MISSION IN CRISIS: BACK TO SENDER

DISCOMFORTING MISSION IN A CHANGING WORLD

Fr. Andrew Gimenez Recepcion, SThD

Introduction

The life of a missionary is a divine adventure. In fact, when one looks at the history of missions
in the Church one finds outstanding men and women who lived heroic lives at the service of the
Church even in difficult situations that tested their faith and commitment to Jesus Christ. Many
of them gave their lives for Christ as martyrs of faith.

One might start to wonder whether the missionaries of today have the same passion and faith-
stamina for Christ's Gospel. Others might begin to say that the situation of missionaries in the
past are much different from the contexts of missionaries in the present. Granted that the
missionary situations or contexts are different from the past, but the missionary mandate remains
the same, that is, to Proclaim Jesus Christ through word and witness.

Allow me to explore the missionary mandate in the light of the present situations of mission
work today with the intention of leading us all back to Jesus Christ who is the Missionary of
the Father.

The reflections I share are drawn from my personal experiences and insights as missioner in the
many frontiers of the Church and humanity. May I invite you to be open to the Holy Spirit, the
same Spirit of Jesus, who helps us examine ourselves as missionaries of Jesus today.

Mission is Always in Crisis

The normal state of mission is crisis. David Bosch has honestly pointed out that we are not
always conscious that crises have accompanied the life and work of the Church through the
centuries. It is in the crises, however, that a new life of faith and passion for mission come out
that respond to the needs or situations of the times with new charisms enriching the mission
work of the Church.

The constant temptation of missionaries is to get rid of crisis and to find solutions to every
problem as if everything depended on human strength, initiative, and planning. It is important to
remember that every crisis, every difficulty, every suffering, every doubt becomes an essential
ingredient in God's missionary work. It is necessary for a missionary to constantly be aware and
open to the grace-filled moment that comes through different situations in the course of mission
work.
Crisis of Faith

For a missionary, the crisis of faith, is not so much a question of doctrine but a matter of
personal and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. Many missionaries today overwhelmed by
the immensity of work in the mission field have become enslaved by to-do-lists and goals to
achieve according to a mission plan to the detriment of a personal and intimate relationship with
Jesus. Thus, a missionary has to be aware that constant union with Jesus during the day is a
missionary task itself and it cannot be relegated to a secondary place.

Pope Benedict XVI during the launching of the Year of Faith (Porta Fidei) says
something very important for a real faith-ing experience:

Faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and when it is communicated as
an experience of grace and joy. It makes us fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and
enables us to bear life-giving witness: indeed, it opens the hearts and minds of those who listen
to respond to the Lordʼs invitation to adhere to his word and become his disciples.

The experience of faith is an act of existential surrender that makes us see our lives not as a
series of work for the Church but as a divine masterpiece that is being woven by the depth of
our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Crisis of Hope

The reality of hope is connected to the way we look at our lives from God's point of view. Hope
is not a preview of the future events to come in the life of a missionary. On the contrary, hope is
allowing Jesus Christ to take hold of the present mission tasks while accepting human limitations
trusting that the task is yet to be realized according to God's plan. For Christians, it is not that
they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life
will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it
become possible to live the present as well. (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 2)

Discouragement and disappointment are recurring experiences of missioners. A closer look at

the experience of discouragement reveals that one gets discouraged in mission work when
results as expected do not come easily. Other factors that can cause discouragement are inability
to accept personality differences of collaborators in mission, and the indifference of people in
the mission areas.

The challenge to hope is to see any negative experience of discouragement or disappointment

as a means to allow God to show the best way from His point of view and to confront us with
the truth about ourselves and the status of our present mission commitment.

It is consoling to be reminded that "the one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes
has been granted the gift of new life." (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 2) A missioner
can only hope that in God's time his work will be realized. It is important to reiterate that in
God's time does not necessarily mean in our time. We may not stay long enough in one mission
place to see realized God's mission work but even without us God will see to it that His plan will
be fulfilled.

Crisis of Love

The crisis of love in a missioner's life is not the lack or absence of love but it is the reduction of
love to what one can do in the mission areas. The danger of equating love with what one can do
can make the life of a missionary or missioner as an experience of doing a job for the church.
There is the great temptation of activism or workaholism. It is not uncommon to hear stories of
missionaries who have spent more than twenty years of their lives in one mission place only to
experience failure in the sense that people think of them as social workers, hospital builders,
community organizers, school administrators, and family workers. As one missioner in
exasperation commented: "They have missed the message of what we do!" Thus, the crisis of
love in mission work is actually a crisis of being, of an authentic lifestyle of love that does not
depend on the amount of mission activities.

Love is not what we do. Love is who we are. We cannot substitute what we do with who we are
as an expression of God's love to others particularly by the kind of life that we live. We could be
doing a lot of charitable work for others in our mission work but it does not mean that love is the
way of life that we radiate to others. In other words, there is a very subtle compartmentalization
of life in what we do and in who we are. It is easy to give something to others but it is more
difficult to live with a fellow missioner in the same house. This is the challenge of love--to
radiate with transparency and consistency who we are in what we do.

At the heart of the crisis of love is a call to embrace a way of life that mirrors the life of the
Trinity. In reality this means that love "no longer is it a question, then, of a "commandment"
imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely bestowed
experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with
others." (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 18).

