While I'm not sure about the relevance of articles and blogs these days, and am questioning whether or not anyone will read this, I have to admit that it is nice to have a place to send people after I have struggled to convey all of the things I wanted to during a short announcement on Sunday morning!

My goal here is to tell you about the trip in the fall to Guatemala, but I can’t do that until I inform you about Revive in Guatemala, but first I need to explain why we are partnering with Revive, and before I can do that I need you to understand my heart for Guatemala, and I won't be able to accomplish that until I clearly articulate the realities and solutions of poverty in Guatemala. So basically, this is going to be long, but I'll do my best to avoid being pedantic (so don't call it reductive, I'm trying to save you time!) when I can. So, go grab a snack, and settle in...

In Matthew 25:31 Jesus tells this story about dividing the sheep from the goats.  The sheep do the Jesus’ will by feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, and clothing those who need it.  This is a story, and it is symbolic, and there are depths of insight to mine here, but I want to focus on one thing:  That taking care of others is important to Jesus.

Jesus continues to say that if someone doesn’t care for the brothers and sisters, that person is a goat, which is a bad thing.  For the sake of brevity, here’s the deal: helping your brothers and sisters is rewarding and not helping them has terrible consequences.
Now here comes the difficult part.  How do we actually help?

I messed this up one time decades ago.  I was in a Youth Group, even though I was not yet a Christian, and we were doing a “Missions Week” where we went out into the community as a group, offering mercy to the poverty stricken in Reno and Sparks.   On this particular evening, Thanksgiving was coming up, and the leaders of this Youth Group decided that the most relevant way to care for the destitute was to ensure that they could have a Thanksgiving dinner.  I see where they were coming from, because I love Thanksgiving food, and what a tragedy it would be for anyone to miss it.

We loaded up the church shuttle with tons of food: Boxes of stuffing and mashed potatoes, butter, frozen turkeys, cans of gravy and cranberry sauce; everything you’d need to prepare your very own Thanksgiving feast!  We then headed out into the 4th Street district in Reno, and found the most dilapidated looking motel to park at, and knocked on the first door we could find.  We waited with anticipation as the door opened, each holding a food item, excited to deliver mercy and love to someone in need.  We truly had the best intentions.

A man answered the door, shirtless, smoking a cigarette.  “Yeah?”  He said, confused by the group of pre-teens the just interrupted his evening.

“We are here from the church over there, and we just wanted to show God’s love for you by making sure that you would get to enjoy a solid meal this Thanksgiving!”  Someone from our group said.

“Okay…”  The man said with a questioning look.

“So we wanted to give you all the items to cook a feast.”  Our Youth Group representative continued, “For free!  Because you are poor!”

I immediately regretted our short-sited and insulting attempt at “mission”.  All of the sudden I could see through the good intentions of the group, and realized an awful truth.  We weren’t helping.   We were hurting.

“Do I look like I have an oven?”  The man shouted at us and slammed the door closed.  He used more colorful language that I will not write here.  I think we knocked on a few other doors that night, before just giving up.  We returned to the church building dejected, and with a van full of Thanksgiving food.

We tried to help, but we ended up doing more damage than good.  Through our lack of research, our cultural biases, and infantile communication methods we offended people.  We damaged the representation of the church.  We might have even misrepresented Jesus.  In the Mathew 25:31 verse, we may have even been considered the goats…

It took many years to become comfortable doing anything similar again.  Even after I became a Christian, doing things like “outreach”, or “street evangelism”, or “missions” made me nervous, not because I was afraid to boldly proclaim Christ, or counterculturally show His love, but because I was afraid I would make things worse.

I did eventually gain a lot of experience doing those things, and have done my best to learn from my experience as an Ambassador of Christ to the impoverished in downtown Reno, the Tenderloin in San Francisco, East L.A., Downtown Denver, and Central America.  However, it wasn’t until I was challenged by my cousin (who was a long-term missionary in Africa) to read the book “When Helping Hurts” by Corbett and Fikkert.  This book offers an incredible analysis of the type of poverty described in Matthew 25, and then offers a genuine definition of how we can really help our brothers and sisters, and even the outsiders that are impoverished around the world.

