If the renewing story of Christ is going to be given the clothing of its context, the values of accompaniment need to take the place of values like power, privilege and survival. The values of accompaniment look like mutuality, vulnerability, inclusivity, empowerment and sustainability.
Sermon for ELCIC Global Mission Sunday, Feb. 2024. Gloria Dei Lutheran, Winnipeg. 1 Cor. 9:16-23
On April 8, 1923, four American Lutherans got off the boat in what we call today Cameroon. After walking inland for a time, these 4 Lutherans set up a station and started living their new reality as missionaries.
Part of the impact of those 4 missionaries in 1923 includes the relationship built between this synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cameroon. This relationship has included receiving and hosting pastors and their family who came as missionaries to Winnipeg. It has included individuals and teams from this synod visiting Cameroon for various lengths of time. It has included this synod’s support of Kids in Cameroon, a program that encourages and resources children who are orphaned by disease or tragedy, and supporting and encouraging women in leadership initiatives. The realities in Cameroon today are different than they were in 1923. So are the realities in the Lutheran landscape in North America. We are more and more aware of how the missionary movement has historically been harmfully intertwined with colonialism. Globalization and migration due to political, economic, religious or environmental crisis means we no longer have to get on a boat and go to a different country to meet our global neighbors.
So how we understand, support and engage in global mission today is another aspect of our faith life that is being reformed as we listen to God, listen to each other, and listen to our neighbors, and as we seek to join God in whatever God is up to in our midst.
Listen to God. Listen to each other. Listen to our context. If you have been at any of the workshops I’ve facilitated in the past few months, that will sound familiar. Intentionally seeking and pursuing a vision for ministry involves clarifying our identity and purpose, doing some deep listening, and being open to a future that might look different than the past.
Thinking differently about how to engage with our global partners takes patience and grace and a lot of humility. Thinking differently about how to do and be church involves letting go of structures, methods and expectations that are no longer serving the realities in our changing context.
So why do we do it? Why in 1923 did 4 Lutheran missionaries make themselves available to a new life in an unfamiliar context? Why, 100 years later, do we seek wisdom and guidance about how to engage with our neighbors…both those in our city and those across the ocean?
I think these are some of the questions Paul is wrestling with in our passage in 1 Corinthians. The church is beginning to establish itself, which means they’re also navigating the spoken and unspoken norms that define them and figuring out what they need to hold onto and what they can let go of as they seek to witness to their understanding of Jesus. And in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he is trying to explain how he is able to hold the small stuff lightly because he is passionately convicted about the big stuff. The big stuff is the message that in Jesus the walls and barriers between creation and God and between creation and itself have been removed. The gift of God’s grace and love is free without exception. That’s the big stuff. And Paul says he can’t NOT share that central message of his hope for life now and into eternity. He can’t NOT share what brings him hope.
But he goes on to say that HOW he does that changes based on his context-who he’s sharing with. Because if he shares this message of God’s love in a way that belittles someone else or causes others to think they can only access or receive God’s love if they earn it or deserve it, then it’s not free. I’m reading a book right now about helping congregations connect with their community. The author talks about the role of paying attention to people and listening to their stories to find a way to connect the message of Jesus to their reality. He talks about having a conversation with a woman on a plane and saying something to her about how God loves her regardless of the success of her farm. The woman responds and says, “I’ve gone to church a lot, but I’ve never heard that.” The author says, “To be good news [for this woman]…the gospel had to be given the clothing of her context. Certainly the body of Christ has a gracious, renewing story to tell; but it is useless unless Christian congregations take that story out of the church and connect it to the specific realities of our world.”[1]
Those four Lutherans went to Cameroon in 1923 because they felt compelled to take the gracious, renewing story of Jesus to a different part of the world. As that gospel message took root and grew into churches, schools and hospitals, the role of the Lutheran missionaries changed. The church in Cameroon is now raising up its own leaders and developing their own systems and processes. This past summer a group of us from this synod went to Minneapolis to participate in a Centennial celebration of the ministry that was started in 1923, and we got to see the impact of those 4 missionaries that continues through the missionary kids who grew up in Cameroon and Central African Republic and are now living out their faith in various ways in North America, through the Cameroonian singers in Minneapolis that came and led music, through the technology that connected us with the bishops in Cameroon and CAR for discussion about the challenges and joys of their churches, and through the conversations with representatives from other synods who are also offering support and prayer through global companion relationships.
