How far should Western missionaries and practitioners go in relinquishing control and submitting to local leadership? What are the risks, tensions, and transformative possibilities when ministry is carried out in indigenous languages and with local resources alone, as advocated by the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM)? This interview-style webinar explores the paradoxes of “letting go” in cross-cultural ministry. This candid dialogue challenges conventional mission strategies and wrestles with what “weakness” and “submission” may mean in practice.

Facilitator    The heart of Vulnerable Mission is to reach out with the gospel while respecting local ways of doing things and intentionally trying not to dominate. To do that, we want to use local languages and resources in ministry, valuing close collaboration with local communities on their terms. So, what should our relationship with local Christian leaders look like? Deborah, after several years of learning the languages in Thailand, and being committed to the ideas of Vulnerable Mission among the Shan people, how did that affect your choices about how you related to local leaders?

Deborah    My goal was to use the local language and resources of the Shan, among whom there were few churches. The churches were primarily Thai. I wanted to respect the Thai church but also wanted to focus on the Shan community.

For the first few years I lived in a Shan village where there was a mix of people who had come from Myanmar and those who were born in Thailand. After that, I moved to a setting where the Thai were the predominant community. I think they expected me to come to their church. I remember a church leader asking me, “So, when are you going to buy some land? What denomination is going to give you funding for building a church?” And my response was to explain that I was there to reach Shan people in a reproducible way without using outside money and in local languages. I think that was a bit shocking for them. The Thai church did occasionally visit villages to do evangelism in Thai and offered food and clothes to people. They didn’t really understand me speaking Shan, and I think they gave up on me being useful at some point.

I had decided to limit myself to personal relationships with Shan people without the structure of a “project.” I think I wasn’t taken seriously by many. I wanted to stay in the background, and there’s a price to pay for that stance. Money buys results, but Vulnerable Mission refuses to buy results, and it can seem that the spreading of the gospel progresses way too slowly. I believe, though, that we need to be patient, and if the gospel grows without outside “help,” the result will be a much stronger church that’s deeply embedded in their culture, language, and way of life. The Thai church wanted to bring Shan people to their church on Sunday, have them speak Thai, go through baptism classes—an attractional model. But many Shan people worked seven days a week, lived in isolated places, didn’t have transportation or documentation for getting past police check points. So, it was just an impossibility for the Shan to get to church, and I only knew one Thai person who had learned to speak Shan.

Facilitator    So, you had relationships with the church people, but you weren’t submitting under their leadership. You didn’t make sense to them, and their approach didn’t seem to make sense in terms of reaching the Shan. Jim, how is all that different for you or similar in Kenya?

Jim    The question I would ask is if it is even possible for someone from Europe to work under local leaders in Africa without dominating them. This is because of the anticipation I have frequently encountered that a European will bring a gold mine with them. This kind of expectation will continue unless and until the European has developed a sufficient reputation that they do not have available resources, and until they have a grasp of the local language so they can cease using English. Using the local language enables you to see the world the people are speaking from, and that’s the world in which we’re trying to reach them with the gospel.

Broadly speaking, I agree that our aim should be to work under the local church, and it’s important that we learn from them. One approach I’m using is to visit many different churches because if I was constantly at one church, I would dominate it. I don’t want them to know beforehand when I will be there, so they can plan their own program in advance, leaving it up to them to slot me in if they want when I do attend.

Facilitator    Ministry in both your contexts is obviously entangled with the complexity of intercultural relationships, race, and socio-economic realities in the post-colonial era. The big challenge seems to be how to relate to local leadership if people want us to work from dominant positions? But then, Jim, what are some positive examples of collaboration that you could give?

Jim    My main formal interaction is to show up at a service or an event and participate in prayer, participate in singing, and later participate in a cup of tea. And then if they want me to share God’s Word, I’ll do so. I prayerfully do what I can but if an event goes on for a long time, like three to five hours, I don’t oblige myself to stay until the end. It’s contributing where you can and not trying to contribute where you can’t.

Facilitator    That sounds like a really useful little rule of thumb. I imagine it takes years of discernment to work out which one belongs in which category. Deborah, how has that been for you? Have you found fruitful ways to collaborate with the Thai church or with other local groups, communities, leaders?

