Pathway to Partnership With Mission Discipleship

Another important document has been approved at a General Assembly, the policy statement of a Worldwide Ministries Division that was entitled as “Do Missions in Partnership.” The partnership is intrinsic to the Trinitarian nature of God and the incarnation of mission. Everybody should take part in God’s task in partnership with the Lord, with the agencies and the partner churches from around the world and with our hurting world. Shifting beyond the ingrained paternalistic outline to equal 2-way missions and the authentic partnership is the challenge before us.

Six essential mission attitudes on pathway to partnership of basic discipleship:

1. Humility - the mission now should start with the recognition, the repentance and the abandonment of the attitudes of pride, condescension, superiority and arrogance. Humility entailed the openness to take, to learn from & to be corrected by others.

2. Compassion - when we give money, feed the hungry, build churches, preach the gospel and resettle refugees without deep manners of compassion, we’re only the cruel imperialists. Having the mission is not one charity. It is the initial touching others with the sincere compassion, and empowering them to changing their lives.

3. Respect - if we approach other people with compassion, we truly respect their dignity as a human being and the gift of their ethnicity, religion and culture. The interest in and the respect for the practices, traditions and ideas that had been different from one another is being demonstrated.

 

4. Hospitality - it is more than the opening the door, then someone will say, “Make yourself comfortable, be at home.” Biblical hospitality is not yet practiced until a stranger will truly feel accepted, welcomed, and a contributing piece of the church, mission, country and the house.

5. Mutuality - the mission is to give and take, speaking and listening through the shared planning, decision-making, orientation, fiscal accountability and the pastoral support. It’s not that easy for the unequal partners to expand mutual mission together. The mission now will mean waiting for and then following the leadership and the initiative of the global partners.

6. Solidarity - lots of times, the distances or the differences from the others is so huge that mutuality is not possible, but we may be in unity with the others when we are able of emptying ourselves, stay back of our positions, sacrifice the privileges, put ourselves with the place of other individuals, identity with the real cause and then feel their pain.

The greatest fear will be that, we smugly thinking that we are now doing everything of this. The cause that is being familiar is that, we usually fail miserably with the international people from different nations, economic classes and ethnicities— both in one’s own country and from around the globe — have shared their painful experiences that result from insensitivities. A great deal of what has been taught and written had been learned from them too. In this present day of mission within the Church, it is time that the Churches should learn from their mission partners with the nature of real partnership.