While I’m going to all but plagiarize the content of the book in this article, I am synopsizing it and adapting it for my own use here, which comes with all of my biases and emphasis, so please read the book if you can to get a more accurate understanding of the content.  

So let's start with poverty.  Poverty is not just they typical definition that we hear used: a lack of money, food, shelter, etc.   It’s actually a symptom of a broken relationship!  At Living Stones, we believe that everyone has a relationship to believers, unbelievers, and God.

Thinking about the Thanksgiving Youth Group "mission", giving someone a turkey was not helpful.  It didn’t fix relationships.  All I did that day was give some poor guy a reason to feel more ashamed, more embarrassed, like less of a human.  That is how helping can hurt.  That is how good intentions can make things worse.  And that is why it takes thought, and care when attempting to alleviate poverty.

An element, that is not shown in our discipleship chart above are the systemic relationships (that are not with people, but with institutions).  We each have relationships with the economy, the political system, the social system, and the religious system.  These relationships can also be broken or strained, and when they are you will see material poverty at it’s worst.  Think of refugees dying in transit, or on the threshold of a country that will not tolerate them.  Those refugees have a broken relationship with the political system!  Think of the children searching for food or goods at the garbage dump.  Unfortunately, their relationship with the economy and social system is unhealthy, to say the least.  An impoverished person who is told that God wants to see him thrive, and then given a frozen turkey to fix his “poorness” will not have a restored relationship with the religious system, I promise you.  You get the point.

Now here's the thing, we are all spiritually impoverished.  Because of sin, we all have these broken relationships, and we all need Jesus to mend our relationship with God, and others.  It is through understanding this truth that we can do anything that can truly help those in need.  As the Church, we can help others by coming alongside them, and humbly, as someone who is also spiritually impoverished, we can introduce them to the Bread of Life who will satisfy forever!  We can help mend the broken relationships, together.  We can strengthen and encourage!

For the most part, the process of mending these broken relationships is not something that is easy, quick, or convenient.  God is powerful, and He is a miracle worker!  And He can use anyone he pleases to carry out his benevolent mission any way He pleases.  God can use a frozen turkey to change someone's life, but the Biblical narrative doesn't describe things that way often.

In other words, mission is about discipleship.  The same way we are discipled by our friends, family, and brothers and sisters in the Church every day.  The same way we are continually practicing the rhythms of grace!

To summarize, you can’t just throw a frozen turkey at a hungry person and expect to have helped.  Likewise, you can’t send a group of Christians to a third world country, spend a week painting the local building and handing out beans and taking Instagram pictures, and expect to have helped.  It may be hard to hear, but I’m just going to say it:  You probably just stole that painting job from local workers.   You gave a man a fish, instead of teaching him to fish.   You gave all of your Instagram followers another reason to think poorly of the Church.  

Now, none of those are bad things (well, maybe Instagramming is) but, unless they are done with care and forethought, they are hurting more than helping.   Additionally, the Bible describes discipleship as a long and continual work.  Sometimes years or decades!  Maybe Paul would have just came through an area for a week, but not without setting up people who are there for the long-term.  People who can do the long work of mending relationships and discipleship.  People who speak the language, know the culture, understand the relationships!  Locals.  Natives.   Or in our specific case, Angela.  

Angela essentially went down to Guatemala on a short-term mission trip, and just never came back!  (She has made several trips to Sparks, of course, but her home is now in Guatemala.)  Angela understood the importance of relationships, and the need to “stick around."  She realized that in order to truly see the change that she wanted to, she would have to be there long-term.  And she is still there, to this day!  Loving people, providing care and generosity, making friends, speaking Spanish, adopting dogs, and doing all of the things that create trust with the local impoverished people.   She is an incredible gift to the people of Guatemala, because she knows that helping to alleviate "real poverty" is about healing broken relationships, which is a long-term process.  It takes time and presence, and by being there for the long-haul, Angela offers both.

