The 'jobless recovery' and missions

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News flash: The Great Recession ended more than a year ago.

That cheery announcement came Sept. 20 from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The 18-month downturn, longest since World War II, ended in June 2009, according to the bureau.

You could’ve fooled me. You could’ve fooled a lot of folks who have lost their jobs (or can’t find one), lost their savings and lost their homes. For them, the economic crisis continues with no end in sight.

The economic recovery, if you want to call it that, has been weak. Hiring — the overwhelming concern of millions looking for work — remains stalled. Businesses won’t take on new workers until they’re convinced a growing economy will return their investment, economists say. So, nearly 15 million workers are unemployed — not counting those who have given up looking.

Many people who do have jobs fear losing them. Many older workers who have lost jobs fear they might never work again at anywhere near the salary they once commanded. Many young adults entering the job market face a long search.

Meanwhile, 4 million people fell below the poverty line in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That brings the total count of those in poverty to 44 million — or one of every seven Americans (the poverty line as defined by the government for 2009 was $10,830 in pretax income for a single adult and $22,050 for a family of four).

These realities pose many challenges for Christians. How can we most effectively help the hurting, inside and outside the church? Food pantries and soup kitchens? Job counseling and training? Partnering with Christian and secular charities and social agencies? All of the above?

Many churches are asking those questions at the same time they deal with the painful process of cutting their own local ministry budgets. A LifeWay Research survey of 1,002 Protestant pastors conducted last November revealed some trends that probably continue today:

* Two-thirds of the pastors surveyed said giving in their churches was flat or down compared to the same period in 2008. Nearly half reported they had frozen staff salaries for 2009.

* More than half the pastors reported higher unemployment in their churches. Seventy percent reported receiving more requests for financial assistance from people outside the congregation; 38 percent said they were receiving more requests for assistance from church members.

* Despite tough economic times, more than 40 percent said their churches had responded by increasing spending on behalf of needy families. One in four said their churches had launched new ministries to help needy people. Nearly half said more church members had become involved in volunteer service to their communities.

“The economic downturn is forcing many churches to become more volunteer-driven organizations focused on helping the hurting in times of need,” said Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, when the survey results were released early this year.

That’s a good thing. But if the “jobless recovery” drags on, how will church support for national and international mission work beyond local communities be affected?

“In a tough economy we have to make some hard decisions, and it’s easier to cut the ministries and people we’re not looking at eyeball to eyeball every day,” admits Southern Baptist minister Richard Mark Lee, lead pastor of Sugar Hill (Ga.) Church.

Sugar Hill, northeast of Atlanta, is home to about 15,500 people. Up to 1,600 of them attend Lee’s church weekly. The town — and the church — took a major hit when the economy stalled.

“A lot of our folks are in the construction industry, so when that bubble burst, it certainly affected us,” Lee reports. “About 18 percent of our church members are either unemployed or significantly underemployed.”
But the church has no intention of backing away from active involvement in international missions. Sugar Hill is featured in Get Connected: Mobilizing Your Church for God’s Mission (imb.org/GetConnectedBook), the new book by Lee’s ministry mentor, Johnny Hunt, former Southern Baptist Convention president.

“If we cut off the lost of the world because of economics, woe to us for being disobedient to Christ’s command,” Lee says. “I can’t stand before God or my people with integrity and say, ‘We need to ignore these and take care of our own.’”

Sugar Hill Church takes care of its own. But it also intends to continue reaching beyond U.S. borders with its dollars and its people — regardless of the ups and downs of the economy.

Countering the 'jerks among us'

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I almost got flattened by crazy drivers the other day — not once but twice.

The first near-miss occurred in the parking lot of a burger joint, where I dodged an SUV barreling toward the exit. Less than an hour later, at a gas station, I was walking toward my car when a pickup truck speeding through the station missed me by about a foot. Before I could recover from the shock of the moment and think about reacting, the pickup was gone.

You have your own nightmare stories about bad drivers, I’m sure. My larger point is this: Many folks no longer seem to care enough about others to observe the basic rules and courtesies that separate civil society from anarchy. From highways to law and order, from politics to media slugfests, from online flamers to breaking in line at the supermarket, examples are endless. And they range from the mundane to the deadly.

In Chicago, 54 people were shot — count ’em, 54 — over a single weekend in June. Ten of the victims died. Some of the shootings were gang-related, but others reportedly were caused by minor arguments or somebody “disrespecting” somebody.

Perhaps the saddest manifestation of the antisocial disease that now permeates our culture is not rudeness or violence, but the indifference that leads so many neighbors to ignore each other’s existence. Is this the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote about our God-given rights in the Declaration of Independence? I don’t think so.

It isn’t just a matter of the cultural coarseness and “incivility” many have decried. The center cannot hold in a society where people don’t even pretend to care about each other. Sooner or later, things fall apart.

Heading into what promises to be another summer of discontent and division, 72 percent of Americans “think that poor behavior has gotten worse in recent years,” according to a national poll conducted in April. Solid majorities of the adults responding to the poll were turned off by what they see and hear in public, in government and politics, on the roads, in schools, in Hollywood, on television, in sports, on the Web.

“We, as a people, pay a price for the jerks among us,” writes Roger Simon of Politico, a multimedia news outlet. “Nearly half of all Americans say they are ‘tuning out’ of government and politics, 46 percent are tuning out of opinion pieces and editorials in the media and 38 percent are tuning out of news coverage and reporting.”

But let’s be honest. Too often, the “jerks among us” … are us. I’m preaching to myself, but you are welcome to join me at the altar of confession if you feel so inclined.

