Reimagining Global Mission in Light of Diaspora
Mission as a "multidirectional scattering and gathering"
On a Sunday afternoon I found my way to an immigrant church worshiping in a tucked away, upstairs room in an otherwise empty building of fairly large and resourced non-immigrant church. This smaller and yet thriving immigrant congregation was made up almost completely of new believers who have come to Jesus from other religious backgrounds from a remote part of the world, a country very difficult for westerners to visit or go on mission. After the service, as I walked downstairs towards my car I passed a table display that the host church had setup for their global mission partners. On it were pictures of mostly White American faces the church supported in other distant countries, some in the same region as the immigrant church. There was no mention, however, of the immigrant congregation I had just visited upstairs. Why was the immigrant church meeting in their own building not listed as a mission partner? I wondered if they knew any of the Christian leaders from the same countries they were sending missionaries to that were here nearby in their same city? It seemed like there was no relationship between this amazing work of God among the nations right in their own building and that happening in other parts of the world, Why is this so often the case? Why the disconnect between the local and the global?
Some variation of this scenario has repeated itself more times than I can count. Let me list two more examples:
I think of the testimony of Raquel Loera from her interview on the Urban Entry “Road Trip” video curriculum. As a ministry leader in the border community of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico she speaks of receiving numerous mission teams from US churches. Juarez has long been a popular, accessible destination for US youth group mission trips. When her family was in Juarez “they wanted to do mission with me” but everything changed when her family crossed the border and moved to the US. She talks about how her children were then in the same schools and neighborhoods with those who had been going to the border mission trips, but those same kids didn’t want to be their friends. All of a sudden, they were invisible. Dr. Kwiyani in his blog Global Witness, Globally Reimagined, which I highly recommend, shares a similar story of a church in the UK that went on regular mission trips to Ghana but ignored the Ghanaian church meeting right across the street.
I’m the third generation in my family engaged in global and cross-cultural ministry of some kind. My grandparents were in the same class at Wheaton College with Jim and Elizabeth Elliot and, like them, went to serve among an unreached people group in the Amazon jungles of Latin America. My parents followed suit and worked with several different indigenous people groups in Latin America. I’m very grateful for this legacy which has profoundly shaped me. Thanks to migration, the world has changed dramatically since my grandparents era of global mission and, yet, I find that many models of global mission in the US haven’t adapted to this new reality. A striking example that hit me recently: my parents served among an indigenous people group in Peru called the Quechua. Just the other day I saw a facebook post about a Quechua church meeting in Chicago, the same city my grandparents studied in before going overseas! Who is helping mobilize and receive the gifts of the Quechua in Chicago now?
What happens when unreached people groups from remote areas of the world relocate to the US as refugees or come to study as international students? What happens when some of the former “mission fields” now are “mission forces” and the ones sending missionaries to Europe and the West? Diaspora requires radically new paradigms for mission, both locally and globally. Dr. Sam George (who serves as an advisor on the Diaspora Network board) writes that in light of diaspora mission models must be reimagined so as to be “from everywhere to everywhere, multilateral, multidirectional, sending as well as receiving… a multidirectional scattering and gathering are helpful motifs to understanding the moving of God in the world” (See his Motus Dei article here).
What does this look like practically for a local church? What does this look like for denominations and mission agencies? What does it look like to bring together the local and the global, to have models and support for receiving the gifts of the Global Church on mission in our cities…here?
I’m very grateful for diaspora voices such as Mekdes Haddis. Mekdes, with courageous vulnerability, tackles head on some very difficult and equally important topics in US based Global mission today. Her perspective as a Black, immigrant, Ethiopian American woman, which she weaves throughout her book A Just Mission, is an important and too often overlooked perspective. She raises some important and probing questions in her book which help provide practical and tangible guides for this “reimagining” of mission in light of diaspora which I’ve adapted here somewhat1:
How can our churches welcome and partner here with the same people groups they are trying to partner with “over there”? She says: “God is sending spirit-filled missionaries from the Global South to the West. Do our churches have space to receive them?”
What would more equal resource-distribution look like? Why are there such resource inequities in mission and in fundraising? Why are some of the most gifted and fruitful Black and Brown mission practitioners so often underfunded and marginal to the centers of power in the US church?
How can you sit “under the teachings and leadership of pastors” from the community you are seeking to serve and partner with?
I’d perhaps add, rather than coming up with your own global mission trips, how can you support, come around and join diaspora leaders on the trips and projects (globally and locally) they are already organizing? Immigrant churches are impacting the world, here and there, in amazing, though often hidden ways to the broader church. In spite of often being less financially resourced, they are almost always engaged in mission “back home” as well as “here” in US global cities.
One example: One Nigerian couple who have lived for over 30 years in the US were recently back in Nigeria for their daughters wedding. The wedding, in and of itself, was a huge deal and a gospel opportunity. But their trip back did not limit itself to the wedding. They took advantage of being “back home” to engage in a mission in a smaller, rural area in Nigeria. While this wasn’t an “official mission trip” with an official mission organization their diaspora context has led them to be actively engaged in mission in the US and back home in Nigeria throughout these 30 years.
How can we join God in what he is already doing through these Spirit-filled, dynamic migrant-missionaries?
Recently I and a group of folks from my local church participated in a short trip across the US / Mexico border to meet with asylum seekers hoping to come into the US. The trip was put on and hosted by a local, Mexican missionary who ministers to migrants in that border area and a small multiethnic church in Austin where I live.
Leaders from this multiethnic church as well as this on-site missionary led a training for our team before we crossed over. Our team had also done readings ahead of time by Latino theologians on what the Bible had to say about immigrants, particularly looking at the book of Ruth. Doing the trip in a posture of learning and alongside these partners opened up the possibility of longer term multiethnic partnerships back home after the trip.
Though primarily a White American church, the church I’m a part of also has a group of Nigerian immigrants members and so we intentionally worked to make it possible for at least one of them to be a part of our team. The financial cost of the trip and the time required to take off from work were some of the barriers we named and worked around in order for one of them to participate. As both a Black man and an immigrant himself, this participant was able to understand and connect with many of the Black Haitian migrants on the border in unique ways that the other White members of the team weren’t.
While visiting a migrant shelter on the border we learned that some of the Cuban Christian migrants were actually trying to make their way to our city of Austin and so we attempted to be a part of that process of welcoming them and supporting their families back in our hometown, further connecting the “there” and the “here.” We reached out to their family members in Austin and offered help, prayers and partnership. We hope to be able to receive the gifts of the Cuban Christian church these migrants are bringing to our city.
This trip, of course, was far from perfect. One key element I hope we can implement in the future is to partner with a local Mexican church on one or both sides of the border. But I share this as an example of a type of trip that tried to intentionally reimagine mission in light of migration and diaspora.
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Jonathan Abraham Kindberg is the Executive Director for the Diaspora Network. He was born in Peru and raised in Chile, Panamá and Kentucky. He currently resides with his wife Lini in Austin, Texas.
See “A Just Mission” Kindle Location 1434