Sharing

Guatemala mission network activists spent a couple of hours Thursday sharing partnership perspectives. Among the familiar partnership issues that folks raised:

- Efforts to try to engage their (U.S.) congregations and to try to redirect the impulse among folks in our congregations and even ourselves to do projects.

- Areas in which U.S. folks had engaged in projects: Habitat for Humanity, Living Water for the World, medical mission and health promotion, scholarships mainly for young people to go to junior high and senior high school, theological reflection, and prayer.

- Another type of project were “circle of love” projects in which a U.S. church congregation, a Guatemalan partner, and eventually an East Asian partner joined together to work on a mission project in Africa.

- “Reverse” visits and fighting the impulse to turn into tour guide and show visiting Guatemalans mainly tourist sites.

- Difficulties communicating with Guatemalan partners – both broad difficulties staying in touch and more specific misunderstandings – apparently heightened when the folks in the U.S. congregation know no Spanish.

Two men at the gathering made other points. An associate pastor from Georgia said mission partnership offer Christians many opportunities:
- to show Christ’s love
- to become disciples of Christ
- to strengthen families (though intergenerational mission trips)
- to advocate for social justice

The other man told an intercultural exchange story. He told about a mission trip that a man who fished to help support him and his family in Guatemala took to Minnesota. Folks at the storyteller’s church were excited to take the Guatemala visitor out fishing in a Minnesota lake. But they did so on a lake in which fisherpeople had to throw their catch back in. After a long dry spell, the Guatemalan visitor finally caught a decent fished. At this point, it was very difficult, however, for the Minnesota Presbyterians, to explain to their visitor the concept of throwing the fish back and to persuade him to do so.

-- Perry