Serving with Eyes Wide Open is an attempt to open our eyes and see what we might otherwise miss. It’s my belief that as we do so we’ll not only interact in more Christ-honoring ways but also come away with a higher degree of lasting change in us and in the communities we visit.
Another priority of this book is to give voice to local church leaders from a variety of settings around the world. These brothers and sisters are on the receiving end of our short-term missions projects. Many of them are too gracious to explicitly state some of the things that emerged in the research behind this book. It’s my hope that this project is one small step forward in listening to the global church, of which the North American church is now a small minority.
Finally, this book is unique in that it applies cultural intelligence, or CQ, to short-term missions. We all understand the idea of IQ—a measurement of how intellectually smart someone is. And in more recent years, psychologists have taught us about the importance of emotional intelligence, or EQ, a measurement of how well we’re in tune with the emotions of ourselves and others. CQ simply draws upon some of the same ideas and research in measuring our ability to interact effectively across cultures.[4]
There are three parts to this book. Part 1 gives a wide-angle view on our twenty-first-century world and church. We live in a global village, and awareness of the pressing issues of our village is an important springboard for a discussion about cross-cultural encounters. In addition, the largest Christian communities today are in Africa and Latin America. We must understand the changing face of Christianity if we are to appropriately see what we’re joining when we engage in missions cross-culturally. “Serving with eyes wide open” begins with a widened perspective on the realities of our twenty-first-century world.
Part 2 explores the conflicting perspectives on short-term missions between North Americans and the global church. It examines the assumptions that drive a great deal of our cross-cultural work. The primary source of the information in these chapters is my original research on short-term missions. For example, I studied the practice of North American pastors who went overseas for ten days to two weeks to train national pastors. The research compared the North American pastors’ assessment of their cross-cultural training efforts with that of the local pastors who received the training. This, combined with research on short-term missions by others and me, and the literature of cross-cultural interactions as a whole, led to the six areas of conflicting perspectives described in part 2. These realities permeate the assumptions of our short-term work.
Part 3 provides a framework for applying CQ to short-term missions. The material in this section helps us apply our widened perspective and actually do short-term missions more effectively. We don’t have to try to master CQ before our next trip. Instead, we want to embark on a lifelong journey of using CQ to more effectively love God and love others—on our short-term missions trips and in our everyday lives back home.
It’s an amazing privilege to interact with people from other cultures. The seven billion people around the world are so much like us yet very different. May this book enhance the way we reflect God’s glory when encountering the diverse people with whom we share the world. We will grapple with some hard-hitting realities in the pages that follow, but I encourage you to persevere; that’s not the end of the story. I have great hope for the opportunities that lie on the horizon as we increasingly become part of a transient, global church traveling from everywhere to everywhere. Open your eyes. There’s much to see in the movement of short-term missions and, more importantly, the movement of God in the world at large. Thanks for embarking on this journey with me.
Part 1
Looking through a Wide-Angle Lens
Globalization and the Church
We begin broadening our view by looking through a wide-angle lens at the twenty-first-century world. After surviving the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, two world wars, several genocide attempts, and numerous totalitarian regimes, we find ourselves well into a new century. North Americans in 1900 had a life expectancy of forty-seven, whereas today it’s seventy-six. Our world has undergone immense change over the last century. The Christian church has been in a state of major transition as well—both local congregations and the church at large.
Widening our perspective on our world should be an ongoing process for all of us. The next two chapters present a few snapshots of our world—the world as a whole and the worldwide Christian church. Like any snapshot, these pictures give us only a glimpse into the realities behind the images. It’s important to begin with a wide-angle view before focusing more specifically on short-term missions work. Join me on a quick tour around the world as we begin the journey toward serving with eyes wide open.
1
One World
Snapshots of the Globe
On a recent visit to Seattle, I met my friend Tony for lunch. Tony lives in Mexico City, and we were both visiting Seattle at the same time. We met at an easy-to-find spot in Seattle’s Chinatown and walked through the international district for a few minutes before ending up at a French café. We walked inside, and soon after we were seated, a Haitian woman came up to take our order. She suggested some English Breakfast tea with our entrées. As she took our order, a group of Japanese businessmen sat down at the table behind us. I looked at Tony and said, “Do you see what just happened? In a matter of three minutes, we’ve encountered Mexican, American, Chinese, French, Haitian, English, and Japanese cultures!” Tony and I launched into an interesting discussion about our globalized world. Experiencing a mosaic of cultures as Tony and I did that day used to be reserved for the jet-setting few who hung out in international airports. But the world is becoming increasingly smaller for all of us.
At the same time, Americans still fare poorly in our awareness of what’s going on in the world. Our collective global consciousness is pretty dismal, and many mainstream media outlets do little to help. Our family often hosts international guests in our home, and they’re forever frustrated that they can’t get more than a passing glimpse of world events from our major news shows. Becoming globally conscious doesn’t come easily. It requires extra effort on our part.
