I sat listening to her in an abandoned school building in our neighborhood. Bible verses, scrawled in Spanish, were left as blackboard relics of some former evangelism class. They were intersected by expletives, sprayed in haste, artifacts of more irreverent tenants. She didn’t seem impressed.
This was her third mission trip of the summer. She’d already been to Jamaica and had built a house there. More recently, she was in Texas, where they did Backyard Bible Clubs for kids. This week, it appeared, was a way to round out her summer a little closer to home—slummin’ it in Jerusalem after stamping Samaria and the ends of the earth in her Great Commission passport.
The young woman was with her youth group from a nearby suburb, and they were going to serve and learn alongside us in urban Kansas City. Yet before the week began, there seemed to be an air of stale indifference that clung to their clothes like late-July sweat.
Admittedly, our neighborhood isn’t sexy. We don’t have queues of homeless people lining up outside of soup kitchens. We don’t have block after block of boarded-up, abandoned houses. We don’t have nefarious, high-rise, government housing complexes or packs of young males roaming down Metropolitan Avenue that make us feign a cough while furtively hitting the lock button to evade notice of anyone else in the van. We don’t have the kind of poverty that’s photogenic and tells a good story.
Ours is a working-poor kind of neighborhood—a lot of undocumented immigrant families squeezed into converted, single-family rental houses and banal, public housing apartment tracts built with 1970s glamour. I had the feeling this wasn’t really the set they were hoping for to match the screenplay they had in their minds. There was something else, however, nagging at me as I listened to this young woman recount her travels. I looked around the room at Eh Dho, Mleh, Zaira and some of the other youth from our neighborhood and thought to myself, “Why don’t they ever get to do this? Is this really part of God’s grand design—calling this girl to travel the globe as benefactor and calling our kids forever to be the dutiful recipients? When do they get to be Superman?”
This young woman is far from alone. It’s become de rigueur for any church youth group worth its salt to offer multiple mission trips and service opportunities each summer. Some forward-thinking youth workers have responded to critiques of patronizing, unidirectional, short-term missions by paying for church partners in the developing world to send teams to their church and neighborhood in the United States. I’ve witnessed these kinds of partnerships firsthand, and I was impressed by the way it neutralized the power dynamics and the way it energized their foreign brothers and sisters. For once, they got to be the chosen ones on mission. For once, they got to be the ones to travel the globe. For once, they got to be Superman.
Yet I was left wondering, “Is this really the way it’s supposed to be? How is it that our notions of servanthood have become wrapped up in experiences that make us feel more powerful, not less? Is it that much better that we’re now just subsidizing opportunities for the people for whom we’ve acted as saviors to play God in someone else’s life? Maybe we need to recapture a more elemental understanding of a servant. Maybe we need to kill Superman.
Taking Adolescents Seriously
Why have we seen such a boom in short-term missions in the past two decades, so much so that we’ve created a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry? Relative ease and cost of travel undoubtedly has played a part in this phenomenon, as well as our theological and missiological interpretations of
These promises are manifested in the usual suspects of violence, drugs and sex that offer immediate sensory experiences of the infinite. I think they’re also present in mission trips and service projects. For adolescents who desire to be taken seriously and exert their agency in a culture that all too often marginalizes them, it can be damaging to their own humanity and those of others when we place them in cross-cultural situations where they don’t perceive others as equals and where we simultaneously feed them with narratives of rescue, transformation and dominion.
There’s nothing so powerful, so exhilarating and self-aggrandizing as believing you’re changing the world, saving the life of other human beings and rescuing them from temporal and eternal damnation. Conversely, there’s nothing so alienating and nothing that so strips one’s dignity than to be someone else’s charity project—mere props that add color and exoticism to someone else’s story of themselves. Granted this seems to be a better alternative for channeling these latent desires than violence, drugs and sex, but can it not be just as self-indulgent and destructive to a teenager’s own humanity and that of others? Does this really reflect the servanthood Christ came to teach us? Or are our ideas of servanthood informed more by Superman than by Christ’s life?
James and John were just a couple of fishermen, but they weren’t stupid. Israel had been waiting for its Superman for centuries, waiting for salvation from foreign occupation and restoration to its former glory. For the two boys of Zebedee, Jesus was a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor and ride His coattails to the top. In
The Pure Desire to Help
The thing is there’s nothing wrong with wanting to help people. To the contrary, a desire to help is the human impulse at the heart of everything that is right, good and true. That’s why critiques of service or mission trips can be so easily dismissed. The problem is that, as with any good, God-given desire—such as for food or sexual intimacy—our desire to help can be skewed, contorted and transformed into something that looks nothing like its original design.
Serving others, especially the poor, is a good place to begin. It’s a good way to shape our desires and to take the focus off ourselves and our own tiny little worlds. Serving others is a terrible place to stay. Fr. Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, which is the largest gang transition ministry in the country. He said that serving others is good, but it is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the hallway that leads to the ballroom of kinship with others. He says, “Kinship is not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not a Man for others; He was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.” Similarly, Bart Campolo once said helping people isn’t a very good way to make friends.
What they’re getting at is that serving others constantly keeps us on a different plain from those we serve. It is isolating, alienating and patronizing. When service is unidirectional and never allowed to be reciprocated, the roles of benefactor and recipient are cemented. When Jesus grabbed a towel to wash His disciples’ feet, there was a reason that Peter recoiled so strongly to the suggestion. He didn’t get what Jesus was trying to do. Jesus was cemented in the disciples’ imaginations as their Master, their Messiah, their Superman. There was comfort in that kind of social order; comfort in the fact that if we hitch our wagons to the right people with enough time, enough perseverance, a little sense of superiority and a little luck, we might be somebody, too. Someday, we might call the shots. Someday, we might be Superman. In washing His disciples’ feet, Jesus was upsetting the whole system of benefactor and recipient, master and servant, the powerful and the peasant, the privileged and the poor. Jesus was killing Superman and showing us a new way to be human. That night, the disciples were no longer servants of the Master. They were called friends.
None of this is to suggest we shouldn’t do mission trips or service projects. I’m a strong advocate for mindful, cross-cultural travel, experiences and relationships that bring together the privileged and the poor in solidarity. Maybe we need to take our imaginations of Superman, our narratives of conquest and changing the world out of our mission trips. This doesn’t mean the world doesn’t need to be saved. It most certainly does. It just means the world never is going to change if we don’t change the fundamental way we think of ourselves and the way we think of others. Instead of using mission experiences and others as props to feed visions of ourselves, maybe we use these experiences to feed a vision of kinship, community and equality. Maybe a litmus test of whether our cross-cultural experiences are really about us or about kinship is in our willingness to take on less glamorous and exotic opportunities to serve. Maybe we’ve been thinking backward about maturity. Maybe a better progression of Christian formation is sending youth to the ends of the earth first to capture their imagination for kinship, then to graduate to Samaria and finally to slip into obscurity in their own nondescript backyards of Jerusalem. There, nobody is going to call them Superman, but they might call them friends.
Kurt Rietema is the director of Justice Initiatives at Youthfront, where he leads local and international staff in community and youth development initiatives. Among them are the Youthfront Missional Journeys, which engage youth in critical listening to the pain of the world and thoughtfully enacting the story of God among broken people and places. Kurt and his wife, Emily, and sons, Luke and Perkins, live in a diverse, under-resourced neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., called Argentine. His work there spans from immigration advocacy to fair housing and lending partnerships for immigrants and restoring an abandoned school building.