The ELCIC does not have its own global partnership department. We work in partnership with ELCA Global Mission, CLWR and the Lutheran World Federation as we engage in relationships and participate in ministry on a global scale. That’s an example of how global ministry is changing. In 1923 individual missionaries were sent by individual church bodies, and the norm was to set up mission stations that were primarily funded and led by finances coming from North America and Europe. But as Christianity in Cameroon has taken root and developed, the approach now is what the ELCA calls “accompaniment.” If the renewing story of Christ is going to be given the clothing of its context, the values of accompaniment need to take the place of values like power, privilege and survival. The values of accompaniment look like mutuality, vulnerability, inclusivity, empowerment and sustainability. This means we try not to send people, money or resources to Cameroon wrapped up in our structures, assumptions and solutions. Instead, we offer our relationship and resources from a posture of humility and mutuality. We seek for ways to learn with and from what God is already doing in Cameroon. We listen to the joys and challenges of a church that is trying to meet people’s physical, spiritual, and economic needs. We wonder with curiosity what broader expression of God’s love we might experience when we share out of our abundance, regardless of what we get out of it or how it benefits us. We look for partners and for ways to identify assets and resources already in the community rather than assuming that we ourselves have everything that they need. We admit our mistakes and take responsibility for our participation and complicity in systemic and historic oppression and prejudice. We invest in what may not show results until after we are gone.
Mutuality. Inclusivity. Vulnerability. Sustainability. Empowerment.
These same values of accompaniment that shape the ELCA and ELCIC’s approach to global partnerships can help us navigate discernment and discussion about our congregation and community ministry. Whether we’re asking about how to engage young people or how to lessen the income gap for marginalized people, it will make a difference if we first remember that the good news of Jesus is transformational when it is given the clothing of its context. That’s what the incarnation is all about! The Word of God, a universal, timeless, eternal word of love, hope, redemption and restoration, showed up in a particular time and place through a particular person in particular relationships who responded to particular economic, political, cultural and social realities. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, accompaniment calls us to come alongside our neighbor—whether that neighbor is a young person who appears not to value tradition and religious practice in the way we were raised, a young adult using language and practices to express their identity that we find challenging, a community organization meeting a particular social need or a global companion striving to faithfully love God and serve their community. Accompaniment calls us to examine the clothing that we’re putting on the messages we’re sharing, and acknowledge when that clothing is keeping the message from connecting in new ways to people who are not like us. Accompaniment calls us to remember, like Paul, that we can’t NOT share the good news of grace and love; and to listen to God, each other and our context so that we can share that message in ways that continue to connect with the realities of our day.
Global Mission Sunday is a reminder not only about our formal partnership with the church in Cameroon through the structures of the ELCA & ELCIC’s global companion arrangements—although it is that. It is not just a reminder to pray for the work of our global partners like CLWR and LWF—although it is that. It is not just a reminder to offer our time and resources to encouraging and supporting the ministry of those living and serving in other countries, or newcomers living in our country—although it is that. Global Mission Sunday is also an invitation to remember that the story of God coming into the world through Jesus and inviting all creation into wholeness and restoration isn’t a story that we remember and live out on Sundays from 10:30-11:30 and then leave here when we go into the rest of our lives. It’s not a story that we tell so that we can get people to come to us and give us their offering and young people so that our institutions continue to exist in the way they always have. The story of God coming into the world through Jesus is a story that crosses time and boundaries. It’s a story that transcends culture and history. It’s a story that is big enough to be expressed in various ways all over the world through languages, songs, creeds and practices that are vastly different than ours. And it’s a story that is specific and personal enough to convict us individually and invite us into a lifelong journey of discipleship.
Most importantly, the story of God’s love and hope for creation made real through Jesus and now made known through the Body of Christ is a message that is given to us as free gift, through the body and blood of Jesus and through the gifts of water, wine and bread. It’s given to us on those days when we believe it, and it’s given to us on those days when we don’t. It’s given to us on those days when we share it, and it’s given to us on those days that we keep it to ourselves. The story of God’s love and hope for creation made real through Jesus IS a story that goes beyond this sanctuary and continues to connect with the specific realities of our context. Our invitation is to notice and remember how that’s happening in our midst, as we engage with our community, and as we learn about, pray for and support the work of our partners in other parts of the world.
At the end of our reading from 1 Corinthians, Paul is talking about how his freedom in Christ now actually binds him to his neighbour and compels him to meet others where they are at for the sake of inviting them into that same freedom. That same freedom is what sparked the Lutheran Mission to Sudan that 100 years later is being carried on through the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cameroon, the Lutheran Church in the Central African Republic and more churches throughout Africa and around the world. It’s the same freedom that you’ve received in your baptism, that is strengthened in you through worship and fellowship together, that invites you beyond your own borders…whether that’s the borders of this building, the borders of your expectations about what the church ought to be doing, or the borders of ethnicity, economics, identity or any other label—as Paul says—“for the sake of the gospel, so that [we] may share in its blessings.”
[1] Harder, Cameron, Discovering the Other. Alban Institute, 2013. p. 40.