There is a myth with multiple iterations that is believed by the masses in the USA. “You can be successful alone.” “Be a lone ranger.” “It all depends on you.” “Be your own person!” “Change comes though individual genius.”

Many organizations and church groups enter into mission contexts seeking to do their own thing. Or they seek to work with one local entity unaware or indifferent to other players and relational networks of the community. The results are devastating. Distrust. Duplication. Dependency. Waste. Failure.

The Dutch consulting company Synergo Ede was asked to evaluate the impact of foreign church groups working with African communities to assess their effectiveness in helping the locals to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS. After several months of research, they came up with a startling finding. When an outside entity works only with one local institution and does not build up the relational networks within the community, “it blows up the community. The situation becomes worse.”

Are you aware of the diverse actors and networks in the communities you enter? Are you strengthening the relational networks of the communities? Are you fostering trust and a spirit of unity between the local leaders and various institutions? Do you want the local residents to go far in their development? Then help them to go together.

Before the early 1970’s, visitors to Yellowstone National Park were enthralled at the opportunity to feed the bears who sat on the side of the road waiting patiently for handouts of food and sugary snacks.  After a busy summer season the Park closed, the cars vanished, and the bears continued to sit, waiting for the snack-bearing visitors who would not come again for several long winter months.  Despite being uniquely created to provide for their own needs, the months of dependency on temporary outside help and empty calories had robbed them of their desire and natural abilities to forage.  With no fat reserves stored up for the winter, they now faced a slow yet relentless foe that their claws and formidable strength had no defense against, starvation.

In our most compassionate responses to the vast needs of our world, particularly as we see the hollow eyes and protracted stomachs of starving children in the evening news or the late night aid or sponsorship appeal, we are driven to help.  We give our money, ship our consumer goods, and build wells; all good things, unless this relentless focus on pain alleviation provides no means for finding a real cure.  Like the park visitors who fed the hungry bears, we can feel really good about our contributions with little to no thought about the long-term consequences of our actions.  Although some catastrophic circumstances do merit immediate aid and relief, very quickly we must turn our best efforts to helping the local community develop sustainable solutions to the crisis in order to prevent a debilitating dependency from becoming established in the people we seek to help.  God has uniquely created these people to thrive in their own environments and we need to help them develop systemic solutions that will meet their own long-term needs without continual outside intervention.

As you consider your own ministry or missional context, ask yourself, “Is our methodology or mechanism of providing aid, social services, or training creating long-term dependency or independence?”  “If we completely pulled out of our current ministry context would the local indigenous people be able to carry on without any future intervention on our part?”  Why or Why not? “What systemic changes might we make to our current approach that will help the indigenous leadership foster creative, sustainable solutions to their own endemic problems?”

Please feel free to respond to these bi-monthly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking; we need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,

Mark Mielbrecht

Director of Global Leadership Development

BREAKTHROUGH PARTNERS

Steve Saint, whose father was martyred with four other men trying to make contact with the Waodoni (Auca) people of Peru in 1956, had strong words to say against some of our most common missional mindsets. In a September 2011 article in the Journal for the U.S. Center for World Missions he said: 

“Our goal in planting Christ’s church where it doesn’t exist must be to produce churches that are self-propagating, self-governing and self-supporting; especially where the members come from a background of hopelessness, powerlessness and inadequate resources. The most important aspect of church planting is whatever that fledgling congregation needs most. In a growing number of cases, the greatest need new churches have is to become self-supporting.

Giving handouts creates more problems than it solves. It is like casting out demons with long leases. Break the lease or they will come back and bring more roommates (Lk 11:24–26). Where the Church is being established among people that perceive themselves as powerless, there is a great need for deep discipleship, wrestling with the roots of poverty at the community level rather than concentrating on the individual.

Financial help that does not develop sustainable, local, financial self-sufficiency is much more likely to create poverty than it is to meet real needs. Until we realize that we can’t overcome poverty with handouts, we will never be much help in completing Christ’s Great Commission.” (Click here to read the article)

It is time for a major breakthrough in how we think and thus act in terms of helping to establish and support the Church and impoverished communities in some of these difficult contexts. God has given us amazing hearts to help those in need, and this is so beautiful! In those cases of widespread catastrophe we must first stop the bleeding. But very quickly we must transfer the triage and care to the local community or they will become overly dependent on our solutions and we will become unnecessarily entrenched. In most cases, being part of the solution requires us to resist the knee jerk reaction to give benevolently when a more long-term approach of empowerment will bring much more independence and creative solutions to the local community. We must ask ourselves, “What is the potential long-term harm or benefit from our current missional approach?” “Who is in perceived leadership right now?” “How am I raising up indigenous leadership to be fully capable to do what I am now doing?” “How is my approach creating dependency?”

