FEB-B-10
AND AWAY I GO!
UP THROUGH CENTRAL MINDANAO FROM BOTTOM TO TOP,
OVERNIGHT IN COCONUT BAY BEACH RESORT
ON A DARK RAINY DAY IN CAGAYAN DE ORO,
BEFORE THE FLIGHT TO MANILA, WHERE THERE WILL BE A VERY LONG LAYOVER TO
BEGIN A MUCH LONGER DAY (TIMES TWO!)
RACING THE SUN IN ITS EASTWARD COURSE
TOWARD SAN FRANCISCO AS A PORT OF ENTRY,
FOR AN EVEN LONGER LAYOVER, BEFORE A TWO-STEP RED EYE HOME
FEB. 15, 16, (ANOTHER 16’) and 17, 2002
Doesn’t it sound like fun? Don’t you envy me a four-day trip back home, when two of them even have the same name and number?
I am starting this Feb-10 finale to the Feb-B-series in the Coconut Bay Beach Resort, in a little rattan cottage by the seaside—but before you get too romantic about this day after Valentine’s Day holiday on the beach, I should point out that it is quite alone, and it is looking out through the rain over the rather nasty brown surf washing the bayside port of this big Del Monte Cannery town of Cagayan de Oro, as the team packs to part. My big Samsonite suitcase that has done so well over so many miles after I had bought it in a sudden urgency in Dubai, to replace the suitcase that had been ruined in a forced breaking entering and pilfering on a pass through London’s Heathrow airport, when the extensive camera system seen inside the bag on X-Ray had meant profit to someone in the near-perfect crime of pilfering without any recourse to lawyers or police, when the in transit bag came from one legal system five thousand miles and many jurisdictions away, and might be discovered at least as far beyond the site where it was committed. Has this ever happened to me before? Just four times running!
This time my substitute big Samsonite, which has certainly been around the world many more times than most people can dream of driving in a lifetime of commuting, appeared in Manila’s Ninoy Aquino Airport, somewhat worse for wear. It had no tags, since they were all on the handle, and the handle was torn off. Someone who threw the bag obviously knew that it happened, and simply tucked the forwarding claim tag on the side of the suitcase and tucked it under its wheels pulling handle, also missing several screws. This means that this very faithful suitcase that I am always overpacking and it has never failed to close or come back to me, even if several days following behind, may be getting close to pensioning off—and perhaps a one-way trip to Africa coming up next may be one noble retirement home. But first I have to get it there. Don Van Weynen worked all day on it. He drilled out the handle holders to bend a nail on each side and then braided a string around the nails to get a narrow cord to pass around it to hold up as I might be able to pick it up once or twice by this jury-rig before it would have to be officially replaced. I doubt that it can make it as far as San Francisco in the course of these (tomorrow) tonight’s trip, but I will have only a few hours in Washington and cannot shop for luggage, and should probably try to get it all on the same outgoing flight I will be pursuing next to Malawi. But, I do not believe that Malawi is renowned for its luggage craftsmen, so I do not know if it is wise to anticipate saving it for that time and place to be replaced. It deserves a retirement with full military honors at flag rank for the tortures it has withstood over about fifteen years of global travels—five times more than the next leading competitor in longevity of my long haul itineraries.
I am sitting in my little cottage now after trying to sit in a gazebo near the beach as the darkening clouds kicked up the wind that blew sand first and then rain toward me. I just finished the last of the A-series of 2002’s serial letters to be mailed on the subject of the Mission to Mindanao, when the rain hit hard enough to make my ballpoint pen skip on the page. So, the A-series is complete in four chapters (1—Manila, 2—TECH in Tboli land, 3—Bethel in Malaybalay, and 4—Cagayan de Oro/ Manila/San Francisco/ STL/ DCA return home—briefly.
