Special guest this week: Hunter Farrell
It’s disappointing when a plan falls through. That was the case when I was in seminary and our cultural learning trip to Israel-Palestine was foiled by the pandemic. A trip like that may truly be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so it was a real loss. But the experience of that seminary class—though suffering quite the downgrade from Holy Land to Zoom—was still rich and important.
The professor of that class was Hunter Farrell, director of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s World Mission Initiative. He brought us into conversation with Christian voices living in Israel-Palestine and helped us understand some of the complicated history in the region. What impressed me about the class was that it also covered close-to-home topics like race, privilege, and white fragility—in a group of students with very different opinions on these topics.
But Hunter (and his co-instructors) wisely and graciously helped us navigate these painful topics. I consider him one of the finest educators I’ve had the chance to learn from.
Why is he joining us at Harbor this week? Well, we are in the middle of a series of conversations in which we are deconstructing (and reconstructing?) some key pillars of our old evangelical faith. Last week we talked about missions and evangelism as the first half of this topic, and Hunter will join us this week to facilitate the second half. He has recently written a book that, among other things, explores how to “decolonize” mission work. Since the main problem most of us at Harbor have with mission work is its deep historical entwinement with colonization, this should be a fruitful exploration of how we might approach the work of “reconstructing” a sense of mission.
Here’s a bit more about the book from its official website:
Freeing Congregational Mission addresses a deepening crisis in mission as practiced by North American congregations. Many mission activities are more effective at satisfying church members than making a lasting difference, producing what’s too often consumer-oriented “selfie mission.” These practices are not just ineffective—they deviate from mission in the way of Jesus. The book proposes a theology of companionship focused on relationships that upend societal expectations; the kind of cultural humility evidenced by Jesus; and the insights of co-development.
We hope to see you this week as we ponder some new ways to think about “mission.” If you’d like to read more about Hunter’s work before (or after, or instead of) our Thursday gathering, you can check out this thoughtful article he wrote for the Presbyterian Outlook. Here are some excerpts:
When you carefully examine the list of highly popular mission activities, a curious contradiction emerges: these activities are highly inefficient and are quite expensive for the impacts they produce. These activities are often unsustainable and frequently fall short of best practice standards for how to care for children, strengthen families or develop communities. Orphanages, for example, have been widely discredited in the U.S. and Europe because children simply do not thrive in institutional environments. Yet orphanages – and these other mission industries – continue to grow because U.S. Christians continue to send them billions of dollars a year. According to numerous congregational mission leaders we interviewed, these mission activities are supported in many local churches because they stimulate participation and contributions.
We interviewed one mission director of a large mainline Protestant congregation described her role as more closely akin to that of a “social director on a cruise ship” than that of a mission leader… Our research and interviews with these congregational mission leaders surfaced a phenomenon we call “selfie mission” — when donor satisfaction replaces respectful service to neighbor as a primary criterion for our mission decision-making.
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One congregational mission leader described “selfie mission” and the colonial era’s enduring impact on his people’s mission work as “a riptide that pushes us off-course without us even realizing it.”