We’re all citizens of a global world, whether we realize it or not. Our journey into a widened perspective on global missions begins by looking at some of the predominant issues facing our twenty-first-century world. While by no means an exhaustive list, some of the most important issues facing us include the following snapshots.
Snapshot 1: Growing Population of the World
Every second, four babies are born. Four more babies were just born . . . and four more . . . and four more . . . and four more. It continues day after day after day, the population of the world growing at a rapid rate. More than twice as many people are born each day than die. All this adds up to a world population of more than seven billion people. Line us all up in single file around the world and we’d circle the globe more than 112 times. At this rate, we can expect a population of eight billion people by the year 2025.[5]
Where do all these people live? Twenty percent live in China. Twenty percent live in India. Five percent live in the United States. Fifty-five percent live in the other nations of the world. Developing nations are growing rapidly while their industrialized neighbors remain relatively static. The seven billion of us are scattered throughout approximately two hundred nations, but there are more than five thousand identifiable ethnocultural groups in the world.[6]
Nearly half of the people in the world are children. Forty percent of the world’s population is under the age of fifteen, while less than 20 percent of North Americans are under fifteen. Many of our global children have a dismal future. It’s hard to grow up when you’re poor, marginalized, and forgotten. Health services are few and far between for most children in the world.
My wife, Linda, and I have often struggled with whether our girls’ school system, teachers, and the corresponding curricula are our best options for them. Meanwhile, over one bill
ion children have no options and no access to schools. The majority of schools that do exist in the world are poorly run and costly to attend.
Perspective. That’s what we’re after in this journey together. Open your eyes. Wider. Look around you. There have never been this many people alive in the world. Four more babies were just born, and four more . . .
Snapshot 2: Poverty versus Wealth
Many of our fellow citizens around the globe face desperate economic circumstances. This is a perspective I’ve continually tried to give my kids. One time shortly after dinner, Grace, who was five or six at the time, said, “Daddy, I’m hungry. I need a snack.” Emily, her older sister, smirked at me, knowing this was the perfect opportunity for my soapbox speech. Right on cue I started in. “Gracie, how can you be hungry? We just finished a good dinner. Millions of children in the world won’t get a meal like that all month—”
“Sorry, Daddy,” Grace interrupted. “I mean, I want a snack.”
This has become standing practice for us as a family. Whenever one of us says, “I need . . .” someone else chimes in and says, “Need or want?” My girls love it when they catch me saying, “I need coffee.” We’re working hard to remember that we’re among the “haves” when so many in the world are among the “have nots.” The point is not to be guilt-ridden, middle-class Christians. But we want to live with a spirit of generosity and be continually mindful of the chasm between the rich and the poor in our world. Read these statistics slowly and deliberately:
Twenty percent of the people in the world live on one dollar a day.
Another 20 percent live on two dollars a day.
Twenty percent of us live on more than seventy dollars a day.
The remaining 40 percent are somewhere in between. [7]
And how about this? The combined income of the 447 wealthiest people in the world is larger than the combined income of 50 percent of the world’s population. Did you catch that? Four hundred and forty-seven people have more money than the combined assets of 3.5 billion people in the world![8]
Sisay, a character in Richard Dooling’s riveting novel White Man’s Grave, is a North American who has moved to Sierra Leone, where he has become fully immersed as a local. After five years away from the United States, Sisay describes the sickening experience he had going back for a brief visit to the United States:
I resolved to sit on my mother’s front porch and soak up some American village life to remind myself of what I had left behind. It was Saturday. My mother’s next-door neighbor, a well-groomed, weight-gifted, vertically challenged accountant named Dave, brought out a leaf blower, a lawn mower, a leaf grinder, a mulcher, an edger, and a weed trimmer. He worked all day, making a terrific racket, chopping, trimming, and spraying toxins on a small patch of ground, which produced absolutely no food, only grass. The rest of the world spent the day standing in swamp water trying to grow a few mouthfuls of rice, while Dave sat on his porch with a cold beer admiring his chemical lawn. Sickening? You bet. It was time to go back to Africa.[9]
This is more than well-written fiction; this is reality. Americans make up 5 percent of the world’s population, but we consume 50 percent of the world’s resources. Think about that. We consume half of the world’s resources. The problem of hunger in the world is not the earth’s inability to produce food for seven billion people; it’s the inequitable distribution of food.
Ravi, a seven-year-old boy I met in Delhi, is among the 95 percent of the world’s population that isn’t American. Ravi works ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, shining shoes on the streets of Delhi. Ravi faces four years of bonded labor in order to pay back a thirty-five-dollar loan his parents took out for his sister’s wedding. Ravi will spend the next four years paying off a debt that’s less than what I spent on dinner out last night. The inequities continue:
More than two billion children live in our world, half in poverty.
One of every four children in the world has to work instead of going to school.
Eight percent of people in the world own a car.