Serial letter B-series will be Back to Africa, C will be Cuba, D will be Dharamsala, E will be Everest, F will Follow-Up in Ladakh, ---well, you get the idea and will shortly be getting these serial letters to match. It seems that in this digital age, and as exemplified by the most recent week’s frustrating experiences in the near desperate repeat failures to transmit anything by email, the serial letters, carried around the globe by a series of exotic stamps, may yet be the most reliable way yet to report on these series of unique world wide adventures. The edited chapters in this series of travel narratives, kept current as I travel, may eventually make it onto the “On-Line Journal” section of the Home Page, but never close to “real-time” despite intent and effort, and will probably follow the arrival of the hand-carried letters from far corners of the earth—even from remote unlikely areas such as central Mindanao, Nepal mountain retreats where couriers backpack the mail to the capital several days down the Himalayas, or even the central parts of southeastern Africa, in Malawi at the Zambian border.
IN TRYING TO LEAVE THE RAINY AIRPORT OF
CAGAYAN DE ORO
I have sat through the rainstorm at the Coconut Bay Beach Resort, which was not a holiday as much as a regrouping to be packed up and debriefed before leaving. Unknown to us, the longest and hardest part of this process would be the very long and exasperating delay before even starting on the long days and days of travel preceding even our first step. But, at least I may have solved the luggage problem, by remembering how it was that the big Samsonite got to the Malaybalay Guest House to begin with. Let’s explain.
Holly had brought two very large rolling suitcases, and had stuffed one with supplies for an orphanage in Manila, which she had dropped on her first stopping at the Shalom Center. She divided the rest of her stuff between the two cases, (a good deal of which was her cleaning out the local Sam’s of all the snack food she could carry) and over time that had been distributed as well. So, when she was leaving the stuff to be carried by pickup truck from TECH to Malaybalay, she had one empty big suitcase. I had dropped my Samsonite, now sans handle and tags as well. When we got to Malaybalay, I could not find my suitcase among the things the A-team had dropped at the Guest House, but Holly’s suitcase was inexplicably heavy. We opened it to find the Samsonite inside it! OK, we can do that again! Now, as she was pondering how to get the extra suitcase home again, I suggested I could carry it back or buy it from her, and she called it a swap for the cash I had loaned her at the Cagayan de Oro shopping center where she had bought souvenirs for her nieces etc. So, I put the Samsonite in her big fabric rolling case, and will re-pack it just as it is, but then leave it in Malawi when I go there!
Now, for the longer explanation of how it is that we got to the Cagayan de Oro airport in the dense fog and low ceiling in an all-day rain after a pre-dawn departure from the Coconut Bay Beach Resort, in a similar rain. We waited, as the flight we were supposed to take on PAL came from Manila, but overflew us since the ceiling was impenetrable and was diverted to Cebu City. It took off when it was thought that it might be able to leave, and it was again diverted this time back to Manila. So, we sat in a small waiting area, reading the latest Time or Newsweek—now two weeks old and in Asian edition, and nodding off as the hours passed and our five-hour layover in Manila became less and less and then turned negative. It was now obvious that we would not be able to connect to the 3:00 PM departure--one hour gone-- on PAL from MNL to SFO on which we are reserved, but if the airport opened in the afternoon, we could take another airline, Air Philippines, which goes to another terminal in Manila, and get a shuttle over to the Ninoy Aquino international airport, where we might be able to get a 10:00 PM flight from MNL on PAL 104, which can cross the Pacific directly without a stop going Eastward. They use the A-340 Airbus and go north to Okinawa and fly up into the jet stream, so they get the 150 kph+ tailwind that allows them to make a non-stop eastward, as opposed to the bucking the jet stream westward, which has had us getting refueled in HNL going the other way into the Philippines. That flight arrives about 7:00 PM and goes to the SFO where I am already booked on a red eye after midnight going to STL connecting to a dawn flight to DCA arriving around 11:00 AM, so I could make it all if I changed these reservations (which Allen did.)
[To cut through all the suspense---the fact that I am currently typing some of this while aboard PAL 104 at 37,000 feet up in the Jet Stream ten hours into the trams-Pacific flight to the US should assuage further fears that all of this might not work out!]
