July 15, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Community in Christ

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 85:8–13
Luke 4:14–21
1 Corinthians 12:14–26

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it;
if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

1 Corinthians 12:26 (NRSV)

Our task as a church
is to help one another
deepen our belonging to Christ
and our trusting in God’s authority.

Gordon Cosby

The early Christian church in Corinth was highly divided. They exhibited fractious, thoughtless behavior. One might think their divisions would be between Jews and Gentiles in light of their different faith backgrounds. But that wasn’t the case. Rather, the wealthier members of the church were treating the poor with disdain. And those who saw themselves as religiously gifted persons had become arrogant and scorned the less gifted. Some persons overestimated how strong they were in the faith. Persons with lower self-esteem would cower timidly before those deemed “more advanced.” In other words, there was no difference between the way these Christians treated one another and the way that anyone in society acted.

Our congregation doesn’t seem to suffer from these same issues, thank God. Yet without meaning to, we may be contributing to some people feeling diminished by our good intentions.

An African Christian told this story to a mission expert from the United States:

Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near. They ate. They drank. They sang, and they danced. And nobody celebrated more and danced harder than Elephant. After the party was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party? What a blast!” But Mouse did not answer. “Mouse, where are you?” Elephant called. He looked around for his friend and then shrank back in horror. There at Elephant’s feet lay Mouse. His little body was ground into the dirt. He had been smashed by the big feet of his exuberant friend, Elephant.

The storyteller concluded, “Sometimes, that is what it is like to do mission with you Americans. It is like dancing with an Elephant” (Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts, pp. 161–162).

Elephant did not mean to do harm. But Elephant did not understand the effects he had on Mouse. Sadly, this is true for too many mission efforts, especially with communities who are economically poor.

Part of the destruction of elephant dancing occurs because many Americans are unaware of what happens when cultures collide. There are cultural differences in value systems that include people’s view of who or what is in control of their lives; of the nature of risk and uncertainty; of the roles of authority, individuals, and groups; and of the nature of time. For example, in our culture, time is seen as limited. Time can be lost or saved, so we seek to get the most out of every minute. “Time is money,” we say. But in many other cultures, time is understood as an unlimited resource. Schedules, plans, and tasks take a backseat to forming and deepening relationships. Fewer goods and services may get produced in such cultures, but they have a deeper sense of community and belonging. Such a cultural difference directly challenges what we may see as productive on a short-term mission trip versus what is seen by those we seek to serve.

Another dimension of elephant dancing is our worldview. If we approach poverty from a needs-based, deficit perspective, we are likely to bring our own knowledge, skills, and material resources to poor communities in order to accomplish a task and do it as fast as possible. Paternalism rears its ugly head. When we fail to recognize and work with the many material and spiritual resources of individuals and communities we seek to support, we undermine local assets and increase their poverties of being and community.

This came home to me on a church trip to Haiti I took a few years ago. Our small group of U.S. citizens went not to do a service project, but to stay in the rural homes of Haitian families and let their lives have an impact on us. Our Haitian host, Harry Nicolas, told us, “It is a very big thing that you come to what is called the ‘Third World’ not to do anything, but to build person-to-person relationships. That is a 180 degree difference from how Westerners typically come. It is a big deal that you come without a project to do because,” explained Harry, “historically Westerners have come to do for us, not learn from us. To have people with economic power, whose worldview is North American, come to learn from a social context different than your own is revolutionary. The way you are coming to be with us brings us hope for healing from our long and painful history between the black race and the white race.”

Harry believes that money pouring in from the outside has had a huge negative impact on Haiti. He explained: “Eight million Haitians live in this country. We have feelings, reason, ideas, hopes. The only difference between us and you is that we have a shortage of material things. Unfortunately we Haitians have been taught to think that we are people of little worth. We have 300 years of history as a nation that began in slavery. Throughout our history, outsiders have either come in as colonizers and slaveholders, as military occupiers, as church people to do good works (for a short time), or as nongovernmental workers. Such interventions say ‘we know what’s best for you, and you can’t do that for yourself.’”

The more one group of people put themselves only in the role of givers and the others only as receivers, the more power the givers keep and the more the receivers may feel ashamed, inferior, or resentful.

Such division between the rich and the poor was precisely what riled up the Apostle Paul when he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians. Paul emphasized that faith is most fully expressed in love. That love needs to be expressed mutually. The mark of true Christian community is that believers care for one another—building up, encouraging, and consoling one another interdependently.

Allowing differences in our social status to determine our interactions is antithetical to Christian community. In the church, all members are valued; all belong to Jesus Christ. Paul uses the wonderful image of all being parts of one body, with Christ as the head. And all those different parts are essential for the health and functioning of the body:

If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. . . . If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” . . . All members are to have the same care for one another, so that if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. (1 Corinthians 12)

It may be our very desire to share in others’ suffering that leads us to be involved in mission. But we need to reflect critically on how our reaching out truly affects those we seek to help.

