A while back Douglas Wilson held forth on mission and said,
What you practice at home is the show you take on the road. What you grow in your fields is what you load on the trucks. Compassing sea and land doesn’t generate a new message. The way you live when you get on the plane is going to be the single best indicator of how you live when you get off the plane. In short, don’t expect geographical location to fix anything.
He then gave the following example,
Say that someone says he has a real burden “for the lost” in Wango Bango. Say that the person at church he is speaking to suggests they spend that afternoon going door-to-door at student housing for the local university. There are lost people here too. Suppose further that the evangelistic ardor of the prospective missionary suddenly wanes. This is a bad sign, and it is a bad sign of what I am talking about…The first step in foreign missions is domestic mission. The first step toward Africa is right across the street.
Now I agree that if we’re concerned about the lost abroad we should be concerned about the lost at home. But Wilson is wrong when he says, ‘don’t expect geographical location to fix anything.’ Or at least he will sometimes be wrong. Let me make a few assumptions about Wango Bango, the two big ones being that is a poor country with vast numbers living on $1 a day and that it is largely pagan. If I go there, happy in my mildly affluent Western lifestyle the chances are the encounter with grinding, merciless, heartless, child killing poverty might shock me out of my comfort zone. The generosity of my hosts will be a refrain I retell on countless occasions back home. I become less self-centred and more generous. More of what I get in goes out to supporting the needs of churches or ministries in these poor countries. In short seeing and encountering the poverty could, and sometimes does, change everything.
But what about the pagan bit? I might know and appreciate that most of my neighbours are lost but somehow seeing lostness in a whole new way drives the point home. Perhaps in Wango Bango I see thousands kneel and sacrifice to idols and spend their precious savings on witchdoctors and suddenly the idea of ‘lostness’ strikes home. Perhaps, seeing lostness in its clearest form helps me appreciate lostness in its vague proximity at home and suddenly the urgency of telling these lost people about the coming of a King becomes a lot more, well, urgent. So going to Wango Bango might not be such a wasted trip.
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