Our mission team is again preparing to leave for Big
Creek, Kentucky and Patti and I have announced our plans to travel to Liberia
in January with the Farmer to Farmer mission team from our East Ohio
Conference. But both of these things
raise questions with some people. I
haven’t heard it said out loud here at Trinity, but in other churches I have
heard the questions, “Why should we leave home?” “Why should we help people outside of our
community?” And, “Why would we ever go to another country to help people there?”
These questions used to make me a little angry
because the answers seemed so obvious to me, but I grew to understand that
these questions usually grow out of a fundamental misunderstanding, or lack of
understanding, of several key scriptures.
In Mark 16:15, after his resurrection, Jesus said, “Go
into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”
Jesus didn’t say that his followers ought to preach to the people they
knew, but to preach to everyone in all of God’s creation. Likewise, when Jesus told his followers to
feed the hungry and clothe the naked, he never specified any one location, but
intended for them to understand that they were to care for the poor, wherever
they could find them.
In fact, the very
last thing that Jesus said to his disciples, only seconds before he ascended into
heaven were these words recorded in Acts 1:8: “ But you
will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my
witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends
of the earth.” In this context, Jerusalem is home, Judea is the local
neighborhood, Samaria represents the foreigners next door or nearby, and the “ends
of the earth” is just what it sounds like.
As disciples of Jesus Christ, our instructions have never been to focus only
on the evangelization of our local neighborhood, but to reach out, in the name
of Jesus, to everyone, everywhere.
There is yet another good reason to do the kind of
things that we are doing. In Acts 24:17,
Paul testifies to Governor Felix that “After
an absence of several years, I came to Jerusalem to bring my people gifts for
the poor and to present offerings.”
While Paul had been planting churches in Asia, the people back “at home”
in Jerusalem were enduring hard times.
And so, the mission churches took up offerings to help the people of
Jerusalem as a way of caring for fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and as a
way to “share in their suffering.”
Many of the people that we reach during our mission
trips are fellow believers and by our gifts, and through our presence, we
encourage them with the knowledge that God cares for them, that God cares about
their hardship, that that they are not alone, and that someone cares enough to “share
in their suffering.”
I know that there are sometimes other questions as
well, such as, “Why don’t they help themselves, and, “Why don’t they leave and
go someplace better?” And the simple
answer is that they can’t. Mobility is a
luxury that comes with a higher standard of living. When things go bad in our American cities,
the middle class can leave and buy homes in the suburbs, but the poor are stuck
because they can’t afford to move, let alone look for work out of town, or out
of state. In much the same way, the
people in the hills of Kentucky were once much better off. When coal was king, it was easy to get a
well-paying job, but when the coal ran out and the mines closed, it became
difficult to make enough money just to live, let alone leave. Many of their children go to school and
leave, but that option is nearly impossible for many.
Similarly, the nation of Liberia is still pulling
itself out of decades of civil war. The
war there lasted for so long that nearly everything we take for granted was
destroyed. After the war, roads were
barely passable, there was no running water, no electricity, no telephones and
even mail was not likely to get through.
Nearly every permanent building had been destroyed. You may have heard the phrase, “bombed into
the stone age.” The civil war in Liberia
quite literally reduced the people to living like the people of the stone-age,
or the people of the Old Testament.
Farming had to be done entirely by hand.
Schools were closed for so long that the most well educated person in
the village might have only a fourth grade education, and so they become the
school teacher. Less than a dozen
doctors, in the entire nation of Liberia, have been to medical school. There were no machines of any kind. No one
had a job of any sort except to find a way to stay alive.
This is why our church has build hospitals and
schools in Liberia. And this is why our
Farmer to Farmer mission began restoring tractors that we would consider to be “too
small to be useful,” or even “antiques.”
Volunteers for Farmer to Farmer rebuilt and restored these old tractors
and shipped them to Liberia where the church uses them to plant a field to help
feed the people of the congregation and earn a small income. We have also built a sewing center and
shipped over several old treadle sewing machines (remember there is no
electricity) so that local women can also make crafts and earn a little money
for their families.
By doing these (and other) things, both in Kentucky
and in Liberia, we are able to stand with our brothers and sisters in Christ
and do things for them that they could never do for themselves. By doing these things we also encourage them,
and help them to witness to the people around them about the good news of Jesus
Christ.
But most importantly, by doing these things we are
answering the call of Jesus Christ to “be
my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the
ends of the earth.”
That
is why we leave home.
