Our team was led by a young woman named Erin Swyers from St. Andrews. There were five team members total and although we were all at different points in our lives we bonded immediately because of our care and concern for the Least of These. We had two guides/translators from Border Links, Scott and Tito who were very insightful, competent, and gentle. Since our days were long we processed all day long discussing the complexity of the issues, the brokenness we witnessed and how that touched us as Christians, our call to share the stories of the unheard with the privileged, and our own emotional gravity in response to the seeming hopelessness that often presented itself in the lives of many migrant workers. At the end of the trip there weren’t any dry eyes as we all hugged goodbye.
Right before I left on the trip I had led a three week Bible Study exploring the relationship between politics and faith as expressed in the Book of Acts. One of the things we had discussed in the class was the nature of apostolic teaching in the first church. That it wasn’t simply the Apostles telling people what to believe and then were converted but that it was a flexible doctrine based in mission. Therefore, to learn the teaching of Jesus would require experience found in performing miracles, teaching the Gospel, and healing the people. In this first community, Acts paints a picture of everyone growing together in wisdom and faith as they actively submerse themselves as witnesses of God’s reign into the brokenness of the world.
With that backdrop, it was during this mission trip that I was reminded of how real the vision of God’s reign on earth becomes and how relevant the Gospel is made when the beating of our hearts intersect with the brokenness of the world. It is when we openly enter into the brokenness of this world that our eyes are opened to the call of Christ on our lives. Many of us reflected on the gap between the church as a stagnant place which drowns the Gospel message in the hollowness of our needs to feel comfortable and the call of Christ to be disciples in the world. As a spiritual leader in a church this is a daily issue I face, how the church spends its time, money, and energy often has little to do with the Great Commission to go out into the world and make Disciples of Christ.
It seems it is not only that the world needs the church but also that the church needs the world. When the two become disconnected the message of the Gospel is lost. Mission trips are a challenge to hold ourselves accountable to the tasks of Christ. To remember that it is God who has called us through the church to serve a broken world, not the church which has called us to serve its programmatic needs. Over and over again Jesus becomes frustrated with the inability of the religious leaders in his community to see clearly the new order which God is to bring to the world. In a similar way it appears the religious leaders of today often fail to understand that we are not called to serve the church but to serve the world through the means of the church as God wills.
Transformation is possible in the stories of those we encounter on the road. When we allow ourselves to be opened up so the pain and joy of the other can fill us, we are once again realigned onto the path of Jesus. These are the stories that so often are silenced within our church walls. Yet even in our desperation to sustain the operation of our churches we fear going outside of our own doors with the message. We have forgotten that we are called to live not in the church but in Christ, the Messiah who declared the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.
In discipleship it is not missions which should be a program of the church but the very nature and function of the worshipping body. It is in this experience that the message of Christ becomes a tangible vision of how we are to change our lives. This mission trip reminded me of my accountability to Christ in a suffering world. That my salvation lies not in a scripted set of beliefs but in the tearful stories of the lost and forgotten. And, finally, that my hope does not lie in the growth of the church but in the creation of Disciples who will be those people which usher into this earth the reign of God.
Over and over on the trip I pondered the words of Isaiah 51:7-8 (The Message):
Listen now, you who know right from wrong, you who hold my teaching inside you: Pay no attention to insults when mocked and don’t let it get you down. Those insults and mockeries are moth-eaten, from brains that are termite-ridden, But my setting-things-right lasts, my salvation goes on and on and on.”
I want to hold inside me the teaching of Christ which tells me right from wrong. I want to be the religious leader who ‘gets it’; who understands the message of Jesus in a way that would not be possible if my allegiance were to an institution and not to the will of God. My call is to provide opportunities for the Spirit to transform the lives of people which can only be done when the walls of the church are broken down and the people walk over the bricks into the world to follow Jesus. Together, we are the church called to be witnesses of what has begun and what will be fulfilled in the physical world. Together, we are called to share the message to not lose hope because something greater than all the evil in this world is at work.
Returning with my heart packed with the stories of dozens of migrant workers separated from their families, it would have been impossible for me to hold back tears as I was reunited with my husband and three year old daughter in the Denver International Airport. Today I not only know the number of people who will die in the desert trying to cross the border to be with their families but I also know their names, I see their faces. I have seen the brokenness drip from their eyes. In the complexity of a system in which there are no easy answers and no good choices we are joined in solidarity through the Body of the Suffering Christ. In my robe, with my stole, it will not be at the altar that I sit singing the praises of the God of Resurrection, but at the foot of the cross.