Perspective. Perspective on “need.” Perspective on “hunger.” Perspective on “money.” Do you feel as if you’re living paycheck to paycheck? You may well be, and my point is not to diminish the financial challenges facing many North Americans. But it’s all about perspective. It’s all about serving with eyes wide open.
Snapshot 3: Disease
If the above statistics are not enough to ruin your appetite, how about this? Thirty thousand people will die today from preventable diseases. More than three thousand Americans lost their lives on 9/11. Many of us remember where we were when we first heard the news that day. Three thousand lives were lost in a matter of hours. We pause each year on September 11 to remember the victims and their families, and we should.
Yet how many of us will remember where we were when we learned that thirty thousand people will die today from preventable diseases? It’s all too easy to read that, say, “Wow! That’s horrible,” and move on. Thirty thousand people will die today. More than two hundred thousand, the population of the city where I live, will die this week from preventable diseases.
A great many of the deaths today will occur because the victims couldn’t get basic medicines that I can buy over the counter at a local drug store. Many of those who die today will be children. In fact, a child dies of hunger every sixteen seconds. Just about every time I take a breath, another child dies of hunger.
Forty percent of the people in the world lack basic sanitation facilities.
Over one billion people have unsafe drinking water.[10]
Perspective. Perspective on the world in which we live. That’s where we’re headed with all this.
One of the worst diseases facing us is HIV/AIDS. AIDS threatens the social well-being of entire nations. Almost forty million people are infected with the virus, with another one hundred thousand infected daily. These numbers are expected to double by 2015.
We must dispel the notion that AIDS is simply just punishment upon those who are sexually promiscuous. The number one way children in Mozambique contract the HIV virus is by sharpening their pencils with their fathers’ razor blades.[11]
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the pastorate has become a “burial business.” Pastors bury AIDS victims daily, while teenagers and grandparents figure out how to lead households in which both parents have died. Over fifteen million children under the age of fifteen have lost one or both parents to AIDS, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2015.[12]
The next wave of the pandemic is expected to be in India, China, and Russia, home to almost one-third of the world’s population. We are at the beginning of this crisis, not the end. This is a century-long struggle.
Of the seven billion people in the world, 40 percent live on two dollars or less a day. AIDS is eliminating entire generations in some communities. All the numbers can become overwhelming—even numbing—but we must gain perspective on the world in which we live. Let’s open our eyes in order to improve the way we serve.
Snapshot 4: Refugees
Too many people on our planet are being forced out of their homes and communities. There’s been a dramatic increase in the number of refugees over the last thirty years. In 1975, 2.5 million people were known to be refugees. Today more than 12 million people have been forced out of their native countries. Another 24 million people have fled conflict and persecution and are internally displaced within their own countries. The vast majority of refugees are women and children, and more than 65 percent are Muslim.[13]
As if being displaced from their homes and communities isn’t enough, militia groups, rebels, and government leaders often take advantage of vulnerable refugees. Aid sent to refugees is often intercepted and horded by abusive leaders. Drugs intended to heal children are taken and sold, and food sent to families is enjoyed by warlords. Worst of all, refugees are abused physically and often killed simply to make a statement to other groups struggling for power.[
14]
Sadly, young mothers such as Isatu Turay in Sierra Leone are not an anomaly in the twenty-first century. Isatu and her husband were living in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone along with their four young children. One morning heavily armed men entered their house and demanded all their possessions. The rebels became upset when Isatu and her husband had only thirty thousand leones (local currency) to give them. On the spot the rebels killed Isatu’s younger sister, who was also living there, and brutally murdered Isatu’s husband right before her eyes.
Isatu gathered her children and fled from the refugee camp into the bush, where she ran into another group of rebels who were lining people up and chopping off their hands. Isatu says, “I was praying heavily, and then my two-year-old daughter started to cry. They said the child was causing lots of noise for them. One of them took her from me while another dug a hole to bury her alive. I could not do anything, and my baby cried until she died.”[15]
Isatu’s story speaks for itself. Perspective.
Snapshot 5: McWorld
Globalization is a broad term with many meanings, but the term is most often associated with the expansion of business and capitalism across national borders. Serving with eyes wide open includes gaining perspective on this growing reality in our world. Marketing products and services that have been profitable in developed nations and selling them overseas is often referred to as the McDonaldization of the world, or McWorld for short.
McDonald’s is the epitome of McWorld. You can get the same french fries in Quito, Delhi, and Toronto. And the most universal product in the world is Coca-Cola. Or consider one of my addictions—Starbucks! You could be dropped into a Starbucks in Bangkok and have a hard time knowing whether you’re in Bangkok, Seattle, Shanghai, or Sydney. The same drinks are available; the same font adorns the signage; and the chairs, lighting, color on the walls, and music are all strangely familiar. It’s all part of the McWorld experience of Starbucks. Granted, even McDonald’s, KFC, and Starbucks have some menu offerings that reflect local tastes and customs. But on the whole, the experience at a McWorld business is much the same wherever you go.
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