Skip to main content

'Why Foreign Missions?' 1. The Needs at Our Gate


'Why Foreign Missions?'

From time to time, I’ve heard someone ask, ‘Why go overseas to minister to people when there are so many needs right here?’  This question is well worth considering, and I propose to do so in several parts.


1. The Needs at Our Gate

"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.  At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores…. (Lk. 16.19-21, NRSV).

When I lived in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, I asked myself a version of the same question: ‘Why go anywhere else to help people when the needs are so great right where I am?’  A sanitary engineer told me that over 70% of the population had no access to toilets and running water.  People lived and slept in the streets, huddling under shelters made from scraps of plastic, metal, or wood whenever it rained or the sun beat down relentlessly.  We had seven shelters right outside of our gate, and many more on the adjoining street.  Down the street, two women begged for a little money each day to feed their children.  A couple of streets over, I met a leper with only stubs for fingers and part of his face missing.  The nearly daily wails coming from the hospital across the street told me when someone died.  I didn’t hear the screams inside, where surgeries were carried out without anesthesia.  One day, I watched a fight break out over bread that someone was handing out to the hungry.

I was simply overwhelmed in Ethiopia with the extent of human needs.  We would buy meal tickets to hand out to the needy so that they used them on food, not something else.  An eleven year old girl with a bright smile and her little brother lived just outside the wall of my compound.  When she would see me on the street, she would come skipping over and gratefully received a few meal tickets.  My heart broke for this little girl, knowing that others like her regularly gave themselves to prostitution so that they could feed their stomachs for just one more day.

I asked myself how we could minister to a city with so many needs.  How could we feed the widows and orphans, the cripples, and the sick?  No matter where I walked—and I took long walks—I would see the same human suffering.  A cripple using a pole as a crutch as he walked to cars idling at one of the still running stoplights, someone suffering from elephantiasis lying outside the church yard, someone scooting along on his fists because he had no legs….  Where does one start to meet such needs?

I decided that I would try to help the little girl with a bright smile and her brother.  They lived right outside of my compound, like Lazarus begging outside the rich man’s gate in Lk. 16.  While we cannot help everybody, we might at the very least try to help those sitting at our gate.

Foreign mission work is not an excuse to ignore the needs right where we are.  Even if needs are greater far away, we need to realize that the needs outside our gate are ones that we can address.  The first answer to our question, ‘Why foreign missions?’ is simply this: Let us not ignore the needs at our own gate.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘For freedom Christ has set us free’: The Gospel of Paul versus the Custodial Oversight of the Law and Human Philosophies

  Introduction The culmination of Paul’s argument in Galatians, and particularly from 3.1-4.31, is: ‘ For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5.1). This essay seeks to understand Paul’s opposition to a continuing custodial role for the Law and a use of human philosophies to deal with sinful passions and desires.   His arguments against these are found in Galatians and Colossians.   By focussing on the problem of the Law and of philosophy, we can better understand Paul’s theology.   He believed that the Gospel was the only way to deal with sin not simply in terms of our actions but more basically in terms of our sinful desires and passions of the flesh. The task ahead is to understand several large-scale matters in Paul’s theology, those having to do with a right understanding of the human plight and a right understanding of God’s solution.   So much Protestant theology has articulated...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’ [1] MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Virtues of a Failing Culture

  An insanity has fallen upon the West, like a witch’s spell.   We have lived with it long enough to know it, understand it, but not long enough to resist it, to undo it.   The very stewards of the truth that would remove it have left their posts.   They have succumbed to its whispers, become its servants.   It has infected the very air and crept along the ground like a mist until it is within us and all about us.   We utter its precepts like schoolchildren taught their lines. Its power lies in its claims of virtuosity, distorted goodness.   If presented as the vices that they are, they would be rejected.   These virtues are proclaimed from the pulpits and painted on banners or made into flags.   They are established in our schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries.   They are the hallucinogen making our own cultural suicide bearable, even desirable.   They are virtues, but disordered, or they are the excess or deficiency of...
Post a Comment
Read more