While waiting in the Cagayan de Oro airport, I found a couple of unexpected arrivals. One pair was a couple who did SIL archiving for the SIL Philippine languages, and had the well-scrubbed threadbare appearance of missionaries on the field with a humble beatific expression. They also happened to be mk’s as well—a phenomenon I often find for both laudable and perhaps not so noble reasons. It may be the admiration of the parents “calling to the mission field” (more on this later), but in some cases it may be finding that the MK’s have never been adapted to US culture, and would find themselves misfits if they tried to go back to a home that was already two generations ago for them. They have adapted to the much smaller, but quite distinctive and cohesive minority role of mission culture, with a supportive small social set of “aunties” and “uncles” in a defensive “laager” around them, which is not only comfortable, but defines a quite simple set of comportments and allows them to be larger fish in a smaller pool.
.
Along with this pair from Nasuli, came ---would you believe—Don Van Weynen, leaving for Manila on the Air Philippines flight we now hope to take, with Vivian having returned from her retreat, and staying with her long-term roommate, fellow translator, Lillian Underwood. So, they were concerned about getting back to Nasuli, having dropped off Don for his onward trip. Don bought me Dutch peppermints, and had brought a top to insist that Holly continue practicing spinning it.
Meanwhile, the ersatz “travel agent/meteorologist” indefatigable Dr. Allen Mellicor, was scurrying back and forth to the agents and arranging everything from our new tickets to the reserving a shuttle bus to carry us over to the PAL terminal. This was a sacrifice of Allen, since he was scheduled to go to Malaybalay for the very important Board Meeting of the Bethel Baptist Hospital. In what I have been reading, the Boards of the churches, Missions, and hospitals are treated with reverence and prayer, attributing to them divine wisdom, and orders from the board are to be accepted as God’s will for any of the individuals that they assign to some other part of the world, or inconvenience, or decide to build a new 2 million dollar facility with ten thousand dollars of funding—this is called a “faith Mission.”
Today is the meeting at which the different proposals for expansion of the BBH will be considered, and Allen had asked me repeatedly as a kind of outside consultant, what plan would I favor. One involves tearing down the antiquated Guest House where we had stayed with a number of people objecting to that idea because of the historic preservation of that structure with the various heritages it has embodied in its roles in fifty years. Another is to build back over the tennis courts where we had the big festival and cultural show at our farewell. If they stay where they are and build up, that would mean an elevator, rather than the engine hoist now cleverly adapted by a car mechanic to hoist things up the very slow back wall of the hospital. Either way it would be expensive, and I mentioned that spreading out laterally, such as building X-ray and diagnostic facilities where the Guest House now is would mean an additional three hundred meters walking for each staff member an additional twenty times per day. All of that was debated last night and at the team meeting, in preparation for the next big step for BBH, to be declared a “tertiary hospital”. It already does more tertiary care than the government hospital in Malaybalay which sends patients over to BBH, a private facility that gives a half million dollars in uncompensated care each year (principally when we arrive, as the MMI delivers most of the elective surgery of the year, and the rest of the schedule is mostly C-sections.
Yet, the BBH is debt-free, and almost solvent at break even, with operations of the kind we are doing would cost the patient who might be able to pay about fifteen hundred dollars in surgical fees each. That means our 110 operations this week represent between 1/3rd to ½ million dollars of free care by the lower Philippine standards—and that is even without the all-expenses paid contributions of the MMI participants for their own travel and the travel and support of the patients. By US standards, we have contributed multiple millions in care. Such musings are no doubt helpful to the god feelings that number crunchers must have as a flush after such calculations.
In fussing over us and seeing that we got out safely, even if delayed, Allen was foregoing his role in deciding what should be done about the future of BBH---“All in God’s will”---his, and everyone else’s’ instant and continuing response. The weather at least served to add to the prayer menu beyond the condition of Holly’s colon, which had passed beyond prunes to prayers for relief.
