Missions and Social Justice

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.

Looking at our own communities is neither easy nor comforting. In my journey in becoming a youth pastor, I have found statistics that I wished I would have never found. I can no longer look at different aspects of my community the same way. For me to turn my back on these issues would be to fail in my service to the Father.

One such statistic is the amount of child abuse that is reported in this country. According to Childhelp.com, "Over 3 million reports of child abuse are made every year in the United States; however, those reports can include multiple children." Think of that: 3,000,000 abuse allegations have been made in the past year, and these are the ones we know about. What about those that are not reported? Another surprising statistic comes from the CDC: "1 out of 4 girls and one out of 6 boys are sexually abused." Such numbers affect the way I view my community. For instance: I can't pass a class of elementary school students touring the Oakes Museum without wondering whether one of them has been robbed of his or her childhood. These aren't things we like to focus on as a community because we don't like to think of such evil as being in our midst.

Another issue we don't like to discuss is abortion, though it is pervasive in America. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, there have been almost 50 million abortions nationwide. These are astronomical numbers, yet social justice proponents seem to ignore this topic. Instead we focus on other countries. We seem to think that because we're more technologically advanced, we don't carry the weight of the world's problem. When you break down numbers, you see how similar we really are.

Around 50 million children are either aborted or abused. There were around 6 million Holocaust victims, 400,000 victims of the Sudan Genocide, and 300,000 for those in Uganda, equaling a total of 6.7 million deaths as a result of human rights issues around the globe. However, this does not come close to the amount of children we have destroyed in this country. As Christians, we are to focus holistically on each issue, not just the obvious ones. We must consider the issues in our own back yard. In our suburban neighborhoods, we may not see physical homelessness, but we may have an emotional homelessness. We might not see poverty, but there are impoverished souls waiting for someone to hear them. We might not see people displaced, but people are wandering around, emotionally displaced by those around them. Are we not to reach out to these people as well?

I have hope for change. I have been impressed and touched by the initiatives of some of the first-year students, including their involvement with "the day of silence" and their idea of the "A Thousand Paper Hearts" campaign. There is hope for holistic mission! As for my distaste for short-term missions and social justice, I have, at times, been deeply touched. Projects like Love Maputo, created by Joy Oaks and Talain Blanchon, have challenged the very core of my disdain. We should not deemphasize world mission, but emphasize mission both here and abroad..Are you willing?