Please feel free to respond to these weekly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking. We need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,
Mark Mielbrecht
Director of Global Leadership Development

In the remote, impoverished and civil war-torn region of Ouelle, Ivory Coast, one of our indigenous partners gathered 870 women from twenty-one different villages and began a savings and credit association. They were able to help each other with micro-loans and many small businesses began to flourish.  Through Dominique’s leadership these women developed a business plan to purchase, use, and maintain a grain mill which cut their manual labor of grinding grain from five hours down to five minutes per day.  With this dramatic increase in available time, these women can now sell excess flour, provide for their children’s medical needs, and begin a literacy program where 600 illiterate women and their children are now learning to read and write using the Bible as their textbook.

The astounding fact is that only 2% of these women were Christians when they first gathered.  63% were animists, and 35% were Muslim.  They came together because they all shared the same real physical needs, and this new community gave them very tangible ways to not only survive, but to learn and grow, and to seek the peace and prosperity of those around them.  They are all now reading and hearing the Good News on a daily basis and have experienced Christ, incarnationally through Dominique and the other believers whom they are now in relationship with.

As you consider your own ministry context, what would it look like to enter your target community in an incarnational way?  How beautiful are your feet to the community in which you are ministering?   What is your “lead foot”, and how are you winning the right to be heard?  This is obviously a long-term approach, and doesn’t make for impressive evangelism statistics, in the beginning…  However, I believe wholeheartedly that the eventual results will be immeasurably more than we can possibly imagine and the Kingdom of God will advance in ways that are truly transforming the entire community!  

Please feel free to respond to these weekly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking, we need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,
Mark Mielbrecht
Director of Global Leadership Development

When people live in a state of despair and without hope, they often move to a state of despondence and fatalism where they don’t care about the consequences of their behavior.  In these kinds of desperate environments a missional approach of simply training, educating, giving money or establishing programs will not produce long term results.  Only through the establishment of trusting relationships and genuine friendship and love can these systemic issues of despair and hopelessness really be addressed resulting in measurable improvements over time.  When the local Church is empowered to really act as neighbors, and fathers and mothers to these vulnerable populations within a given community, it can stand alongside those in need as “oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor” (Isaiah 61:3b)

As you consider your missional approach to providing training, education, or in funding programs overseas, how are you empowering the local church to be in loving relationship with the beneficiaries?  How is your aid and relief approach connected to indigenous agencies who have established relational approaches for walking long-term with the recipients of your aid?  What changes in your approach might be needed at this point to ensure that trusting relationships and hope will be there long after you are gone?     

Please feel free to respond to these weekly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking; we need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,

Mark Mielbrecht
Director of Global Leadership Development

A friend of Breakthrough Partners told us this story about an aid and relief effort by four different churches in Minneapolis.  With compassionate hearts and a desire to help bring an end to the suffering in Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, they mounted a campaign to ask everyone who bought peanut butter to buy two.  One jar for their own family and one they could donate to fill a shipping container to send to Haiti.  Everyone loves peanut butter, right?  There was just one unforeseen problem.  One of the only viable and widely grown crops for Haitian farmers in the aftermath of the destruction was peanuts.  By having thousands of jars of free peanut butter flood the Haitian distribution centers, the local market was swamped and the price of peanuts plummeted.  Unfortunately, these well-meaning churches began destroying a crucial piece to Haiti’s economic recovery without even knowing it!  

How are our well-intentioned efforts affecting those we wish to help?  How are we killing others with indiscriminate kindness?   How can we learn what is really needed in a given context?  As we know, a surgeon has diagnosed the risks and benefits of the medical procedure before he makes a single cut with the scalpel blade.  How can our approach be delicate, precise and knowledgeable in ways that will help and not hurt them?  Are we using a scalpel or a sword in our missional approach?  