Years ago I took training to work on a crisis hotline phone ministry, which basically meant training in how to listen. I had to get over my inclination to try to cheer people up. It took me a while to believe that what the other person most needed from me was not advice or a sunnier outlook, but to listen, to stay with them in whatever place of pain or hopelessness they were in until they signaled that they felt understood, supported, and were ready to move on. Our desire to cheer others up really reveals that we don’t want to stay with them and feel their pain, at least not for long.

When we support mission efforts or participate in short-term mission trips, we need to ask ourselves, is it really out of concern for the economically poor? Are we responding to their invitation and initiative, what they say their needs and hopes are, what they are able to be engaged in and develop for the long-term? Or do we mostly want to feel good about ourselves by trying to make a difference, assuaging our guilt for all we have, or wanting to make others’ lives more like our own?

Robert Lupton wrote an important book called Toxic Charity, which critiques how churches and charities actually hurt those they seek to help. He wrote,

Pity diminishes and respect emerges when servers find surprising strengths among the served, strengths not initially apparent when the served are seen as the nameless, needy poor. Perceptions change when servers discover unseen capacities, like the amazing ingenuity required to survive in harsh environments, or the deep faith that depends upon God for daily bread, or the sense of community that sacrificially shares meager resources so that those most vulnerable can survive. Authentic relationships with those in need have a way of correcting the we-will-rescue-you mindset and replacing it with mutual admiration and respect. (Robert D. Lupton, Toxic Charity, p. 190)

A community’s health and growth depends on each person feeling valued, able to contribute to the common good of all. There are times when relief work is the right response, such as immediately after the crisis of a natural disaster. But most of the time, relief is not the appropriate response to poverty. Churches tend to do relief work because it is easier than investing in the longer-term work of development and relationship-building. But a cardinal rule for mission outreach is “Never do for others what they can do for themselves.”

Todd Luke, a former member of Fourth Church, now serves our denomination as a mission coworker in Mexico. He is among those global mission coworkers whom Fourth Church is financially supporting through a gift of $1 million as part of our Project Second Century campaign. Todd works in a poor region that faces severe water shortage. Earlier this year we sent a small mission team to work with Todd in a community project that builds cisterns to catch rainwater. Before deciding whether to send another mission team there next year, I wrote Todd and asked, “Are we doing what the local people can and should be doing for themselves?”

Todd replied, “There is no danger in our doing work that creates dependency on outsiders. . . . Our local partners manage 100 percent of the cistern project. When we don’t have visiting groups, they perform 100 percent of the work. Our ministry does not do things for people that they can do for themselves. An important component of our partnership is that we (the American Presbyterians) are invited by our Mexican partners to do things with them as we serve others out of a shared sense of gratitude to God.”

Todd continued, “The mission trip gives God the opportunity to work through our local partners to reach out to our hearts, minds, and spirits, because in this cistern work being done in (this) region, God reveals a glimpse of [God’s] kingdom in the place where we, in all our pride, would least expect it—among the materially poor, the uneducated, the lowly, and the deprecated.

Our Mexican partners are considered the bottom rung of the social ladder in Mexico. But during our week together it is they who are instructing us, because they have the knowledge, the experience, the skills, and the talents required for this setting. They minister to us, and then we have the great responsibility not only to share this witness back home, but also to try to take what we learn and then do what we can to encourage similar forms of partnership that empower the ‘weak’ in our own communities.”

Some churches have learned that when it comes to Christmas gifts, parents with low incomes would much rather work and earn and purchase presents for their children than they would stand in free toy lines with their proof of poverty or have gifts delivered to their homes while the father slips out the back door in shame because he cannot provide gifts for his own children.

Here in Chicago, the annual Christmas Store at Bethel New Life gives families in the community the chance to participate in both giving and receiving. Churches and businesses donate thousands of gifts. Over two days, gifts are sold to families in the community at an affordable price: $1, $5, or $10. Families can also earn “Bethel Bucks” to use in the store by participating in Bethel programs, completing a financial literacy course, taking a healthy cooking class, getting A’s and B’s on a report card, and more activities. In the process of exchange, human worth is reinforced.

Some churches have converted their food pantries into food co-ops, in which those needing food pay into a food-buying collective that yields a purchasing value ten times the amount of each member’s biweekly contribution. This not only brings a genuine sense of personal gain, but also builds community as members work together to supply one another with these basics. Habitat for Humanity uses a model for building houses that engages the families who will live in them to work alongside volunteers a required number of hours building their own or another’s house.

Doug Pond, another of our church members involved in global mission, has worked in Mozambique for four years in microlending on behalf of Opportunity International. Earlier this week Doug told me his first couple years were challenging, and he learned from many mistakes. What worked in another country as a model for microlending development didn’t work in his setting. Some initial ideas couldn’t be implemented because of corruption or the lack of a market for products. But Doug prayed daily, hung in there, discovered some local entrepreneurial farmers in remote areas, and seeds were planted. Now there are 10,000 farmers who collectively will take advantage of small loans to produce and sell enough crops to sustain their families to be able to eat year-round and flourish in new ways.

These are positive ways to avoid doing the dance of the Elephant. We need to shift from pity to partnership. Love is best expressed in mutuality, in ways that build up each member of the body. May we live out what the Apostle Paul taught: every part of the body of Christ is needed, valued, and to be honored. This is the way we are to mature in love.