Mission Partnerships

I was just re-reading an old article I found in a pile on my desk; it's from CT's Christian Vision Project. This article is called The Dread Cancer of Stinginess. Despite the fact that we're now officially in a recession (the article was written over a year ago), this is still a timely message for the American church -- especially a church that's inclined to be greedy and the least generous church perhaps in the history of Christianity.

What caught my eye in this article was his call for a mentality in mission work that goes against the typical "Western presumption that because we are often more wealthy, we are somehow more worthy to hold positions of authority over national leaders." One thing I appreciate about many of the missionaries that our church partners with is that they work so hard to reject this mentality and to develop true, "symbiotic" partnerships. [Btw, this is also how we view developing our partnerships at work.]

Here's the 2nd-to-last paragraph, a GREAT call for how we can think about the global body of Christ:

"As we consider the needs of the world's poor and the funding of global evangelism, we must be unflinching in our assessment of Western responsibility in light of our enormous store of resources. We must also be fairer in our willingness to acknowledge the reliability of indigenous leaders and their desire to help themselves. They are, after all, not a band of beggars, but a band of brothers. They are not seeking alms; they are seeking arms with which to fight the good fight of faith. They are not looking for us to be their welfare agents but their warfare allies."