DEPARTURE MODE:
ANALYSIS OF OUR CONTRIBUTIONS
AND THE OVERALL “MISSION” EFFORT
On Friday night, our group had a seafood rather oriental dinner (sweet and sour pork, and squid etc) and then went to the gated community where Allen and Blessie moved when they pulled out of the medical work which they had been in at Malaybalay and its Bethel Baptist Hospital full time, two years ago, when they moved to Cagayan de Oro for five days a week to be involved in evangelism and helping the local church grow—a transition, I believe, for Allen to full-time ministry. As Allen is making those changes Blessie, a veterinarian, is finishing her nursing degree to go the other way into medicine as Allen is sliding into a majority preacher role. I said to Blessie that she was reversing the phylogenetic scale in going from veterinary medicine to nursing, but the difference was that in dealing with valuable animals, you had to be so careful!
There is a conflict between where we can most easily work (e.g. BBH) and where we are most needed (e.g. TECH or maybe even Leyte or points further afield, not yet explored as options for our already assumed “next visit.”)
ON THE MISSION MENTALITY IN THE MERCY OF HEALTH CARE
DELIVERY TO THE NEEDY WITH AN OVERIDING AGENDA
OF SAVING SOULS FIRST—
BUT USING TERMS I CAN UNDERSTAND AND FOLLOW
I may have further conflicts within the delivery of health care to a needy group of people who are no doubt disadvantaged as to their health, and then taking advantage of their problem to make them into little carbon copies of ourselves---a danger into which smaller people slip quite readily in mission settings. I can explain from a couple of books I have been reading and also a few experiences in the “compulsory group think” of some group mission’s dynamics.
We had dessert (Mango cake) as Paul, their son, who had studied up all day in preparation for what Blessie had said was an encyclopedist who has been everywhere on earth, had prepared geographic questions to try to stump me. Allen and Blessie have their first and only new car, having ridden a motorbike and the mission “paddy wagon which brought our luggage here to date. The vehicle is a Mitsubishi Crosswinds, and is a neat SUV we do not have available in the US, and one of the freebie come-ons for a sales gimmick is a DVD TV screen player—paradoxically placed on the dashboard—a potential distraction for the driver. The DVD played was a blonde torch-singer who sang like a rock star prancing in front of a full participatory well dressed audience in “Christian songs.” This group is apparently an evangelical set of performers from Sydney.
We had our “team meeting” in which we could offer suggestions about how well this mission had gone and what could be improved. I suggested that there was a very efficient use of our services in the two venues which was very good being broken in the middle of two weeks whereas the nonstop two weeks push at the Tboli land TECH last year had exhausted all the team and the resources they carried. But, there is a struggle between where we are best used and where we are most needed, since Malaybalay has a full functioning Bethel Baptist Hospital with a fifty-year tradition. I am reading a bit of that history now in the” With Scalpel and Sword”—by Lincoln Nelson, a somewhat simplified missionary biography about one of the founders who came to the Philippines as part of the Navy and returned as part-time doctor full time preacher and worked in Bukidnon with some of the folk I now recognize as familiar in this setting.
I am unsettled that the climax of each of these simple stories in this book and also the David Thompson autobiography of his saga in turning himself over to another mission board after the “martyrdom” of his missionary parents in Vietnam—a fate that each seems to devoutly hope for in the sanctification (and, for some, the much-envied “canonization extension of this) process—and his winding up in Gabon—all the “adventure stories” are simplified down to the same climax, since each encounter seems to be a “leading to the Lord” some one whose decision saved them from a future of eternal damnation. I am very sure of what I must do, (and frequently don't), but am reluctant to impose these same commands on others. Many missionaries I have met, however, are not above condemning a whole culture around them without knowing more than that they do not sing the same Sunday Schooled "action songs" and repeat the same phrases in very unoriginal recital of clichés, even if translated into a variety of tongues, is not my judgment. I am glad that I did not have to change a lot, and make very public and standardized conversion responses to the same questions in the same phrases BEFORE God could love me, since I would not have been able to make that grade, with or without help of any other human evangelist.
