Mission service in contexts of conflict
UMMA Gathering, Chicago, 7 August 2007
By Paul Jeffrey

Although I’ve been thinking about this presentation for weeks ever since Norma and Howard asked me to be here, I didn’t really get around to putting my thoughts into sentences until yesterday when I was sitting for eight hours on a United flight from London to Chicago. Because I fly a lot, I get all sorts of perks, including upgrades to business class, and so I drafted these words sitting in a very comfortable seat, no deep vein thrombosis, accompanied by a glass of delightful German Riesling. Well, several glasses. It is the contradiction of our calling, this tension of risk versus privilege. I go off to report on genocide in Darfur, and I fly home in business class.

In stark terms, that is a tension we all face, though usually in more nuanced forms. We come from lives of privilege, most of us, having grown up in the First World, but we choose willingly, indeed joyfully, to respond to God’s call to the Third World. We seek out and encounter Christ as he comes to us in the poor, but at the end of the day we will have food to eat, and at the end of our career we will have a pension (albeit calculated using voodoo economics at something less than one percent of DAC).

So I typed these words at 35,000 feet, a height to which the cry of the poor doesn’t reach. From that distance you can’t hear the screams of women being raped in Darfur or of migrants falling under trains in southern Mexico. From that distant perspective, we might even think there is such a thing as mission in situations without conflict; but that would be delusional, because there is always conflict, always contradictions of class and race and gender that leave someone hurting. If we think there is no conflict, we need to remove the filters of privilege through which we see our neighborhood and our world and begin to discern with God’s eyes the pain of our sisters and brothers.

I am just coming back from covering the conflict in Darfur, my second trip there. And I want to note for the record that the situation in Darfur is indeed one of ethnic cleansing, or genocide, as it’s defined by the 1948 UN Convention. But in some circles we’re not supposed to say that. Several months ago, Elliott Wright, the publicity czar of the GBGM, sent out a memo in which he instructed board staff not to use the G-word in connection with Darfur. There are advantages to being a lowly missionary, however, in that like the women and children at the feeding of the 5,000, we don’t really count. So I didn’t receive the memo, and thus I can use the word. Taking seriously the very real tension between humanitarian action and advocacy should not turn us into genocide deniers. If we succumb to that temptation, at the end of the day I believe we will only increase the objective risk both to aid workers and to the terrorized women and men they seek to assist.

And so I come from Darfur to Chicago to share my perspective on mission service in contexts of conflict. I ought to be relieved to be here, but as I think about it, addled perhaps by the Riesling, I realize that there’s probably more objective danger for me in this room than I experienced in Darfur. Although they could kill me there, they can fire me here.

But let me cut to the chase: in faithfulness to the Lord whose blood has washed away our sins and set us free to live life in all its abundance, I believe we need more mission in situations of open conflict, not less.

In June I went to San Jose de Apartado, a small village in the northern mountains of Colombia. This is one of the most violent places in our hemisphere, where war without end has terrorized civilians for decades. But in one of those kaironic movements of the Spirit, ten years ago the 1,400 peasants of San Jose de Apartado decided to declare themselves a peace community. They would refuse to participate in the armed conflict. They would not carry guns nor offer support or information to any side. Moreover, they would work together cooperatively to survive. They would, in their humble yet mighty way, attempt to break the inexorable logic of the conflict by declaring their community to be a sanctuary for life. they became a powerful example for others; at least ten peace communities now exist throughout Colombia. Yet this community’s witness for life in the middle of the hemisphere’s longest-running conflict has been costly. Of the original 1,400 members, 179 have been murdered. Twenty were killed by guerrillas, the rest by government soldiers or government-backed paramilitaries. The most recent victim was murdered by paramilitaries in June just a week after I was there.

In an effort to support the peace community, and in some way protect its members, in recent years both Peace Brigades International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation have maintained international accompaniers in the village. Among the accompaniers I encountered there was Amanda Jack, a young United Methodist from Somerset, Pennsylvania, whose father is a pastor in the western Pennsylvania annual conference.

Amanda lives in pretty harsh conditions, a long, sweaty, uphill hike through the jungle into the heart of the mountains. She earns almost nothing, but literally puts her life on the line every day for the satisfaction of knowing that she is making a difference, small as it may often seem, in carving out a fragile space for hope in the middle of overwhelming violence.

