I want to serve those who serve

Have you ever considered volunteering with a relief agency that serves in places where human need is so bad that everybody is just trying to keep those people groups alive to begin with?

Imagine joining a team of non-religious doctors, mechanics and councilors who need your testimony and Christ-driven encouragement to sustain a feeding program in a refugee camp in Uganda, or counsel a thirteen year-old prostitute dying of AIDS after a failed abortion necessary while she tries to earn enough money to feed her younger siblings after losing their parents to landmines or genocide.

I don’t want to be a missionary.

Working on my main project for one of my classes here at DTS, I have done three month’s worth of research on the current reality in Africa’s refugee camps, the statistics of health-related epidemics and the inter-connectedness between political unrest, violence against women, and the blood-diamond-trade paying for small arms that (stolen and enslaved) child-soldiers use. “What are Christians doing about this?” I wondered.

I studied at a secular university for seven years. Today the Christians who have the most fruit hanging on their trees planted among corporate business decisions and political reform were not the tokkelokke (nickname for theology majors who always had to wear ties to classes) but the guys doing medicine (most of them took up smoking to get the smell of formalin off their fingers), counseling (some of them also spending time in the dark valleys of depression) and the engineers (either the wild party-animals who liked extreme sports or the socially evasive ones who never left their desks).

The athletic physiotherapists who invested long hours helping African kids who had never walked properly because their moms carried them on their backs since birth and their hips never recovered or their insufficient diets prevented them from developing completely. The aspiring teachers who sat under trees in the dust to encourage exhausted nurses from a mobile clinic that had to send patients back untreated every time.

Dr. Pocock requested a response paper to our annual World Evangelization Conference and the only vivid response that rang in my mind was: I don’t want to be a missionary!

I have no personal desire to preach and the idea of handing out tracts to strangers and never seeing them again does not appeal to me either. I have endless hang-ups with the stereotype of how a “missionary” is supposedly different from any regular Christian. I avoid recruiting agents from mission agencies who try to psyche me up with opportunities to manipulate Christ’s return by reaching x numbers of people groups somewhere in the jungle or 10/40 window. When I find myself forced to hear sincerely missionaries speak and still leave with the impression that missionaries are the only faithful Christians obeying the Great Commandment, I cringe.

Who are we (yes, I do consider myself a sent-one into foreign cultures) to proclaim that we know the only solutions to stop the world’s sickness, violence, and immorality? Where are the mission agencies at WEC-week who support our incarnations to reach prostitutes or drug-lords in our own suburbs? Who teaches the new languages of post-modern executives stuck in the chains of first-world economies?

Maybe my skin color (white) and citizenship (South African) contributed to an early disillusionment with this coveted ministry description when I ventured as a teenager into poor black settlements during the Apartheid years giving away Bibles in their local dialect.

After everybody (whether they could read it or not) had received their free copy, basic explanations about who Jesus is were often interrupted by someone’s wheezing cough from TB lungs or an urgent request for a new borehole with a water pump to replace the dangerous well in which a toddler almost drowned again last week. Granted, our outreach usually included shared meals, gifts of books, clothes and pens for the kids going to school but we paid taxes and voted for government officials to deal with the long-term needs of these grateful souls or the hopelessness of their unemployment.

Please hear my heart on this: nothing is worth anything in life without knowing Christ.

While reading the DTS statement of purpose during spring break I found myself asking the next question: if training those of us who choose to remain in our professions (outside the church?) is considered a secondary purpose to those who plan to do vocational ministry (inside the church?), are there other DTS students with specific passions, gifts and perhaps even professional qualifications who also feel suffocated by the prescriptions of many mission agencies about who draws the boundaries concerning Christian involvement as appropriate, or not?

I want to serve those who serve; by working alongside non-institutionalized teams of relief-workers albeit feeding displaced Israelis or distributing medicine to Palestinian patients, or drawing Christ’s parables with my finger in the red African dirt to entertain forgotten orphans dying of malaria.

Perhaps these affiliations forfeits any chance to recount my good works before financial committees and apply for tax-deductible donations, God owns all the cows on all the hills in every capitol on this planet.

I want to share the Truth behind my eternal source of hope who helps me love even machete-bearing mercenaries and zealous car-bombers.