After briefly describing some salient points for reflection in the life of a missionary, we explore
in a cursory manner the horizons for doing mission today and what it demands from a
missioners.
Changing Mission Horizons: New Evangelization

Beyond Geography

In the past and even today, mission has been understood and experienced primarily from the
horizon of geography. In other words, mission is leaving one's place or country in order to be
sent to a designated territories that are often referred to as missions or mission stations. Though
the permanent validity of mission ad gentes, that is, missionaries going to other territories that
need the first proclamation of the Gospel cannot be dismissed as outmoded and unnecessary, it
remains equally valid that the mission horizon of the Church cannot be confined to geography.
There other ways of mission-ing in the changing horizons of our times. In fact, mission has
assumed a new stance of embracing humanity's frontier situations where God is unknown in the
consciousness of humanity even in the jungles of global cities where the absence of God is
fashionable or where God is a private matter that cannot interfere with other areas of life. Even
when it comes to God, it is mind-your-own-business.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella points out in his recent book on New Evangelization (Italia:
Mondadori, Italy: 2011) the situation of humanity afflicted with secularism: "Humanity is in
crisis... the crisis is cultural as well as anthropological." God is no longer at the center of life for
humans have taken the place of God. Fisichella illustrates that secularism has proposed the thesis
of living in the world etsi Deus non daretur, that is, as if God does not exist. Thus, after
having taken away God's rightful place, humans have also lost themselves. (Fisichella, 32).

Mission in our changing world needs to go out from the security of a stable designated territory.
It has to enter the disorientation of humanity that is in search of the true face of God. A
missioner today needs to give witness to a personal God who makes a difference in one's entire
life. A missioner today needs to be passionate about proclaiming the true face of Jesus Christ
who makes a difference in the world today.

Beyond Maintenance

Some missioners after having spent more than two years or more of their lives in a particular
mission station or area, have become "settled" in the sense of feeling at ease with the people of
the place and with the system of mission work. One unconsciously enters the missionary's
comfort zone. The sense of surprise from the God who sends during the first few months of
mission work has been replaced by a sense of fulfillment that everything has gone well. The
sense of exploration of new avenues for sharing the Gospel has been replaced by the
maintenance of structures and systems. Attachment to one's mission work slowly creeps in and
people give the impression that their lives would be different without the contribution of the
missionary.

A missioner should not be deceived that mission is his task. In the first place, mission is God's
work and not a human task. Thus, when everything goes well in the missions it is an affirmation
that mission is a gift from God who finds in the life of a missioner, in spite
of his or her frailty, an adequate instrument to communicate his Divine life by word and witness.

Mission in our changing world needs to go out from the maintenance status of institutionalized
mission work to mission in the frontiers after the model of St. Paul who never settled in one
place but went where he felt Jesus wanted him to proclaim his message; who was never
attached to any of his mission works for the fulfillment of a true missionary is not in one's work
but only in Jesus Christ. Like Paul, missioners today need to find the different frontiers of
humanity where there is an urgent need of God's message. Go when nobody wants to go. Go
when you think you are not ready and prepared. Be ready to be ill-at-ease because Jesus Christ
is in charge.

Mission is Homecoming

In the Old Testament, the People of Israel did not see mission as going out of Israel but rather
they were convinced that by their fidelity to the covenant with Yahweh, non- believers will
come to Israel to know the true God. In the New Testament, the center is not Israel but Jesus
Christ. In Jesus Christ, racial, geographical, and cultural divides are secondary. The person of
Jesus Christ becomes the message, the origin, and the point of arrival of every disciple's
mission work.

It is in this light that no matter how we slalom in our mission work we will always have to find
our way back to Jesus who sends us, accompanies us, and welcomes us back.

There is a certain degree of restlessness in the life of missionaries, that is, the temptation to find
fulfillment in the end product of mission work. Nevertheless, it is necessary to reiterate that only
Jesus Christ is the true measure of success in the life of missionaries. The implications of this
affirmation to the life of missionaries is tremendous in the sense that everything becomes
secondary and only Jesus and his plan matter most. Only Jesus and his plan in the mission area
remains forever even after the missionaries have left.

Missionaries cannot live without a spirituality that is at home with Jesus present in their lives and
in the community that they serve. In fact, only friendship with Christ in the restlessness of daily
life can give serenity in the midst of difficulties and in the seemingly unsurmountable challenges
of mission work.

A missionary cannot compartmentalize mission work into spheres of activity but integrates
every aspect of life as a journey from God in oneself to God in the other. It is an unending
contemplation of and encounter with God in the routine of the global village: in the daily
commute; in the patience needed to go through a traffic jam; in the experience of forgiving a
mistake of a fellow missionary; in the difficulty of dealing with people in the mission area.
Mission is homecoming to Jesus who makes a missionary's life a continuous praise of God's
providence, guidance, and compassionate love.
Conclusion

Living mission today is homecoming. It is an encounter with an event, a person who gives a
new meaning to our Christian identity and search for holiness in a changing world. Benedict
XVI captures this encounter meaningfully when he says that "we have come to believe in God's
love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being
Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a
person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction." (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas
Est, 3.16).

***

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

0. What kind of crisis do I think I'm experiencing as a missioner?

1. What are the factors that contribute to my present crisis?
2. What are my comfort zones in my mission work?
3. What steps do I need to do in order to go back to Jesus as a source of missionary life and
fruitfulness?