Partners in mission: youth showing us the way
Mission co-worker Rev. Mark Wright (right) and Westminster Presbyterian Church youth director Greg Klimovitz.
On our first day of orientation as PC(USA) mission co-workers, we learned the mantra “Presbyterians do mission in partnership.”
“Mission together,” they said. “In partnership,” they taught us. I (Mark) liked that. It rang true with what I had come to believe about the heart of mission. True mission means that as North Americans we don’t come with all the answers. We come when we are invited, not to bring God where God hasn’t been before, but to mutually share with others what we have learned about following Christ.
We arrived in Honduras at a very difficult political time for the country. During months of watching and learning, I saw North American church groups come and go, doing great work and full of good intentions, but I struggled to find the mutuality evident in true partnership. I asked myself: How much of what we do and promote is actually helpful in the long run—or are we subtly promoting a crippling paternalism among the people we call our brothers and sisters?
I began to hear the same struggle voiced carefully and quietly from some of the pastors and leaders of the Honduran church. Something wasn’t quite right; something was missing in our dealings with one another. I struggled with just what “partnership” meant and what it looked like in relation to the churches of the Presbytery of Honduras. I wondered what models of real partnership we could find to guide us.
As I struggled with this, God answered with a young director of youth ministry from Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, Pennsylvania, named Greg Klimovitz. He was smart, insightful, energetic, had a heart for mission and was already asking some of the same questions. Greg told me that several years ago the Imago Dei Youth Ministry that he led underwent a significant paradigm shift regarding short-term mission trips.
Following worship at Peña de Horeb on Westminster’s last night in Honduras … but just the beginning of a beautiful mission partnership!
“We had become disenfranchised by the conventional models of weeklong ‘service blitzes,’” he explained. “These swift and vigorous altruistic barrages, when gazed upon at a distance, appear beautiful, brilliant and powerful. Yet, much like the difference between lightning observed and lightning experienced by a golfer on the 18th, ‘service blitzes’ often elicit different reactions by the communities that experience short bursts of altruistic electricity.”
Instead, said Greg, “Our youth were eager to explore something different. We longed for pilgrimage. We were thirsty for partnership. We hoped to serve alongside and enter into community with youth in another cultural context.”
Greg and I met each other through Skype videoconferencing. During the ensuing months what was so amazing and refreshing to me about this Pennsylvania youth group was the fact that they were all willing to put in so much work in preparation for their trip. Not so much in logistical planning, as I usually observed in adult groups, but in learning—about themselves, about Honduras and the church here, and about mission in partnership.
Greg explains the process they went through:
“In the spring of 2010 the Imago Dei Youth Ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church began to discern a call and vision together about the nature of missional partnerships. We developed a Missional Experience Visioning Team and explored the biblical theme of mission—i.e., missio Dei (Editor’s note: a Latin theological term that means “the mission of God” or “the sending of God”), missional church paradigms and the pros and cons of our previous summer missional experiences. After numerous conversations, we agreed that what we desired was ultimately embodied in the vision and witness of PC(USA) World Mission, specifically the hopes and dreams of mission co-worker Rev. Mark Wright and the Presbytery of Honduras youth. At their invitation, we began to form our team and prepare for a July 2011 sojourn. Their first request: read through and wrestle with Fikkert and Corbett’s book When Helping Hurts, as a means to shed paternalistic habits typical of North American teams. (Editor’s note: see the review of this excellent resource in this issue.) So we did. Eager to pursue this potential partnership, we adjusted our posture and became listeners and learners versus planners and programmers.
“Our team of 19 let go of our lust for control and surrendered the agenda to our pending partners in Honduras. A pivotal question was then posed by Mark to the Honduran youth, ‘What do you want the youth in Pennsylvania to see, hear and experience while in Tegucigalpa?’ In essence, we were confident that if we were truly to be partners, we must be willing to follow their lead.”
I was amazed at the patience and flexibility of Greg and the Pennsylvania youth, especially their leaders, as our planning progressed in a “Latin” and not “North American” way. They came on faith, and that made all the difference.
“When we safely landed in Tegucigalpa,” Greg says, “we were welcomed as brothers and sisters in ministry together. What began as invitation quickly became sacred laughter on fishing boats, roundtable discussions about the hopes and dreams of youth for their churches and communities, interactions with local parachurch ministries, and worship services on the beach.”
It felt like something important, maybe even holy, was happening. Following the blog postings by the Imago Dei youth group confirmed just how important and transformative the experience was for them. But the real test of partnership had to come from the Hondurans. We listened intently as the proof began to come, unsolicited, from the lips of the Honduran youth as they said that this was new, important, meaningful, different. It was confirmed one evening after a prayer service when an excited church pastor with years of experience with mission groups pulled a couple of us aside to thank us, explaining that this was a very different kind of partnership and he wanted more of this to continue in the future!
Greg sums it up: “We experienced a different sort of electricity in July 2011, one generated by God’s kingdom at work through Presbyterian youth-to-youth partnerships that illuminate people, churches and systems in both Honduras and Pennsylvania. This is precisely why our youth not only embraced the invitations of mission co-workers and the Presbytery of Honduras, but also why our congregation continues to explore how intentional giving can support the faithful witness of PC(USA) World Mission.”
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