What is mission work?

Saint Anthony
Originally uploaded by hnwate04

I've been thinking about this question a lot lately. My school has mission trips over our academic breaks, and I have never been on one yet. But this year my goal is to go on one. One trip is to the Phillipines and the rest are within the U.S. I probably can't afford to go overseas, but I often wonder at the complexity of what that would entail...

I'm doing a presentation on mission work for my ministry class, and throughout my research I have been coming up with a lot of questions that I would ask a missionary if I met one. I believe these are questions that we should all ask ourselves as well. If we think about a time (or imagine a situation) where we have come into contact with a culture that is very different from our own, how do we act, how do we react, and how do we evangelize?

Evangelization is a very delicate thing, because everyone responds differently to a person's words of faith. It is important to know that when I am speaking with a non-Christian, I have to respect where they are coming from. This means that if they have a different cultural tradition from my own, I can't assume that they will give it all up. I have to come to understand their culture, because aspects of it are most likely very good. So this brought me to ask the question "what parts of a cultural tradition are sacred and should remain and which parts could change?" I don't know the answer to this question because it is probably different in every case.

This question brought me to another question: does sharing my faith mean that I also bring my way of life to this new culture? How could I say that my way of life is the best way to live? Sure, I may have luxuries that they don't have (some countries just don't have toilets, and that is normal), but should we force them to adapt the luxuries that we are used to? Maybe all the luxuries that I have are not necessary. In a class discussion about this topic, we decided that standard healthcare was something that everyone deserves. We also decided that we could not force a country to get toilets.

I will also ask the question of how to relate to a culture that is so different to my own. This is important to think about. I may not speak the same language or look the same. So what is it that can connect us on the same level? Let's go back to basics and say that we all connect on the level of humanity. We all share human experience, emotions, spirituality, music, ...love. Love is such a powerful thing that it speaks to us even if we cannot speak to eachother. And so my friends I come to the bottom line of what mission work needs. It needs love. If you love a people you wish to evangelize to, you will strive to know their needs, both spiritual and physical, and you will strive to know exactly what you can do/say for them that will help them the most and bring them closer to God. So this is where I have found myself on the topic of mission work... there is much work to be done, but first and foremost, the heart of charity is absolutely necessary to understand the full picture of what we are doing when we are evangelizing. We are not counting numbers of people we may have converted, we are not keeping tallies. Evangelize my friends, but do it with complete love of God and of those you are helping, because what we do to the least, we do to Jesus.