by Jason Byassee
Jason Byassee
One of the great strengths and great tensions in our wonderful church is that many groups think their thing is the church’s only important thing. I love this! The folks who run the Bazaar, our Sunday School classes, the UMW, our Disaster Relief Team (this list could continue) all think their activity is the most important one in the church. And here’s the little secret: they’re all right! All tied for first, that is.
The missions committee has a similar fire in its belly for the gospel and to change our church and our world. I am so proud of the work its coordinator, Luke Edwards, and this committee have done in preparation for this year’s Mission Celebration. In the committee’s decade or so of expanded work at Boone Methodist this group has come up with a way to raise serious funding for missions here in Boone and around the world. It can seem gimmicky to some, manipulative to others. I saw it as a challenge and an invitation to participate more deeply in God’s quietest and most important work in the world. Here’s the way to view it I think: a passionate group wants to share its passion with others. I’m so glad they do. Here’s why.
Mission is usually stereotyped as a “conservative” interest in the church: they are spreading the gospel, trying to convert people and grow the church on its edges. Fictional accounts of missionaries like Michener’s Hawaii (with its blatant inaccuracies) and The Poisonwood Bible (which raises more accurate and troubling questions) made this view common, almost commonplace. But this reputation is unfair. More balanced scholars have shown that it is missionaries who have preserved local languages by the hundreds. Why? Because they want to translate the bible into folks’ mother tongues. International business has no interest in preserving local languages spoken only by a few thousand people. For the church, those few thousand people are inestimably precious to God, their language a fitting vehicle for the Word Made Flesh. Missions has also been an empowering agent for women and children around the world. You could hear this last year in our mission celebration keynote speaker, Peter Pereira, describing his work in India. It is often women, children, and the poor to whom Christianity has special appeal. Jesus’ good news to all (Mt 28:20), Pentecost’s promise that the Spirit is poured out on all flesh (Acts 2), Paul’s promise that baptism makes us all one (Gal 3:27) is especially good news to those relegated to second class status in their societies.
When I worked at Christian Century magazine I realized the category-bending quality of missions. The Century is a flagship liberal Protestant publication, but its news coverage is almost entirely focused on America. Christianity Today, by contrast, is a flagship conservative Protestant publication. But its coverage is consistently global. Why? Because they have the missions emphasis. Evangelicals have to be concerned about, say, banks in Cypress, because they affect mission in Cypress and beyond, whereas liberals’ humanitarian interests often don’t push them to be as internationally minded.
Last Sunday at the 11 AM service as we watched the video promotion for Word Made Flesh (https://vimeo.com/63405926) I started to tear up. It’s not only that I’ve come to love All Sons and Daughters’ music. It’s that I love Chris Heuertz. He is a friend I got to know while working at Faith & Leadership at Duke. I traveled out to Omaha to write this feature on Chris’s work: http://www.faithandleadership.com/features/articles/the-side-hope I fell in love with Word Made Flesh’s combination of Wesleyan evangelical zeal with Mother Teresa’s work among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. Seeing the faces of children WMF works with on our screen at BUMC, while sitting beside Madeline Hays and Julia Handley and giving thanks that their lives are not like that, imagining Chris preaching from our pulpit to my church here that I love so much, almost overwhelmed me (I’m glad the sermon was over!).
I cannot beg you enough: come hear All Sons and Daughters. Come hear Chris Heuertz and our other speakers, including some of our own dynamic and creative missional leaders in our Saturday afternoon sessions (Dale Williams from Samaritan’s Purse and Eric Heistand from Campus Crusade for Christ, among others). This is a feast of a program, a delight for the heart, please do not go spiritually hungry next week!
Another local connection to Chris Heuertz is our own Wade Grimes. Wade quickly became my closest friend when we moved to Boone in 2011. We ran together, joked around, dreamed big dreams, watched our wives and children play. My worst day since I got to Boone was the day I learned Wade and his family were moving. I still think about and grieve his move daily, even as his family thrives in Charlotte.
Wade and I realized the day we met we had a common friend in Chris. “No way, you know Chris Heuertz?” he asked. “Way,” I responded (sorry, we grew up in the 80s). Wade had traveled to India with Chris, where WMF opened the first pediatric AIDS care clinic in all of South India. Wade spent months there working with the destitute and dying in Mother Teresa’s famous Home. Wade actually met Mother Teresa and seriously considered staying in India to do that work. At the same time, Wade had met a young woman named Jen Hill at Asbury College. In these pre-email days Wade and Jen were faxing letters back and forth to one another. One kind of love won out over another, thankfully, giving us the Grimes family and their bevy of redheaded kids, Sarah, Molly, and Elliot. Just to bring things full circle, Jen’s parents, Dan and Lavonne Hill, soon moved to Boone and began the Mission Celebration at one Boone United Methodist Church.
See how things come full circle? Please come this weekend, hear Chris and All Sons and Daughters, and be changed. Jesus has something special in store for us.