This is where Revive Guatemala comes in.  In her efforts to help the people of Guatemala, Angela became acquainted with Revive who is on the same mission, and is now a staff member with them.  To quote Revive:

The work that Angela and Revive are doing comes from a place of truly understanding the problem, the culture, and the solution.  They are not going anywhere.  They are not just throwing resources at the impoverished, they are walking with people in their reconciliation with the various broken relationships.  They are helping, not hurting.

Now, this is after all, a post about a short-term mission trip to Guatemala in the fall.  I want to be very clear that it’s unlikely that we can solve poverty on a short-term mission trip.  It is a struggle to create a relationship in a week, let alone walk through life together.  It is hard to relate to someone who is so culturally different than us; someone who doesn’t even speak the same language!  It is foolish to think that in a week we might fix broken relationships to the institutions like the economy and politics!  (Although we pray for that to happen, because God can do anything!)  But it seems obvious that the local ministries and organizations will have the biggest effect on truly alleviating both spiritual poverty and material poverty!  Real help comes from long term people like Angela, organizations like Revive, and most of all, the sovereign work of God.

So then, should we even do “Short-Term Missions?”  Absolutely!  But, we need to redefine them.  We need new and better expectations and goals for what a short-term trip accomplishes.  We need to take our own individual and collective ego’s out of the mix.  We need to use our energy to empower and encourage the local efforts.   We need to humble ourselves, and approach the destitute as a fellow person in need.  We need to “be” with people while we are there, not simply “do” things for them.  We need to teach a man to fish, but we also need to listen and learn from the man, because he has a lot to say.  We need to remove our notion of “saving” or “rescuing” people from poverty, and instead point them to the true Savior.  We need to enjoy food with them.  We should seek to laugh with them.  We should share the goodness of Jesus with them.  We should pray with them, and we should never stop praying for them.

Furthermore, I can confirm that working in, with, and around poverty is discouraging, even if you are seeing victory.  It is exhausting.  Sometimes it is overwhelming, and I know Angela and Revive are not immune to that.  One major aspect of a short-term trip can be to simply encourage those that are on the frontline of the mission.  To support them so that they can support so many; to be the Joshua that holds up Moses’ hands (Exodus 17).

Finally, short-term trips need long term full bodied commitment.  Our dedication to Guatemala cannot just be a team of eight folks that go in the fall.  Our whole congregation needs to be in this together.  We all need to be praying for Guatemala and God’s plan there.  We all need to participate in the process of mending broken relationships and alleviating material poverty.   We all need to be a part of encouraging and supporting those that are helping in Guatemala while we are here.   And we need to continue to do all of these things until, God willing, the work is done! And we all can, together!

So, now onto the trip.  When we go in the fall, we will be putting into practice all of these values.   We will be alleviating the material poverty; we might build chicken coops, mushroom huts, plant or harvest crops, educate about nutrition and health.  We will do our absolute best to accomplish these things responsibly, attempting to help and not hurt, but the material poverty alleviation will not be our primary goal.  All of these things will be accomplished alongside learning and listening, fellowship and relating, encouraging, communing and showing Christ’s love, and creating more engagement between Guatemala and Living Stones Sparks.  We will support and encourage and love the people down there that are doing the sometimes grueling long-term work.  We want to bring hope to those who are bringing hope to the impoverished Guatemalans.

To be honest, even the alleviation of "real poverty" will be in the periphery to our primary goal, which is to glorify God and share his goodness with everyone.  I am hoping for the trip to be holistic, in that we will point everyone to God: the airline and airport staff, the immigration desk, the cab drivers and restaurant staff, and the Angela, Revive, and the people of Guatemala.

All of this is to clearly explain what we are doing, and how you are already a part of it.  This is to be an ongoing relationship with Guatemala.  This is the first trip to support Angela and Revive, but it won't be our last.  Maybe this is something that you would like to do?  Keep posted.   Or maybe this is something that you would like to support, but you aren't interested in the "trip" part.  Keep posted.  Or maybe you just want to see the result of the relationship between Living Stones Sparks and Guatemala.  Keep Posted!   You can keep posted by checking the LS Sparks Missions Page - there you will find all of the things that are happening, and how you can get involved.  We plan to keep it updated with everything that is going on with the fall trip, and beyond!

Stay cool Sparks Church.
-Sean
sean@lschurches.com