“You’re Either for Us or against Us!”
| Through the eyes of North Americans . . . | Through the eyes of majority world Christians . . . |
|---|---|
| It was unbelievable. They treated us like rock stars. The Brazilians were like storming the stage, asking for our autographs, and chasing our buses. I don’t think they get to see Americans very often. | This was all a big joke one of our Brazilian friends started. We pretended they were famous by storming the stage and asking for their autographs. But we live in Sao Paulo—one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. We’ve seen plenty of Americans. |
President George W. Bush will be chronicled in history books for his frequently repeated mantra to the world, “You’re either with us or you’re for the terrorists.”[93]
Many of my friends from other parts of the world were confused by his statement and, even more, the thinking behind it. Shortly after 9/11, one of my Asian friends said to me, “I don’t for a second condone what the terrorists did to you on 9/11. It was a horrifying time for all of us to see you attacked that way. So I’m not for the terrorists. But neither can I support the way the US so quickly moved into Iraq and Afghanistan without more global input. Why does it have to be an either/or?”
Filmmaker Michael Moore appears to exercise the same kind of either/or oversimplification for which he so brutally attacks Bush in his documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore asked Pete Townshend, British rock star of The Who, for permission to use his anthem “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as part of the soundtrack for Fahrenheit 9/11. Townshend refused because he felt that Moore’s previous works demonstrated bullying and a lack of critical engagement with key issues. In response, Moore accused Townshend of being a war supporter. Townshend said Moore’s attitude seemed like the very credo he was criticizing in Bush: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”[94]
I’m not after a political debate right now. I’m more interested in looking at the very American-like simplicity demonstrated by Bush and Moore alike. The simplicity conflict cuts across all the other factors we’ve considered. Our conclusions about why we should go, our sense of urgency, and our use of Scripture and money all flow from our tendency to oversimplify complex issues. In particular, the quest to find common ground is seamlessly related to the simplicity conflict.
Simplistic categories have been central to our US ethos. An American is either Republican or Democrat, blue collar or white collar, liberal or conservative, modern or postmodern, environmentalist or industrialist. Of course, one of the things that’s happened in our twenty-first-century world is an exposure of the fallacy of these clear-cut categories. Life isn’t that neatly ordered. There is a place for simplicity. A few things in life are clear-cut, but most of life is not. In particular, most cross-cultural issues are far too complex to be placed in one category or another. The simplicity factor shows up in short-term missions through an overuse of the K.I.S.S. principle, the rock-star complex, and the ways short-term missionaries describe the lessons they learned.
The K.I.S.S. Principle
North American Christians have often embraced the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle for many purposes. K.I.S.S. is a familiar mantra in short-term missions too, whether it’s the importance of simplicity in planning our itinerary, our testimony, or our plans for follow-up. “Keep it simple,” we’re told.
There is a place for the K.I.S.S. principle. I spend a great deal of time in university settings, where we often make things unnecessarily complicated. Overcomplexity can paralyze us and keep us from getting anywhere. But many times K.I.S.S. becomes a hindrance to cultural intelligence. If we overemphasize the K.I.S.S. principle and never ask the deeper questions, we’re at risk of missing some core issues, particularly in cross-cultural work. We’ll keep it simple but remain stupid.
We already looked at how easily we inaccurately interpret familiar behaviors. Short-termers assume smiling, nodding, and silence mean the same things for all people. Likewise, the way we too quickly apply the behavior of one person to everyone in a culture is another demonstration of the K.I.S.S. principle negatively at work.
I first became aware of the prevalence of the K.I.S.S. principle in short-term work when I began asking short-term participants what they observed about the new context they visited. When I asked, “What’s the number one thing that stands out in your mind from what you experienced in this new cultural context?” I most often heard these kinds of responses, from both adults and youth:
By now, you probably recognize many of these kinds of statements from the last several chapters. One of the things I’m striving for in this book is to help us move away from using the K.I.S.S. principle as our guiding protocol for short-term work. Lumping everything into simplistic categories or looking at only surface-level issues is not helpful in bringing about effective ministry across cultures. You don’t need a graduate course in intercultural studies to do short-term missions well. However, we have to open our eyes to some of the things happening below the surface. We’ll look at some suggestions on how to get there in the next section. Before we get there, though, let’s look at a couple of the other ways we tend to oversimplify our thinking in short-term missions.