Please feel free to respond to these weekly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking, we need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in Missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,

Mark Mielbrecht
Director of Global Leadership Development ]]> http://www.breakthroughpartners.org/blog/2011/11/breakthroughs-in-missional-thinking%e2%80%a6/feed/ 0 http://www.breakthroughpartners.org/blog/2011/11/welcome-to-breakthroughs-in-missional-thinking/ http://www.breakthroughpartners.org/blog/2011/11/welcome-to-breakthroughs-in-missional-thinking/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:57:15 +0000 buildingleaders http://www.breakthroughpartners.org/blog/?p=345 It is our hope that this collection of thoughts, ideas, rants, stories and models for doing missions will generate more innovative and necessary engagement to how we reach out and participate in Kingdom work for the sake of the nations.  The time has come to re-think how we engage, interact with, and resource those whom we are working with in a variety of contexts.  Leadership development that empowers those whom God has already raised up in their own cultures and contexts must be of paramount importance. 

Furthermore, sustainable spiritual, economic, and societal practices that are owned and adapted by indigenous missional leaders must be developed in ways that bring widespread life and vitality to a community, not dependence.  For far too long many missional paradigms can be illustrated by the robin and her nested young in the above photo.  Without the constant feeding and care by the mature robin, the blind and helpless young will simply perish.  They are absolutely dependent on her unabated procurement of more resources.  How does this picture represent some of the missional relationships that you are aware of?  How has your church or mission organization added to the dependency of the foreign mission field on Western aid and relief?  How have you begun to think of ways to empower local missional contexts to develop their own solutions to the needs of their own communities?

Please feel free to respond to these weekly Breakthroughs in Missional Thinking; we need your voice in this ongoing dialogue about how the Christian Church engages in missions in this rapidly changing world and culture.

Blessings,
Mark Mielbrecht
Director of Global Leadership Development

            Pastor Stephen Campbell of Redding, California, triggered my rainy, Seattle-weekend read of Hybels’ newest book, The Power of a Whisper [Zondervan, 2010], and I’m glad he did.  I finished the last of 260 pages and couldn’t help but compare the text to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.  Where Gladwell encourages readers to listen to their “gut,” Hybels encourages his audience to listen to the still small voice, uttered by a God who speaks in a language his followers can understand.

            Anecdotally rich, Hybels recalls fifty years of experiencing God who speaks through the written word, the preached word and through the faithful.  Career making and life changing, he says, of God’s whispers of which he hasn’t always been so fond.  His candor and struggle with abject obedience keeps Hybels within reach of ordinary servants who can easily identify with his stories and those of many who cite Willow [his abbreviated name for Willow Creek] as their church home.

            The perpetually youthful looking author writes like an aged veteran, prompting believers of all stripes to memorize Scripture, enhancing the venues through which God may speak in days to come.  He testifies to the dark night of the soul and confesses the help he received from Mother Theresa in navigating those silent times.

            With deep conviction, the mega-church founder tells how God led him to minister beyond the Willow campus and even the Willow Creek Association to take on extreme poverty in global areas, sanitation, impure water supplies, immigration issues, micro-enterprise, racial injustice and the need for racial reconciliation.  Out of the lime-light, God consistently challenges this multi-talented man to “do good” to those unable to fend for themselves, illustrated by a whisper to help an elderly woman carry groceries to her apartment.  In short, he champions God concern for the underdog and that’s especially telling given his birth to privilege.

            Be assured, this text isn’t a warm rehash of Hybels unquestionable success. Rather, it’s theme is one that may discourage Willow Wannabees from flocking to Barrington but if they do, they will more than likely be the better for it.

            Don’t read the book before bedtime.  It’s unsettling, moving and good fodder for preaching. 

Guest blogger – Randall Davey, Liberty Wealth Strategies, LLC

Please read the story here and think about ways that you might build trust with others and partner to help solve the big problems of your community through the creative love of Jesus.

 Gary Edmonds

There are many more stories I am sure I will share in the near future. For now, I just wanted to introduce you to my summer. I know you are praying and thinking about me and I am beyond grateful . . . Please pray I have the ability, energy and teachability to fulfill my role as intern here as I help with updating their website, taking photographs, participating in seminars and everything else that may come up.

Amahoro. Peace. 

Stephanie Muncie
Breakthrough Intern, June 2010