk about the injustice of poverty, it is the same result. However, when we focus on issues pertaining to our own communities, such as divorce, abuse, or abortion, we are lucky to fill a quarter of the room. This is why I could no longer stomach overseas or urban missions. We focus on "third-world" countries but fail to realize that while they may by third-world physically, America is third-world spiritually. We live among people crying out to be fed, clothed, healed, and provided for, but we are not meeting these needs because we choose not.
My disdain with missions, and eventually social justice, is the emphasis we put on reaching communities that are either underdeveloped or poverty stricken. Not to be misinterpreted, these are good things--incredible things--but if they are our only focus, we become apathetic to the things around us. While some people are genuinely called to overseas missions, there are those of us who choose short-term missions because of the sense of instant gratification they provide. I like to call these "feel-good" missions: they make the participants, who never learn what it's like to live among the people, feel good about what they do during a short amount of time.
To be sure, good things are done on short-term mission trips. Then we return to comfortable suburban life where things are "much better" than the poverty-stricken inner-city, the war-torn Sudan, or the myriad countries that exhibit human rights atrocities. We live in comfort and ignorance of the dire needs right in our own community. We either choose not to notice them or do not look hard enough to find them. In order to find them we must look at the ugliness that surrounds us and our communities.
Here at Messiah Collage I have noticed a general focus on urban and cross-cultural missions, yet our focus is not on the very community that we are a part of. When a speech is given on AIDS in Africa you can't find a seat in the room. When we talk about the injustice of poverty, it is the same result. However, when we focus on issues pertaining to our own communities, such as divorce, abuse, or abortion, we are lucky to fill a quarter of the room. This is why I could no longer stomach overseas or urban missions. We focus on "third-world" countries but fail to realize that while they may by third-world physically, America is third-world spiritually. We live among people crying out to be fed, clothed, healed, and provided for, but we are not meeting these needs because we choose not.
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