This seems to be a number crunching process of a calculus different than the other one I rather disparage, such as just how many major, minor operations and consultations did you do on this mission to report whether or not it was a success? How about, how many personnel did you encourage, help educate and further motivate and equip to carry this burden more effectively when you are no longer here? I would prefer that score card, whereas both of these “mission books” I have read on this trip involve a simple and declarative statement, that the saving of souls is the first priority, and the health care work is a means to that end, and presumably ineffective in its performance unless the patients benefited, having “come for the soup, and had to stay for the sermon” then immediately express their decision to recite the required litany from the primary agenda—whether healed or not, benefited or otherwise in the humanitarian aspect of our interaction –“Did you come to know the Lord Jesus Christ and accept Him as your personal Savior?”
Life is much simpler for folk who see all things in black and white in a judgment I would prefer to reserve for God alone, who can decide for the Moslem—as well as for me—whether each of his children is subject to His grace, and can do so without my prejudgment or even without using the standardized missionary-expected responses in the same words in which they were learned in Bible School missionary training programs no matter what language they were translated into by SIL with many more than the 92 languages SIL has worked on in the Philippines alone.
I would want to try, as I have working with a wide variety of organizations and missions, to reflect the love of God to all peoples, as surely as it has always been for me, and make no further Divine Right division of the sheep and the goats in my humble opinion. In this MMI, as well as in the Buddhist monasteries three through eight trips later, or in a Presbyterian mission in Malawi next, or with a Roman Catholic team worker (my closest compatriot on this trip) –to my embarrassment in this “only Christian country in the orient” said by the author Lincoln Nelson and others in my hearing to be “very religious, but unsaved.” I would rather not participate in the preaching for a conversion from Catholicism to a Baptist profession of faith.
To say that someone must come to God just exactly as I did must be a supreme arrogance against divine omnipotence, that might be able to use me—and perhaps others who are Moslem or Buddhist or Hindu—for His purposes as well. Life (and the written text of my descriptions of it) are far less simplistic than the unmodified simple declarative sentences in some of the texts I have read or “messages” I have heard, often confusing a particular man or group’s prejudices or limits with the only way God may relate to His children, who are living here in a very wide variety of environments. Taking a missionary from an isolated Bible belt home and Sunday School, and shipping them after they have responded to God’s Calling to an even more remote and isolated area in Africa or Asia clinging to the others in the anthropologic tribal setting of the missionary compound cluster re-enforces the conservatism of the common clichés that brought some of them here, and may prevent some of the smaller people from hearing and seeing the huge spectrum of God’s people in different settings. It may also induce a sycophant group of followers rather than indigenous leaders, since, like the conquistadors, or any “superior technologic group of invaders” in the ongoing colonial process of “Culture, Contact, Change” the way to access the TV sets, vehicles, and education in a Philippine Seminary—or, in their dreams, a US Bible School, is to “sing the songs of Zion” in order to catch the bus to Jerusalem!”
It is difficult to Preach Christ, without the imperative to “follow me, since look where it has got me! I would rather respect the indigenous leaders in situ, support, facilitate, and empower them, rather than require them to repeat whatever mistakes I have made, despite which I may still have got here to observe and participate in their culture.
I made an observation in Nigeria when I was first involved in Mission Medicine, and met builders’ assistants coming out to the “mission field” directly out of a vision they had in Western Michigan Sunday School, “for a term or two, to see if this is God’s will for us—ands I was unemployed in Hudsonville, anyway.” They soaked up the resources of a lot of faithful churches contributing to the upkeep of a foreign outpost in an energy-input intensive steady state as a foreign outpost in a hazardous zone, where maintenance was difficult, and made for a long preliminary indoctrination to include language training, boarding school, health risks and a long transport supply line, with furloughs and ‘depositions”—read as “marketing,” for further supporting contributions of the faithful back home.
This became a numbers game just on
the basis of the terms used—e.g., if you are called a “church planter” you had
better come up with a number for the numerator for the denominator of the ever
escalating costs that keep you there.
His may be why MMI assigns someone like John to ask, intrusively every
day for his headquarters assigned task (as the retired missionary alliance pastor
Bascom was last year---how many cases were operated each day, and (in the
opinion of a retired missionary pastor) were they major or minor? How many medical consultations did the team
tally, and how many decisions for Christ?
