Pastor Powell's Column

October 2010

Culture Shock

Mission trips have become a great fad. Last year over one million Americans took part in some kind of “mission trip.” The quotes are necessary because many are only mission-trip-lite, a kind of religio-tourism designed merely to provide an “experience” without demanding too much. Word is out: a mission trip can “change your life.” Bored Americans will try anything once, any novelty that might insert some meaning into an over-indulged, under-fulfilled lifestyle.

Does it sound like I am anti mission trip? Hardly! Just look at The Fellowship’s menu of opportunities. A well planned, spiritually selective mission trip can be greatly used by God, both in the lives of participants and of the host community.

Our recent team to the water project in Uganda, East Africa, was one of these well-planned outreaches. For this team as for other teams, both the journey outward and the transition back become over-whelming experiences that rock the soul. No matter how much one has read or viewed information on life in the developing world, it never becomes as real as actually meeting people face to face, ministering with them, eating and living with them, immersing in their way of life, even if only briefly. Experiencing the reality of their Christian faith in completely different cultural trappings forces one to examine one’s own faith. “How much of my own faith is merely cultural?” In other words, which of my own values are simply unexamined Americanism, and beneath all that, how much genuine Christian faith and practice do I have?

The return home is no less challenging. Can I continue, as before, to ignore the mind-boggling contrast in lifestyles? Will there be a lifelong permanent change in my values, priorities, and practices? Or will I return to the old patterns of denial and apathy? And what of these people around me, my friends and family? Do they understand? Or care? Do even they want to?

Short termers struggle with such feelings, in some cases severely. Some will make resolute changes in lifestyle and life direction. Some will find other ways to resolve the tension, ways that accommodate fitting in to standard cultural expectations and norms.

For instance, twenty six centuries ago a young prince ventured out from the carefully maintained isolation of his palace life. For the first time he witnessed realities he never knew existed: poverty, sickness, death. It was a shattering experience to realize that the aristocratic world he had lived in was an illusion. He was never the same. He pondered suffering and determined where the problem was: human desires. So far, so good. But in his quest to overcome desire, Gautama retreated inward and concluded that all desire, and the resultant suffering, were mere illusion. In fact, the whole of life and this world is illusion. The way of release is to achieve a total disengagement with the illusions of existence. With this enlightenment, he became the Buddha, and hundreds of millions today follow his pathway of disengagement.

On the other hand, Jesus chose to leave a far more glorious majesty in heaven to come down and immerse himself in the suffering of this world. We have no means to conceive the culture shock when the eternal Creator took on human existence, born as a helpless poor infant in a dirty cattle shed, growing up to live among people that misunderstood him, tried to misuse him, often mocked and rejected him, and ultimately framed him and tortured him to death. This mission trip was a total cultural immersion of the profoundest sort. But it was not just for “the experience.” It was to totally engage with the realities of desire, sin, suffering and death, to meet them head on and overcome them, to liberate all who would make the faith commitment to follow him. And so he became the Christ, and over a billion people today bear the name Christian.

What’s the name on YOUR mission trip?