Deborah    In the first place I lived, I was with a Shan church that was part of a Thai church association; I was basically a missionary serving them. The church had a pastor. I lived like the local people and served them and did what they asked me to, basically. I didn’t give them money, but I did drive them to the market or the hospital occasionally in my pickup due to the remoteness of the village. Looking back, I see that this could have created dependency on outside resources. For example, they wanted me to go with them on evangelism trips to different villages. They would set up their generator and show the Jesus film to villages at Christmas and put on programs for the kids. For me, it was a bit uncomfortable, and it’s not how I would have done it, but I joined them because I wanted to be a learner. I learned a lot and have a lot of respect for the people in that church.

Facilitator    Moving on from the positive experiences of collaboration, could you each tell us something that’s been a painful experience that has helped you to learn as you go?

Deborah    I’ll share one story about something I experienced. A young Shan woman and I were going around to different farms where members of her extended family lived. I learned a lot watching how she used Shan vocabulary to communicate the gospel and how that clicked in people’s minds much quicker than if I came in there speaking in Thai. Her uncle came to Christ, but shortly after he was killed in a car accident. The young Shan woman and her Thai husband were the ones arranging the funeral, so the Thai husband asked the local Thai pastor to preach at the funeral. All the family were there, some of whom had heard the gospel from her, and some were just on the edge of coming to faith. The pastor preached in Thai in a very Western style. He was pacing around and almost shouting. That is really contrary to how people in the Shan culture behave, especially in a spiritual setting. I could tell that the people there were very shocked when the Thai pastor told them you’re going to go to hell if you don’t convert.

After that there was not so much openness anymore among her family. Those at the funeral spoke to the ones who weren’t there, and they didn’t want to hear about Christ anymore because of their impression of what it meant to follow Christ. I think that stopped a lot of the potential that I had seen up to that point.

Facilitator    So sometimes the local Christian communities can approach some of these cross-cultural issues differently. Do you have a difficult experience to share, Jim?

Jim    My own kind of achievement-oriented, time-oriented way of living makes it difficult to work with local leaders. I find the way my African colleagues go about doing their church business to be very frustrating at times. Time is not an issue for them, so everything is delayed. So, for example, on a particular occasion our meeting happened at 1 a.m., because you first have a cup of tea, and then the ladies must kill a chicken and cook it, so we ate about midnight. And by 1 a.m. I was dead tired, struggling to enjoy the meeting that went until 3 a.m. And then, if you’re visiting someone, and maybe there’s a big thunderstorm coming, instead of quickly finishing so you can get home before the thunderstorm, the meeting drags on, and then it’s wet, muddy, and dark, and you have to struggle home by bicycle in all that.

I find it hard work to day-in, day-out follow the African pace. I can put a few hours aside and move into their world, but then I must come back into my world. When they take hours and hours doing what they’re doing, I don’t have to be there. Now, that may be a cop out, but lack of awareness of time and any “achievement” orientation is part of the real difficulty, I think, for a Westerner working under African church leadership.

Webinar Participant A    Have you ever, in a culturally appropriate way, sat down with local believers and heard from them how we can and should submit to their leadership?

Jim    I’ve tried those talks, but it’s more about living it. So, the few times when I’ve had the conversation, I think it’s actually been when my Western identity has been very prominent. And I just need to put that identity and power aside and not expect my hosts to tell me not to use money, not to use their language. It’s our responsibility to be what we term vulnerable, and we shouldn’t try to hoist it onto them.

Webinar Participant B    If I may add from my South African context, such dedicated conversations are sometimes difficult to have. At the same time, it’s very important to look out for clues when people themselves want to discuss this and do so perhaps in a culturally different way than we are used to. We need to be very attentive to hints where we may have overstepped the line and learn from where we have behaved inappropriately.

Facilitator    Working in the indigenous way of doing things can be pretty challenging. Leaving our Western selves behind has its limitations and its painful points. A lot of the challenges are inner, personal struggles in which we struggle to have patience and also know where to draw the line. We need to consider how our time, gifting, and calling from God are well used in the places we serve. We need to know when to say “no” to those things which could lead people to see us like a bank account or a ticket to the West. It’s not necessarily easy but hopefully it’s the route towards a long-term kingdom of God impact of the gospel in that culture on its own terms. In the end, we’re all still leaning on the grace of God in the Holy Spirit for the outcomes of what we do and for forgiveness for our mistakes.