I read the “prayer letters” of several such missionaries, and, knowing
the on-the-ground details from the other side as an “Inside/Outsider” who has
never had to solicit anything from anybody, I recognize how simplistic the
stories often are—and how contrived. I
was present when the Tiv were lobbying in SUM for a distinctive Seminary. The Africans are past masters at playing
tribalism tricks, and they expertly insisted on a “TIV REFORMED SEMINARY.” This was a perfect predatory practice, since
the locals knew what had just been asked for without even so much as a wink---a
TIV reformed seminary—and what the CRC Board of Foreign Missions had heard
appealed to them as well, since they heard the plea for a tiv REFORMED
seminary—the tribalism biting both ways through the ecumenicism that a foreign
mission would seem to be an ideal site to foster. In reading the book by Lincoln Nelson and his ABWE family,
(Association of Baptists in World Evangelism), the Bible schools, church
planting and all the other numbers he has recorded as a sign of God’s grace are
a “harvest” from among Christians already in Roman Catholic churches—but of
course, they really aren’t, you know—saved.
I learned 35 years ago in Nigeria, that someone of limited capacities, who might not be much in the developed world in competition with a lot of high powered people, could get to be a “Big Fish in a Small Pond,” by being “moved” to the minority enclave of the “mission field” where they were front line soldiers of God’s own army, beating back Satan’s forces, which were much easier to identify if pictures of pagans with idols could be sent back home. Since we are all one family, and we are all equal, the assistant airplane mechanic could express his vision for the coming of God’s Kingdom and it would have to be every bit as important as that of the Medical Director—who himself, served at the pleasure of the Board and the ordained ministers who would decide where the medical part fit in the lesser supportive structure---and all of them learned with the depositions they all depended on, that it was very much easier to be clever then profound! No one can question your vision; after all, it is a Divine Inspiration—even if such a hallucination could be called medically treatable anywhere else. And, the person so afflicted with some such powerful calling, can be “empowered”—assuming a good deal of divine authority, since it is God Himself that has called him to lead all others down the path this inspired person has chosen. I find that even in the passive aggressive use of prayer and devotions—no one can suggest that during any particular emergency that it would NOT be appropriate to stop and lead a prayer, or that the day’s schedule is being held up by someone’s delivery of a not-very-well thought out “message”. I have often found that anything that I say that seems rather pithy comes back to me in answers to my letters, most often without attribution, like a Scripture quotation, rather liberally sprinkled through the pages of “With Scalpel and Sword.” Now, I agree the Good Book is inspired, but I believe that much of the use of it is not, (the Devil, the text itself says, is quite capable of quoting it for his own purposes) and most often Scripture is much better in its own context than being bent to a purpose or illustration of what is wanted.
One strong revulsion I have in hearing prayers by any number of people I will have to confess to classifying as “small-minded” is a phrase that enters any intercession, often right up front in a string of prayer requests as a “shopping list.” If I am allowed to make fiat orders: “From hence forth, anyone using the term “JUST” in any prayer to the Almighty will be immediately stopped.”
Examples: “Lord, I just want to come to you, and just ask you to make plain to all of us your will for what we are going to do today, and just make all our patients do well, and just guide us all safely back to our homes and loved ones, I pray just this, Oh Lord.” Does this not trivialize the process and demean the Omnipotent? “Just come on down to my size, Buddy, and the two of us will just get this done together!”
I can relate to a lot of different cultures and have. But what I have found out about most of those poor people I deal with in Africa and Asia predominantly is how profound is their faith! They do not minimize their human condition or the power of the Creator, by requesting that He “just” level the playing field!
I cringe with certain contrivances,
which are used without apology. For
example, a very good program that started up near northern Mindanao came from a
reading of Scriptures when an army officer and his pastor read a passage that
said God loved the Semitic peoples—then, how could they decide to hate Moslems
or Jews with such a passion. After the
nasty military operation by the AFP directed by former deposed President
Estrada in March 2000 in which all the villages, mosques, fields and water
supply were bombed and blown away with house to house emollition, a group of
Christina churches put up the funds and work force to rebuild the Moslems
houses. The group of engineers from
MKAVI, the banana plantation, who had perfected the “fertigation” use of drip
irrigation, went to that area and rebuilt the water supply for the Moslems that
the AFP (Generals-led "Armed Forces of the Philippines") had
destroyed—a very important function, since the Moslems depend on water for
their worship services which entail ablutions.
