Are Real Partnerships in Global Missions Possible?

Robert Morrison (1782-1834), pioneer missionary and Bible translator in Cantonese-speaking China, served twenty-seven years for about a dozen converts. Commenting on the need for a leader to be willing to serve away from the limelight, Morrison wrote, “The great fault, I think, in our mission is that no one likes to be second.”6

The greatest challenge in building effective partnerships between Westerners and non-Westerners is control. This control issue gets played out around money, goals, policies, reporting mechanisms, theological statements and more. It seems that our inherently sinful condition makes working together difficult, which is one of the reasons that unity of Christians is foundational to global witness (see chapter ten of this book and Jn 17:21, 23).

Which grabs our interests more? Our “small k” kingdoms: the enlargement of our churches, denominations, agencies, personal agendas and sense of global influence? Or are we dedicated to the spread of Christ’s “capital K” Kingdom, where we care more about God’s reign than our church’s influence and more about the growth of the family of God than the expansion of our organization’s global footprint?

Chapter four exhorted us to build our involvement in the global Christian movement on biblical foundations. Chapter five set the groundwork for partnerships with the challenge to humility and servanthood. Chapter six reminded us that the image of the multigifted body of Christ is an image of reciprocity and interdependence. And chapter seven advised that global participation might confront us with the challenge of personal sacrifice. So how do we build a greater sense of equality in partnerships between the North American church and the Majority World church?

Bishop Hwa Yung of Malaysia calls us to struggle with the development of partnerships in spite of the human and economic challenges: “In a globalized world, the days of parochial thinking and action in missions are over. The task is far too big for any one group to manage on its own. The way forward has to be one of genuine Christian partnership between Western and non-Western churches, and between the rich and the poor, whether materially or spiritually.”7

Partnership Paradigm Shifts

In their book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert challenge the ways that we in North America act out of a paternalistic spirit, like a father to a small child: “We have the resources, and you have the need.” We enter into partnerships, but we enter with ourselves as the senior partners and our colleagues from the Majority World serving as the junior partners. Corbett and Fikkert write, “Avoid Paternalism: do not do things for people that they can do for themselves.”8 They go on to explain five ways that we in North America sometimes act paternally.

• Resource paternalism: believing that throwing money at global problems will solve them.
• Spiritual paternalism: believing that since we are materially rich and they are economically poor, we must have the deeper walk with God.
• Knowledge paternalism: believing that we are the teachers and they are the learners.
• Labor paternalism: doing work for people that they could (and should) do for themselves.
• Managerial paternalism: taking charge when things are not moving at a pace that satisfies us.9

For effective North American-global partnerships to exist, we need to revise our paradigms, or the ways we look at things. Several partnership-related paradigms needing revision stand out.

Revising our relational view of partnerships. Being part of God’s global mission means many changes ahead in the way that we relate to each other. True global partnership means being willing to redefine our roles. To add global perspective, North American agency boards will need to become more multicultural, international and non-Western. Local leadership will set strategies, and serving missionaries will look for ways to serve those strategies.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my global travels is serving as a facilitator for a course titled “Culture, Ethnicity and Diversity.” The course addresses the underlying issues of how race, ethnicity and history affect the new global realities of the diverse church. The students call me the professor, but the course inevitably raises locally specific questions, questions that I have no capacity to address. From their cultural framework, the students expect me to be the expert, but I see myself as partnering with them to discover their own answers. My job is to ask questions in an effort to draw the students out in answering their own questions as applicable to their local contexts in Africa, Asia or Latin America.

In a class in Burundi, we were talking about forgiveness in a country where more than 300,000 people died in the genocide of 1993–1994. The question arose, “How do we forgive people who chopped our family members to death?” From my comfy life in the suburbs of Boston, any answer I gave would be purely theoretical, so I started asking questions. Eventually one of the quieter students, Alfred, spoke up. He shared his amazing journey toward forgiveness of the people who had killed his mother, father and five siblings. In a relational view of partnerships, I don’t need to have all the answers, all the money or all the ideas. We come together as family to chart the way forward. We need each other, as Andrew Walls suggests: “Crossing cultural frontiers constantly brings Christ into contact with new areas of human thought and experience. All of these, converted, become part of the functioning body of Christ. The full stature of Christ depends on all of them together.”10

Paul Borthwick
Paul BorthwickBorthwicks.org

Paul Borthwick is a senior consultant for Development Associates International, which equips and develops Christian leaders in underresourced areas of the world; teaches missions at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass.; and serves as a missions associate with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He has written multiple books, including “A Mind for Missions,” “How to be a World-Class Christian,” and “Six Dangerous Questions to Transform Your View of the World.”

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