Missions: Who Wants to Write To My Child?

           The line that has stuck with me is “Would you want a foreign adult writing regularly to your seven-year-old daughter?”  If it was me, absolutely not, I would demand some kind of investigation.  But B. Hunter Farrell is quoting a mother whose family is being aided by US mission giving.  I guess this sticks with me because our family “sponsored” a young person, and I was the foreign adult who could write regularly to a boy in another country who was of my son’s age-when my son was in elementary school.

          This ‘In Focus’ article from the Jan. 30 issue of the Presbyterian Outlook has stuck in my theological craw.  I know I threw out the term ‘selfie mission’, and a lot can be loaded into that.  But, as with any short-cut terminology, such an expression can quickly become something to tarnish all missions, to get sarcastic with.  And this is too serious for that.

          Now, all this comes at the end of a series of posts on the kingship of Jesus.  It is my opinion that the ‘divine right’ of kings that is found in Jesus has been horribly abused by ‘royals’ throughout history, that the US rebelled against that privilege in the American Revolution, but that such privilege continues to exist-maybe without the explicit notion of ‘divine right’, but with an implicit notion of superiority from those who ‘have’.

          For me, that stands behind gender privilege, racial privilege, economic privilege, and privileges I am not even conscious of, where someone identifies as superior to someone else, consciously or unconsciously, by some abstract concept.  Poking at that presupposed privilege can get some serious pushback.

          For me, the ‘shakened’ awakening in this case came from applying that cliché, walk a mile in another person’s shoes.  Of course, to truly do that is to equalize all our notions of the other person.  In this case, putting on the mantle of the protective parent.  No way would regular correspondence from adult members of my own family from up in Canada would be welcomed.  Certainly not unmonitored.

          Now consider when that kind of unwelcome correspondence is the lever by which your family may or may not receive the financial support that it needs to function on a day-to-day basis?  And this support-with requisite communication privilege-is being done in the name of Jesus?

But, from our point of view, we are helping.  And we are getting practical feedback.  And we are (hopefully) using a vetted agency to act as our eyes and ears on the ground to make sure our mission dollars are not getting wasted.  And who is that agency going to be most responsive to?  In a perfect world, we would like to say the clients they are serving.  But this is not a perfect world, and the success of the missions depends on "our" support.  So where do the interests of the agency lie?  

We got very professionally done packets of information reporting on our sponsored child. From what I remember, done in the school that the young person was attending, so I cannot state categorically that the correspondence was being run past the parents at all.

But if that were my child, and I was accepting this foreign adult exchange of correspondence, I would want whomever that adult was to know in no uncertain terms that I, as a responsible parent, was screening everything being written to and written by my child.  But it would be a desperately difficult set of circumstances that would get me to even agree to such an arrangement in the first place.  That's what I would demand.  Why should I expect the recipient of my mission dollars to do any different?

Peter Hofstra