And, then, in a further step (that I am sure very few mission boards or
formal associations of the conversion bean counters could bring themselves to)
a group of indigenous Philippine Christians rebuilt
the mosques!
The startling response to these acts of humanitarian and merciful compassion have been most telling on the Moslem population affected, and they are very grateful for their Christian brothers helping them when they needed it most—an afflicted minority—like Jews in Eastern Europe when an official government juggernaut is out to crush them, an d the churches remain silent. Outside media have heard about this program of spontaneous aid across very hot religious boundaries, and Readers’ Digest and Reuters and a couple of other media wanted to get in to do a story on it, but as Allen said to me “you cannot get in there as a white man, yet, so it is best to let the “brown men” (Allen’s precise self-applied term) handle it.”
To the credit of the people whose private inspiration from their untutored reading of the Bible brought them to merciful rescue and rehabilitation of their Islamic persecuted brethren goes the credit for real “Christian” compassion, and let me say that the program came first and from their Philippine grass roots. Now, an acronym has been applied, and I cringe, since it seems so contrived—but let it be said that the acts of mercy came first, and only afterwards came the unfortunate acronym: I Sincerely Love All Moslems---“ISLAM”, get it? Now, with that acronym, the mission board is getting interested, I fear somewhat superficially, but with reservations on anything other than an avenue to make inroads into the culture and faith of these Abrahamic believers.
I have cited the quote that Dr. Paul Harrison, father of Timothy Harrison, (and also the “obstetrician” who delivered his own son in Kodicanal, India, and a medical missionary to King Saud Abdul Azziz in the Arabian Gulf region) sent to the Gulf by the Presbyterian Mission Board. One of the board members who had complained that he was not getting reports on the numbers of souls saved, and was suspicious that medial work among a staunch Moslem population was a waste of time, asked Paul Harrison, “The churches have been supporting you for some time in this difficult work among the Moslems; just how many converts to Christianity have you made among them through your efforts?” The answer---which I love---was:
“Only Allah knows!”
I am working often in the Himalayas with Hindus and Buddhists—very profoundly religious people with whom IU certainly might have doctrinal differences. If they ask me my motivation for volunteer service among them, I will surely tell them, to the extent I am able to unambiguously articulate it without over-simplifying the service to these fellow children of God, even if they may view and express that paternity in a very different way. I am more than eager to hear about the workings of their faith and worldview and their own cosmology and mythology, which may seem even bigger and (perhaps far too-expansive) more culturally engrained than mine. I doubt that they will be “converting me” any time soon, but I am as wiling to listen to them as they are to me, not assuming that the technologic superiority or wealth differential, or whatever other transient advantage has brought me to them to help rather than the other way around makes me the superior truth from my own possession of it.
I have many strongly held convictions—the strongest of which may be—that I might possibly be wrong!
The press of time (“Two Thousand Tongues to Go!” for SIL, or the imminence of the Second Coming, according to some interpretations of the “Last Things”) and the tailoring of their message as much to the “marketing” among their supporters back home as to the assumed “primitiveness” of the people of their mission field cultures has perhaps coerced the missionaries and their mission boards to forego the profundity of such insight. Their own circumstances may constrain them to substitute a cheaper quantity for quality, and to accede to the weakest link member who might come up with the supportive assistance of the “dismal science” of number crunchers.
I, too, am on a “mission.” My mission is more one of understanding and trying to help those I learn from than to be pointing out that my way is the only way for them to come to a deeper understanding. I know what I have to do; I am unwilling to come into a culture I may not understand nearly well enough to prescribe for them exactly what they must do and in my own terms recit5ed back to me. I am still practicing, rather than preaching, and I have a few discoveries about myself to make along the way, that may be helped by my better understanding of them, before I become global in my determining just what they must do—yet, one thing I am rather sure of, is that they do not need to be just like me!