Mission Partners

My friend Steve Hayes over at his blog Notes From the Underground writes a very insightful post about mission partnership and I think this is true. I know that Western missionaries are doing their best not to force their culture to the host country where they are serving. But I am witnessing it happening all the time.

But what is really mission partnership? A more verbose expression but nonetheless clearer phrase: Mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ. Steve quotes his friend John Davies clearly give us a good description of what it is all about.

Missionary work is essentially two-way; Christ said, `Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them' (Matthew 7:12). If we took this seriously, we should probably have to pack in half the missionary work of the Church that we are used to, if it meant that blacks would start teaching whites , and doing good to them, and expecting them to be grateful. Our mission is not, in a one-way traffic, to extol the greatness of our religion: it is to hear and know the living God - and just as between God and man, so also between Christian and non-Christian, all real living is meeting. If this is not our way, we misrepresent the God who has sent us out, whose very nature as trinity is one of reciprocal relations.