I want to suggest tonight that Amanda is living out a missionary calling that can serve us as a model to emulate, a course correction for us when we become subsumed in careerist aspirations in the field or bureaucratic rigamarole in New York. Our short sightedness and our tendency to take ourselves too seriously, can lead us away from the contexts of conflict to which God is calling us, no matter that we’re overeducated enough to articulately justify whatever safe and comfortable places we end up in as somehow representing an authentic missionary calling. So I call forth Amanda’s bravery and commitment to enlighten and guide us as we wrestle with these critical issues.

Of course, one doesn’t need to go outside the GBGM to find such models. When I think of missionary service in situations of very real conflict, I recall people like Sandy Olewine, Janet Lahr Lewis, Ashley Wilkinson, and Alex and Brenda Awad–mission personnel who have worked under the grim violence of Israeli occupation. Or closer to home, I think of people like Kenny Green and Russell Martinez, two gang intervention workers from the Toberman Settlement House in Los Angeles, with whom I spent a couple of fascinating days on the streets of Wilmington as they sniffed out trouble and literally waded into the middle of armed conflict in order to calm the afflicted and protect the innocent.

I became a missionary in the mid-80s, working in revolutionary Nicaragua as it was being criminally attacked by my own government, and also covering the church in the middle of the counterinsurgency campaigns in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala. There was risk for all of us, but it went with the territory. And there was never a single discussion that I am aware of about recalling us because we lived amidst conflict. [Note: Howard Heiner later reminded us that the IRD publicly requested our withdrawal, something the GBGM directors voted to reject.] There was an intentional mutuality in mission between New York and Managua that treated us as adults capable of making appropriate and responsible decisions. Mission clearly implied risk, but we all accepted that because we were saved by a guy who died on a cross.

In the years since, I’ve continued to work for the board in other contexts of conflict, not because I’m addicted to adrenaline, but because I seek to be faithful to Jesus Christ. But there have been moments when bureaucratic timidity in New York trumped faithful service in the field.

A few years back, for example, when I wanted to cover the return of President Jean Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, there were folks who were nervous about that, and I’ll never forget Bob Harman reducing me, in his words, to “a white guy with a camera,” and telling me that if I went to Haiti I could look for another employer.

Or fast forward to when a group of us Latin American missionaries and some board staff wanted to begin a program of providing accompaniment with some very endangered Presbyterian colleagues in Guatemala (one pastor had just been killed by the death squads and others were on the list), and I remember German Acevedo repeatedly refusing to allow it–and then a few weeks later flying to Guatemala to announce with great fanfare an identical program, but one that was his idea and not that of some lowly missionaries.

Or fast forward again to when Action by Churches Together asked me to go to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at the time of the U.S. invasion, and I can’t help but remember Jeanette Zaragoza de Leon dragging her feet on letting me go, insisting to people in Geneva that they somehow guarantee my security and in fact provide me with bodyguards.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by this excess of caution, given that the board headquarters is located in the United States. Since I moved back to the U.S. three years ago, I’ve been struck by how afraid we are as a society. That fear is, of course, cultivated by political elites and encouraged by a whole genre of hate media that drums into us that it’s just you and me against the whole evil world. That our church and even some board staff would be affected by this is not surprising. In the midst of such hysteria, however, we must continue to insist, especially in those moments when we doubt that it’s true, that perfect love does indeed cast out fear.

Well, despite Jeanette’s obstructionism, I went to the Afghan-Pakistan border to cover the churches’ work with refugees who were fleeing the bombing and fighting. I was based in Peshawar, where I had the opportunity to cover a political gathering one Friday afternoon after prayers. ACT insisted on sending the biggest Afghan on their staff with me, and when we told the taxi driver where I was going, he insisted on coming along also to protect me.

When we got to the rally, I climbed up onto the flatbed truck that served as a speakers platform, and started photographing the action. Men waved photos of Osama bin Laden as the crowd swelled to some 15,000 people chanting Allah is Great and Death to America. After about 20 minutes of work, I’d basically run out of film and it was time to go. But the flatbed truck had so filled up with people that there was no way I could make my way off the back of it to where my bodyguards awaited. From where I stood, the only way out was to climb down into the crowd. And so I did that, but halfway down became entangled in my cameras and camera bag, and ended up hanging there, half off the stage, unable to move up or down without dropping a camera. I felt like a fool. Finally some hands reached up from the crowd and took my cameras from me, and then helped me down. A space opened around me, people pausing for a moment in their chant of Death to America so they could hand me back my cameras and pat me on the back, all of them saying, “Hello my friend, how are you?” That’s an English phrase that every Pakistani and Afghan male knows. I smiled back, thanking them in Arabic, and then started to make my way through the crowd toward safety. As I did so, the crowd opened in front of me, people pausing in their chant of Death to America in order to smile, pat me on the back, and say, “Hello my friend, how are you?”