The Rock-Star Complex
Another way the simplicity factor frequently shows up is through the presence of a rock-star complex when we serve cross-culturally for a few days. This is another way to describe ethnocentrism—the tendency to define what’s normal and best based on our own cultural perspective. It’s the assumption that the world revolves around us. Here are a couple ways I’ve seen ethnocentrism or the rock-star complex get played out on short-term trips.
A few years ago, I attended a church service in the Chicago area in which a youth group was reporting on its recent two-week trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The youth group had done a number of musical and dramatic presentations in public schools, churches, and shopping centers throughout Sao Paulo. The team of students and adults described the typical things heard from a group like this, including the ways their hearts were stretched by the generosity and contentment of the people, the challenge to consider missions as a vocation, and the need for us to pray for the struggling, small Brazilian churches.
In addition, nearly every student described how strange it was to be treated like rock stars whenever they completed one of their performances. One student said, “It was unbelievable. They treated us like rock stars. The Brazilians were like storming the stage, asking for our autographs, and chasing our buses as we drove away. I don’t think they get to see Americans very often.”
That same night, I met a couple Brazilian teenagers who had been with this youth group in Sao Paulo and were now in the US for a year as exchange students. Given my interest in comparing North American perceptions of short-term missions with those of the people who receive them, I asked them what they observed about the North American group while they were there. The Brazilian teenagers spoke warmly of the friendships they developed, particularly since they themselves were now on the other side of cross-cultural travel. They talked about the joy they experienced as they heard the testimonies and music from these American students.
After the Brazilian students spent a lot of time affirming the Chicago students, I jumped in and said, “So tell me about this whole thing of being treated like rock stars.” The Brazilian students immediately started laughing and blushing. After I insisted they tell me what was so funny, they said, “Okay—this is so bad. But this was all a big joke one of our Brazilian friends started. He decided we’d make them think they were famous and everything by storming the stage, asking for their autographs, getting their pictures, and that kind of stuff. I mean, we live in Sao Paulo—one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. We’ve seen plenty of Americans. Don’t get me wrong. We enjoyed their music and drama and stuff, but they weren’t exactly ‘rock stars’ in our eyes.”
You certainly can’t fault the North American students for being confused. They were duped. But the problem was when they jumped to a conclusion about what this all meant. And before we’re too quick to explain this away as youthful naïveté, I haven’t seen a significant difference among adults who go overseas on short-term trips. The rock-star complex is the same tendency that drove the North American pastors to confidently claim, “They’re so hungry for our training” and “We have a biblical model that applies to everyone.”
Some people have said to me, “C’mon. This rock-star syndrome isn’t unique to cross-cultural ministry. This is just arrogance. That’s why these kids think everyone wants their autographs. That’s why pastors assume everyone wants their training.”
I’m not so sure! Certainly, all of us struggle with wanting to prove ourselves. So I’m sure some of that weaves through our cross-cultural behaviors. But I think this is more than pride.
One of the things that surprised me most in my study of North American pastors’ cross-cultural training was the difference between what they said before they went on their trips and how they behaved when they got there. In my conversations with them prior to their trips, they espoused and demonstrated a strong spirit of humility. They weren’t the self-absorbed people they may appear to be when we read their arrogant, insensitive comments written on a page. Likewise, most of the high school students I talk to about their mission trips are conscious of wanting to be learners. So why do they still end up being so ethnocentric and colonialist in their cross-cultural work? Why do they develop a rock-star complex? In part, it comes back to the issue of simplicity.
On the whole, North Americans are not inclined to reflective thinking beyond surface-level observations. The K.I.S.S. principle drives much of how we approach cross-cultural work, so the rock-star syndrome is an inevitable result. By failing to look at the deeper issues, we come to false conclusions. My concern is not so much that a group of teenagers didn’t catch on to what was happening. My concern is that the rock-star complex reveals another way that our perspective influences the ways we engage with people as we relate and serve.
Takeaways
One more way the simplicity factor is blatantly evident in a lot of short-term missions work is that we repeat, with amazing regularity, the same takeaways from these trips. It’s as if we’ve been scripted with the right answers for what we learned from a trip. We parrot one another with statements such as these:
“We have it so good here.”
“We’re so caught up in materialism.”
“We need to pray more.”
“I felt so close to God there. He’s doing amazing things there.”
