Honourably Wounded (eBook)

CHAPTER
1

The Changing Face of Missions

Someone has said that ‘change is now the only constant’. It is therefore important to look at this as a preliminary to the rest of the book. Following my recent travels I feel there are four major changes in mission that need to be considered: the impact of generational psychology on selection, care and administration of personnel; changes related to duration of service; the growing importance of holistic member-care world wide, and change in the social backgrounds of new personnel. Some of these will be outlined briefly at this point, and the remainder in the relevant chapters.

Generational psychology

Generational psychology tries to explain the differences between generations partly as the result of global mega-events such as the World Wars, the Vietnam war, and the collapse of communism. Sine (1991) described three successive generations by the terms booster, baby boomers and buster, each of them having different characteristics. This work has been excellently outlined by Donovan and Myors in Too Valuable to Lose (Taylor, ed., 1997). In a nutshell, the boosters form the traditional school of expatriates, hard working, conscientious, strong in institutional loyalty and led by strong, rather authoritarian figures. These provided the ‘model of missionary service still followed by traditional missionary societies today’. The next generation, the baby boomers, were the idealistic, questioning protesters, with a strong feeling of personal responsibility and respect for all who do their own thing. The most modern of this group were the busters, who because they came from a fragmented society tended to look to each other for relationships, to try to live broadly balanced lives, and to reject pressure to follow an established pattern just because it had always been done that way.

Tony Horsfall (personal communication) reminds us that generational study is not an exact science, and it has certainly proved difficult to discover whether these categories were based solely on research in the US or were internationally valid. I have, however, found the same concepts present in all four continents in which I have travelled, although their terminology and cultural expression may be different. These new concepts have profoundly influenced selection and management of mission partners and have been found useful to agencies in their efforts to select and nurture new personnel in cross-cultural ministry.

Together with the work on generational psychology based on mega-events, it has become apparent that there is also a change in how people think, their general philosophy of life. This has led to the creation of terms such as generation X, modernism and post-modernism. Just to make things more complicated, there is now a post-post modernist group emerging, and a generation Y that is characterised by a more optimistic outlook than generation X. This has been attributed to the new millennium, a time of hope and of change. (To avoid confusion I shall use only the term generation X, or GenX in this book, the other groups being too long to insert every time!). To put things shortly, the philosophy has changed from acceptance to rejection of authority, from a scientific approach to a search for reality through music and poetry, and in the West a marked increase in tribalistic thinking and a search for community and relationships. The need for relationship and community is related to the fractured social backgrounds of many nations, but this fracturing has had some positive spin-offs. Many of the new generation are remarkable people. They are survivors, many of whom became converted to community before coming to Christ. They have learned to be flexible, and to cope with change usually through the strength of their community. This one sees in the streets of London, where the homeless often form a spontaneous community whose membership fluctuates but which endures through change.

It is important also to remember that the new generation is preoccupied with ‘stories’. Individual stories are more important than the meta-narrative, the overall big story. Every life has a personal story which needs to be fulfilled, and this idea partially explains the response of the young when they are asked to do something — ‘it’s not my scene, man’; it is not part of their story, so they don’t feel the need to get involved. The outcome is that the current story is more important than history, and what is being experienced is more important than revealed truth. This of course has a profound influence on teaching the history of the Bible as a background to the story of our salvation. It has necessitated a totally new approach to teaching the integrity and authority of the Bible, and it demands almost a quantum leap for generation X to adjust to the possibility of a reliable body of truth, to a mega-story from God, and not just to the events in an individual life-story.

The end result is a series of significant differences between this generation and the older ones. The older generation responded to a task, the new responds to a relationship. They will ask themselves how they feel about it — do they feel they are simply being used to accomplish a task or will relationships be helped? The older has difficulty moving internationally, the new accomplishes this with ease, but due to their mobile habits have more difficulty staying in one place than the older group. The older generation did not make frequent job changes, the new one does, often going through six to seven jobs in their early working years. In the sphere of missions, this tendency is revealed in the growth of short-term appointments and loss of long-term workers, the new generation operating on job changes, moving on, and developing through freedom to change. This is in line with their motivation for short-term, cross-cultural work. They want to do something practical and to accomplish something during their time overseas, and they want it to be church-related. They want to ‘rethink the Church into the missional community, not an institution’ (personal communication) and are little interested in the old-style mission institutions unless they are a part of the local church out-reach. This of course is related to the ‘instant generation’, which is accustomed to speedy results to their demands. Which McDonalds they hang out in depends on how quick the service is, and how undemanding the place is.

Generationally it is harder for them to operate on the old concept of constantly sowing seed and perhaps never seeing a result. Hence the enormous growth in both secular and Christian organisations of short-term, work-oriented projects which enable the young to see what they have done. Their usual motivation is to empower and support nationals rather than to sit in a job slot, and seeing the completion of the project they came to help in is what satisfies them. A letter from a generation Xer in November 1999, quoted by Tiplady (2000), is revealing:

There are many refreshing aspects to this generational change, and the expressions of faith used by the young are delightful. I was recently at a rather solemn conference where a young music group led the singing. One day the leader was asked to pray before the talk began and he said ‘Thanks God, we’ve had a good sing, now help us as we hear all the other stuff.’ I don’t know what the eminent speaker thought of the reduction of his paper to ‘other stuff’, but the audience was delighted with this fresh approach. There is a sincerity and genuineness about the new generations that gives confidence to those they work with, even though some of their trends are decidedly startling. At a recent graduation ceremony at London University I was astounded to see young people going on stage to receive their degrees wearing academic gowns, dirty jeans and T-shirts, and dirty thonged beach sandals or huge macho boots with no socks. Then I remembered it takes all sorts to make a world!

How then do we react to all this confusing theory and wholesale changes in the familiar set-up? Under no circumstances should modernisation programmes be seen as a negation of all that has been achieved by the older generations. Modernisation is essential to meet modern needs, but must incorporate all generations of missionaries. It is indeed wonderful to see the old and new generations working together in many countries, and establishing new methods of working to fulfill the task the Lord has given them. These include new strategies for reaching the younger generation with the gospel and then mobilising them for cross-cultural service, as well as the modernisation of methods, principles and practices, and overseas care of personnel.

In practical terms it has been...