If Christians succumb to the culture, if we hurl (or murmur) insults and disdain rather than loving the unlovable and practicing kindness to strangers, what distinguishes us from anyone else? We have become useless for God’s work, even destructive to it. Scripture calls us not to be conformed to the world but transformed by God’s Spirit.

“It is clear that America needs a spiritual awakening. Our country is awash in all kinds of lostness, including mean-spiritedness in conduct and speech,” wrote former Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt last year. “The fruit of the Spirit works in the life of the believer to create, among other things, long-suffering, gentleness and self-control. The word long-suffering is more than mere patience; it is a long-fused patience with people. The Apostle Paul urged us, as believers in Jesus Christ, to let our speech ‘always be with grace, seasoned with salt’ (Colossians 4:6). …

“[N]ever underestimate the power and influence of one voice. When we exercise civility in our public and private rhetoric, we bring glory to our Lord, enhance our credibility as men and women whose lives have been transformed by God's grace and create opportunities to share the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ with our lost and dying world.”

An effective missionary deeply studies the culture he wants to reach and searches for ways to communicate Christ within it. Eventually, however, he challenges that culture to transform itself through the power of the Gospel.

In our culture, one of the most countercultural things you can do is to yield the right of way, whether on the roads or in relationships. A soft answer to wrath is downright subversive. Turning the other cheek? It’s as revolutionary as it was in Jesus’ day — and just as powerful to change minds and hearts.

They came. They saw. They left ....

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At least 40 years into the “age of the volunteer” in world missions, debate still rages about whether short termers are a blessing or a curse.

Peruse mission journals or blogs, and you will find articles celebrating or questioning the ongoing volunteer phenomenon, which has seen tens of thousands of lay church members travel abroad to preach the Gospel.

At one end of the philosophical spectrum are those who believe volunteers have transformed and revitalized missions, returned the global mission task to its proper owner — the local church — and mobilized several generations of believers to take the Gospel to the nations. At the other extreme are critics who warn that “amateur missionaries” on vacation with good intentions and poor preparation make little positive impact for the kingdom of God abroad — and do actual harm in some instances.

I don’t pretend to be objective in the debate: I’m pro-volunteer. I’ve been making the case for mission volunteerism since the late 1970s. A week after finishing college, I signed on with Southern Baptists’ new Mission Service Corps program for long-term volunteers and started writing feature stories about other volunteers working throughout America. A few years later I joined the Foreign (now International) Mission Board news staff and began to see volunteers in action overseas.

In those days, some missionaries grumbled about having to take time from their ministries to “baby-sit” visiting volunteers, find something productive for them to do, keep them from causing an international incident, etc. Time passed, however, and more and more lay volunteers came to serve. Open-minded missionaries — and even some of the grouches — began to discover how valuable volunteers could be in evangelism, relief work, launching new ministries, even penetrating new regions and people groups with the Gospel. When they went home, excited volunteers told about their spiritual adventures and got their churches involved in supporting and participating in missions.

Today, most new missionaries point back to experiences they had as volunteers or shorter-term workers as key moments in their journey to a life commitment to missions.

Still, the critics make some valid points about volunteering. There’s a right way — and many wrong ways — to do volunteer missions. Church teams that “parachute” into an overseas location, make no attempt to work with or even contact missionaries and local believers and proceed to do their own thing seldom produce real results. They often claim hundreds or thousands of “converts,” few of whom can be found a week after the volunteer team goes home.

A missionary friend in Southeast Asia has worked for many years in a land that gets many such visitors. They come. They look around. They leave. Few return.

“People come and go by the planeload with great intentions to ‘save’” the nation, he says. “Nearly every plane that lands has one or two mission teams on it. Many mission trips are little more than ‘Christian tourism,’ where you hit a few key sites and bypass thousands of less-prominent locations.”

He calls it “hit-and-run evangelism.”

“I know there are tons of great people who love [this country] and are doing all they can to see change,” he stresses. However, “to see change in culture, to see change in community, requires one very important element. It is not church permits, national strategies, education, money, buildings, infrastructure, good governance, electricity, high-speed Internet, systematic training, dedicated locals, training materials, pioneering missionaries, more mission teams, more preachers, more Bible schools, more NGOs, more parachurch organizations, more churches, more pastors. Nope. All those are good and eventually will be developed, but what is needed is far more mundane: time to exert influence.

“To really see [this nation] changed, we need people who are called of God and willing to commit their lives here. To gain the trust of the people requires time. To build relationships requires time. To learn a language requires time. To develop key strategies requires time. To have influence requires time.”

Besides the love of Christ, time is the most important thing missionaries can give to the people they serve. Day after day, month after month, year after year — but, ideally, not one hour longer than it takes to prepare local believers to take over the work.

Volunteers who want to make a difference are wise if they seek such servants.

“The local church is waking up to its role in the Great Commission, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need God-called, culturally trained, long-term missionaries who passionately love and deeply understand the people groups they are assigned to,” writes Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt in his new book, Get Connected: Mobilizing Your Church for God’s Mission (order at imb.org/GetConnectedBook).

Hunt, pastor since 1987 at First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Ga., led a church that hadn’t produced a missionary in 150 years to be one of the most strategic mission mobilization centers in America. It sends out hundreds of volunteers each year and partners with missionaries in some of the most challenging places on earth. But Woodstock never does “Lone Ranger” missions, if Hunt has anything to do with it.

“I see a lot of churches led by enthusiastic young pastors who ride off to the mission field with no vision, no strategic relationship, no plan,” he observes. “They ‘fire a shot’ here and there and come home with some great stories, but it often ends there. Don’t try to be Indiana Jones, the solo hero who barely makes it back alive. Be a team player, a coach and a mobilizer. … Work with a knowledgeable mission partner who knows his field. You’ll make a much more lasting impact.”

Amen to that.