With little variation, these are the things reported in follow-up letters and given in testimonials. When I asked Rhonda, a thirty-year-old woman, how her experience in Africa changed her, she said, “We have so much, and they have so little. That’s a plus for us because we’re so blessed. I mean, we all have running water, electricity, telephones, computers, and cars that go down the street with no problem. And the power doesn’t go out. . . . But our material possessions can be a hindrance because they keep us from really focusing on God.”
Bill, a fifty-two-year-old pastor from Southern California, said, “I was really encouraged to see how they deal with so little and how strong their faith is. That makes my needs in life and ministry seem so small comparatively, or at least different.”
Shannon, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, said, “I never want to forget some of the things I’ve seen this last week. These people do so much with so little. I have it so good.”
Ken, a thirty-year-old man, said, “The biggest thing I learned was the power of prayer.”
These adults’ reflections are largely reminiscent of what teenagers have to say about their experiences. Remember Amy’s comment: “It’s just amazing, the poverty. Like, it breaks my heart, but it makes me feel so spoiled, and like I’m such an evil person.”[95] More than two-thirds of the high school students I surveyed about their mission trips said something like fifteen-year-old Ryan: “I just felt so close to God when I was there. I wish I could keep that feeling alive at home, but I know I won’t.”[96]
In many ways, these are rich, potentially life-changing conclusions. Exposure to what God is doing among other believers around the world, being conscious about our wealth and the trappings thereof, and suspending “life as normal” for a few days as a way to deepen intimacy with God—who can argue with that?
However, one of the more troubling comments I heard from a group of majority world pastors who were giving me their frank perspective on North American short-term trips was this: “You talk about us to your churches back home in such demeaning ways.”
I pushed back. “Really? You usually come off as heroes in the reports I hear. You would think your churches were nearly perfect from what most short-termers say about you.”
They weren’t so sure. Our exaggerations about how locals are so dependent on these short-term teams and the long-term impact of the work, the jokes about the weird foods and the destitute conditions, and the exaggerated reports about what was accomplished often lead our brothers and sisters to feel demeaned.
I’m troubled by the way our simplicity plays out in statements about what happened in our lives as a result of our short-term sojourns. I expected more, particularly out of the adults, and especially the pastors. While we describe the dissonance we feel as we see our wealth juxtaposed against poverty, it seems to have little influence on the number of souvenirs we purchase or the choices we make when we get home. Participants rarely describe a significant change in how they think about God and their faith as a result of trips like these. In fact, rather than being challenged to see Christianity differently, participants talk most about how Christ and his bride are the same everywhere.
All too often, the short-term experience “eludes any significant reflection on the deeper assumptions and attitudes that structure one’s view of God, of themselves, and of host strangers.”[97] Terence Linhart reports that the Indiana group he studied demonstrated an “absence of theological reflection about their ministry programs they were conducting, no attempts to understand the incongruity between poverty and joy, and no awareness of new experiences that contradicted previous observations or interpretations.”[98]
Clearly, some participants experience deep transformation and come home with very different descriptions of what occurred within them. But why aren’t there more? Why are our takeaways always the same surface-level things? What can we do to make long-term transformation more common among the millions of North Americans who participate in short-term missions every year?
Concluding Thoughts
Our understanding and thinking about what we experience on short-term missions are often oversimplified. As a result, our expectations and motivations are inaccurate. Our desire to “Just do it” comes from a short-term perspective rather than a long-term vision. Our tendency to look for similarities often keeps us from seeing differences, and as a result we miss out on the more colorful picture that exists among the people of the world. Our reduction of the Bible to manageable concepts and cultural principles sucks the life out of the story of God. Our simplistic approaches to help poor people end up exposing our own poverty. Simplicity is endemic to short-term missions. It’s part of what it means to be an American. It’s part of what it means to be a North American evangelical. But it doesn’t have to be.
There’s an endearing simplicity to Jesus’s focus as he goes about his ministry. Yet a quick perusal of his use of parables and his upside-down approach to challenging the established religious system ought to warn any of us against labeling Jesus the epitome of simplicity. Our response should not be to see how complicated we can make short-term missions. Instead, we must acknowledge that we shouldn’t be content simply to look at what we can see with a quick glance. We’ve been on a journey to open our eyes wider in order to see what we may have missed before. Are you beginning to see it? Is your vision broadening?