If we are to cross geographic and cultural borders to engage in a missional encounter with Jesus as he presents himself to us in those who hurt and are hungry, we need to let go of our artificial and unhelpful constructs of security. We need to stop listening to the xenophobic and racist voices of hate that offer a constant backdrop of hysteria in the United States, and eagerly engage a world where if we truly come as representatives of Christ, most will embrace us in a spirit of peace.

Once I was in Hebron covering the conflict in the West Bank and I asked these Norwegians from the international monitoring mission who were my escorts if they’d take me to where Diane Roe lived. She’s a United Methodist member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, and I had read her descriptions of daily life in Hebron as she and her colleagues escorted children to school and otherwise tried to protect Palestinian civilians from the hundreds of Israeli settlers who had moved into Hebron along with thousands of Israeli soldiers. Because there had been violence the day before, the international team made me dress like them, with full body armor and even a heavy helmet lined with ballistic plate. We walked through that no persons land in the old city, which most Palestinians have abandoned under the daily barrage of glass bottles and urine and excrement thrown on them by the Israeli settlers. Encased in armor, we walked down abandoned streets to what looked like just one more abandoned building, where they knocked on the door, and soon Diane Roe answered it. Picture this encounter. Here I am, an official United Methodist missionary, wrapped in a kevlar cocoon against the world, protected against all manner of evils, and there she was, this diminutive grandmother, the kind of woman who you expect to be baking cookies for the next UMW circle meeting, living in a free fire zone, standing up to oppression with nothing in her hands but the Bible and a cell phone. Look at us. Which of us is represents a style of mission that reflects the values of Jesus?

I believe that God calls us to overcome our fear, take off the armor, tear down the walls we build around us, and work tirelessly for a world where people have no excuse not to pat us on the back and say, “Hello, my friend. How are you?”

Ok, enough ranting. My flight is about to land in Chicago, and Bishop Ott is about to pull the plug. Let me end by quickly suggesting three implications my wine-induced diatribe could have for us as a missionary community.

One. I celebrate the hiring of people with real missionary experience to work at 475. Bringing people like Dakin Cook and Sara Flores to the board should help to bridge the gaps of perception and experience that otherwise get in the way of doing real viable mission.

Two. The volunteer in mission movement needs to stop being afraid of the world. Although there are exceptions that prove the rule, VIM teams are too often marked by an aversion to risk taking. Canceling VIM trips to someplace like Haiti in moments of political turmoil is counterintuitive. It is precisely at those moments of crisis when people from US suburbia need to go forth and ask why the hell the world is such a messed up place, prayerfully discern the reach of structural sin, including the links between governmental policies at home and political and economic disempowerment abroad, and then come home to begin to globalize solidarity in a much more meaningful and decidedly less paternalistic manner.

Three. One richness of our missionary community is that we’re not all doing the same thing. Some of us are teachers, some foresters, some doctors, some – Lord help us – even journalists. I don’t want to change that variety of gifts for anything. But we could add one more. I’d like to suggest that the accompaniment work done by groups such as the Christian Peacemaker Teams, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program could inspire us to related forms of mission service. I’m not suggesting we replace those groups, or even copy them. What I’d like to see us do is take the power of commitment present in all corners of the missionary community–including the Volunteer in Mission movement–and harness that in a strategic way to creatively witness to God’s thirst for justice in the middle of violent conflict. I know that the GBGM recently made some commitment to look at how it could do something similar to the CPT’s work in Palestine, but ironically what little I know about that I learned on the website of the IRD, not from anyone at the board. Let’s get VIM groups and short-term individual volunteers headed to Colombia or Uganda or Palestine or Sri Lanka, not to build more ugly concrete block church sanctuaries, but rather to stand in real witness to the God of life amid the very real forces of death.

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