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February 1999
Dear Friends,
Recently, Hunter was asked to write a short essay about the way
our church tries to be faithful to God's mission—by working
in partnership with churches around the world—and he has
been persuaded by a friend to share it with you.
Why Partnership?—Partners as Mentors
In these days of neoliberal economics, where invisible, impersonal
market forces instantly determine prices and decree feast or famine
for millions around the globe, some people would say that a missiology
of partnership is far too cumbersome. Working in partnership takes
too much time; rather than "doing mission" immediately,
partnership forces us to involve ourselves in the difficult, laborious,
and sometimes messy task of being in relationship: first understanding,
then valuing, and then trusting the insights of our neighbor.
"We appreciated getting to know folks from the local church,"
summarized one work team, "but our group could have gotten
the health clinic built in four days if we didn't have to wait
for them to contribute the bricks."
Partnership makes us dependent on another member of the Body
of Christ—their schedules, their priorities, their organizational
weak points, their values. In the international context of PC(USA)
mission relationships, partnership often pushes us into relationship
with poor and oppressed members of the body of Christ—and
that is a feeling I do not enjoy. Embracing my insurance policies,
second helpings at mealtime, and comfortable home, I prefer not
to be reminded that many of my partners (read: "brothers
and sisters") are experiencing, even today, the sharp ache
of hunger, another night of homelessness, or the long wait for
refugee processing. And yet this intentional binding of ourselves
to particular members of the body of Christ is proving to be a
vehicle of God's saving grace to our church—a church considered
one of the wealthiest in the world partnered with some of the
materially poorest partners, a church of declining membership
partnered with some of the fastest growing churches in the world,
a church rent by theological divisions partnered with some churches
that have discovered remarkable unity around issues of mission,
service, liberation, and evangelization.
To work in partnership is to bind oneself to persons who may
know much more than we do about what it means to share sacrificially,
to rest fully in God's provision, and to persevere in faith through
suffering. On a personal note, I think it's fair to say that I've
very rarely been "out-given" in my relationship with
partner Christians in the "Two-Thirds World." I am almost
always given the best seat, the first choice, the biggest say,
and the largest portion. On more than one occasion I have eaten
a feast prepared with the last chicken or measure of corn flour
that the hosting community had left. And while I often calculate
exactly how much I should put in my local church's offering plate
(so as not to create unhealthy "dependency" on my contribution),
I am daily confronted with extremely poor Christians who, like
the widow of Luke 21:1ff, give out of their own poverty with what
seems to me to be sheer reckless abandon. This sense of abandonment
into God's hands is not a natural, but rather, a learned response.
Two weeks ago, I took a trip to Ayacucho, a region in Peru's
Andean highlands characterized by extreme poverty, 42 percent
illiteracy, and deep and festering wounds from the 15 years of
the political violence that raged between the Peruvian government
and the Shining Path Liberation Movement . In the town of Callqui
(Quechua for rocky, unproductive soil), I had a long and intense
evening conversation with a group of mothers, many of them single
or widowed, who are deeply concerned about helping their children
live a more abundant life than they themselves have experienced.
I am learning not to seek these kinds of meetings unless I am
prepared for deep and painful personal transformation. Perhaps
it was in order not to hear fully the pain that these women had
experienced from the years of dehumanizing poverty at the hands
of both government soldiers and terrorists that I busied my mind
with the details of development planning—what a quality children's
education or water well project might look like, how much it would
cost, which donor agencies we might contact for support, etc.
As the meeting ended late that night, an older woman with long
braids who had slipped out at the end of the meeting came up to
me with tears in her tired eyes: "Thank you for coming,"
she said simply, and gave me a carefully wrapped package. A local
friend later explained to me that Ana's husband had been murdered
12 years ago when Peruvian government troops, acting on an erroneous
tip-off, arrived suddenly during a worship service of the Callqui
Presbyterian Church and rounded up and shot seven men. They were
accused of terrorism, but no charges were made or proven. No questions
were asked. Ana's husband, a farmer and long-time Presbyterian
elder, was among those executed. She now makes her living by embroidering
and selling three or four white cotton tablecloths each month.
Ana's gift to us was a beautiful white tablecloth with the words
"His Love Makes Us Whole" embroidered on it in bright
red, blue, and yellow thread. And though her gift represented
perhaps a fourth of her monthly income, she arose from a late
night meeting and walked all the way home to bring to me a gift
from the heart. A token of gratitude for the past and hope for
the future. I later learned that Ana has been a pillar of support
in that grieving community, organizing the widows, encouraging
single mothers, even cajoling the Presbyterian session into action
(!) to help the children of the rocky, yet now productive soil.
Ana represents to me a kind of person that I have met often on
my own path of discipleship with Jesus Christ. A person who knows
what really matters in this incredibly complex, yet remarkable
simple world of ours and can give out of her own poverty because
all she is giving is love, which miraculously multiplies when
given freely. Ana has learned, as a more faithful follower of
Calvin than perhaps I will ever be, to rest fully in her faith
in God's providence and provision. She knows what it means to
persevere in her faith, even when human wisdom can offer no reason
to continue to believe.
Perhaps Ana is one of the reasons that brought me to work in
Peru—because by God's grace, I have become aware of the hole
in my own soul that is being filled daily by God's love and forgiveness
and grace extended to me through the ministry of persons living
in extreme poverty of possessions but extreme wealth of the spirit.
Persons whose love, together with Christ's makes me whole. Persons
I am privileged to consider as partners on this road toward personal
and societal transformation.
Faithfully yours,
Hunter and Ruth Farrell
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