June 18, 2007

Dear Friends,

Becky and I are now in the United States for the summer. We arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in early June. We have not been in the United States since Christmas 2005. Now we are doing mission interpretation and reconnecting with family and friends. We return to Lithuania on August 22.

Becky with Nelia and Olga, two accounting students from RACU in Moscow. Nelia’s husband is a pastor; Olga’s sister also attends RACU.

In May we were again teaching at the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in Moscow. RACU is a small Christian liberal arts college, similar to Lithuania Christian College.  Becky and I wanted to go to this college to increase our awareness of the Russian context, since now almost half the students at LCC have Russian, not Lithuanian, as their first language. Like LCC, RACU aims to be a Christian presence providing a North American style liberal arts education in a Christian context. Both of us are graduates of liberal arts colleges, Becky from Lebanon Valley College and Eric from Allegheny College, so these schools resonate with us.

A liberal arts education means cultivating a broadness of mind, an awareness of the wider world. Russia, like Lithuania, can be a very inhospitable, even dangerous, place for people of color. These former Soviet states have remained very closed societies, even as globalization has increased the diversity of migrants to what had been very homogenous societies. Tolerance and acceptance of diversity are scarce. Right-wing nationalist and skinhead groups have all too frequently attacked Africans; personal safety is a paramount concern. In Klaipeda, several Africans students at LCC have been subjected to physical assaults, especially this spring. In Russia, African expatriates live circumscribed lives, avoiding isolated places and the Moscow subway later in the evening for fear of being targets of abuse. Much needs to be done to promote open societies in these formerly closed countries.

We are teachers; we seek to be connected with the lives of our students. At the start of our classes at RACU, we wondered just how we could be relevant to the lives of these new students. At the end of our classes at RACU, Viktorija, one of the students, said, “I needed this course.” She related an encounter on the Moscow subway with a black man about South Africa. It seems Viktorija was reading her economics textbook and had turned to the pages about micro loans to poor women in South Africa. The other passenger was surprised by the interest of this Russian student in a faraway place very different from Moscow. Viktorija suddenly made an unexpected connection with a real person in the otherwise anonymous Moscow subway. Viktorija related her conversation with confidence and a new appreciation of the diversity of her world.

PC(USA) mission workers in Moscow: Al and Ellen Smith with Becky and Eric Hinderliter, June 2007.

While in Moscow we had time to meet with Ellen and Al Smith, PC(USA) mission co-workers in Russia. We shared stories of the ins and outs of living in strange places, of how we maneuver through the rough spots of life away from family and friends. The discussion turned to reappointment prospects for mission workers like us. We face uncertainty in the coming years; the adequacy of mission funding remains an open question. We agreed that awareness of what mission workers actually do is the key task in mission interpretation. Like the apostle Paul, we need to report back to the congregations that committed us to the grace of God and sent us “all that God had done” (Acts 14:27). Paul made his mission reports a top priority—and so should we.

Summer has a very different pace for us than the near frenetic pace of the academic calendar. In these months we have time to prepare new courses, to catch up on the new issues in our teaching subjects, and to reflect on what we have been doing. We’ve now starting our seventh year as teachers. Parker Palmer is a popular writer these days about the craft of teaching. In his book, The Courage to Teach (1998), he says that there are four fundamental questions teachers should ask themselves: about their subject matter, “what do I teach”; about teaching techniques, “how do I teach?”; about the reasons for being a teacher, “why do I teach?”; and most importantly, the “who” question, “who is the self that teaches?” He asks about the inner self, “How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?”

Palmer says, “we teach who we are”; his stress is on the inner life of teachers. This is the lesson that Becky and I are learning. Students want to know who we are and why we have come to their schools. They are hungry for authentic, meaningful, and enduring relationships with responsible adults. But these intentions cannot just be announced upon arrival; the students receive such messages as lectures, too easily forgotten. Relationships just can’t be declared, no matter how well intended they may be. Students watch us closely; they read our lives. Our inner quest for lives of integrity and obedience form the basis of our outward relationships with our students and our colleagues.

“Who is the self that teaches,” Palmer says, is “the most fundamental question we can ask about teaching and those who teach.”  Tempting as it is to relate the record of what we have done—courses taught, places visited, lectures given—the continuing question for us who aspire to be the good teachers is “what have you become?”  We see mission as touching the lives of students, an authentic transformation. But we also have learned that teaching as mission is about our own journey of faith, our own transformation—our redemption and sanctification, we reformed believers would say. The old hymn says it best: “O dear Lord three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, to love thee more dearly, to follow thee more nearly, day by day.”

May we all have a refreshing summer, a time of renewal, and growth on our journey of faith.

Becky and  Eric Hinderliter
PC(USA) Mission co-workers, Lithuania

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179