Reassessing the Mission Volunteer Movement

 By Paul Jeffrey
Tegucigalpa , Honduras

     During the thirty months since Hurricane Mitch flooded Central America , hundreds of volunteer teams have descended upon Nicaragua and Honduras . Many came from churches in the United States . At times the region’s threadbare airports filled wall-to-wall with herds of pale-skinned gringos wearing matching T-shirts proclaiming “Jesus for Honduras ,” “Mission to Nicaragua 2000,” and “Christ Loves Central America.” As their patient shepherds ushered them past the hordes of beggars and baggage handlers into waiting vans, they embarked on an adventure of solidarity that is an increasingly important facet of church life in the U.S. It’s also a phenomenon that Latin Americans are still trying to understand.

    The airports here are quieter these days; most of the money for reconstruction projects has been spent. The geographical focus of volunteerism is shifting away to new disasters or returning to traditional destinations like Mexico and Haiti , where poverty, proximity, and paternalism combine to create an ideal setting for North American mission tourists.

    Volunteer teams have multiplied dramatically in recent years as reservations about mission bureaucracies in places like New York and Louisville have convinced many at the grassroots to get involved personally in mission. They are less excited about sending their dollars off to faceless mission boards and agencies, and, encouraged by the testimony of people who sit beside them in the pew but who went off to have a  “life-changing experience” in a Third World country, increasingly  interested in “doing mission” themselves. 

    While this hands-on approach to mission has long characterized the outreach efforts of many independent faith missions, its increasing prevalence within bigger denominations represents something of a conceptual shift in how mainline churchgoers understand mission. It’s becoming less something they raise money for and entrust to a professional missionary class and more something they do for themselves. In addition to volunteer groups, the rise of the internet and the increasing popularity of direct covenant relationships between churches have spun the locus of decision making about mission outward from the ecclesiastical power centers. As a result, plotting denominational mission strategies has become more difficult, even more so because mainline mission executives remained in denial about this paradigm shift for many years. When the conflict grew intolerable, they tried in vain to take control of the volunteer movement. Today, most have come to accept the trend as a legitimate, decentralized movement which they can at best try to nudge in positive directions. 

    For Latin Americans looking north, this is an important shift to grasp if they are going to understand the arriving horde, as well as make sense of altered financial and personal relationships with U.S. churches. Gone, for example, are the days of “block grants” when mission boards in the north sent chunks of money to churches in the south to spend as they please. In general, northern denominational and ecumenical agencies have less money these days to give to programs here. Yet, at the same time, most denominations have more mission personnel available to send, although an inordinate number are short-term volunteers and many come abroad to help handle groups from back home. This stepped up recruitment and training of new missionaries has come partly in response to conservative criticism that mainline mission boards were abandoning the fight for lost souls in the world. When these developments are combined with the withdrawal from Latin America of several European church agencies that perceive more desperate need in Africa , poor churches to the immediate south of the United States have fewer options today for funding their programs. 

    The volunteer movement obviously represents a potential source of funds, yet perhaps at a higher cost. Instead of filling out project applications and evaluations, southern churches now have to host gringos and tolerate their often paternalist behavior in order to shake loose money for programming. Moreover, those bucks are more likely to come designated to particular projects that have caught the fancy of visitors, as contrasted with the freedom that was associated with the funding patterns of yesteryear. This isn’t necessarily all bad, however. Having gringos demand to see where their donations go could help foster greater accountability and transparency in some southern churches and church development agencies that have abused the trust of northern churches or misled mission agency representatives for too long. And it may yield more money at the end of the day, as affluent volunteers and their well-off congregations back home get excited about seeing firsthand how their surplus wealth can make a difference in helping people in the south survive or even experience some of the abundant life that’s promised to them in the gospels. 

    Despite its financial benefits, a few in the south refuse to buy into the new pattern, intolerant of abusive northerners who seek out the instant emotional high of personal charity as opposed to investing in long-term empowerment. They cite examples like a United Methodist Volunteer in Mission team from South Carolina that last year came El Estribo, a poor village in southern Honduras , and insisted on handing out $50—in U.S. paper money—to each family, despite objections by local church workers. Not surprisingly, households headed by single mothers were left out of the group’s largesse. 

    Such paternalistic insensitivity motivates some in this region to take the high ground and stick to development and evangelistic practices that empower the poor without exposing them to the embarrassing rich. That may work for now, but at least within church circles there is no long-range promise that the necessary funds will always be available to pay salaries and fill the gas tanks of the ubiquitous four-wheel drive church-owned vehicles. As frustrating as donor-driven aid can be, there are few other viable options available. 

    Others in the south are shifting gears in order to embrace the new volunteers, perhaps hiding their face at times as they shuffle them through the airport, but nonetheless accepting that volunteer groups represent the immediate future of northern mission rather than a throwback to a Kiplingesque past. Even more importantly, when many of my Latin American church friends talk about U.S. volunteer groups, they speak in evangelistic, even proselytizing terms. They see the flow of gringos through Latin America as an opportunity for affluent northerners to be converted to the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ. “They come here thinking they’re going to give something to us, but many discover that instead they receive, from people who have almost nothing, a new experience of hope, faith, and love,” says Dámaris Albuquerque, executive director of the Nicaraguan Council of Churches. 

    For many team members, that throws the volunteer experience on its head. Usually motivated to join the groups in order to do something for the poor, their paternalism comes apart when they meet articulate poor people who often believe in God more than they do and who want a world where north-south relations are characterized by justice rather than charity. 

    A central task of volunteer coordinators is how to facilitate that encounter. A good start is to help volunteers overcome the Edifice Complex by disabusing them of the notion that what’s most important for the group is the classroom or clinic or house that they’re going to build, and in its place insist that the real purpose is pastoral accompaniment. That doesn’t mean they have to spend all their time holding hands in prayer sessions. More likely, it means hammering together in the sun and laughing at each other’s jokes even if they don’t understand them. It means living in the village or neighborhood where the people live. 

    We don’t have to leave behind the hammers and saws. For some reason, building a physical structure is an essential excuse to get many people to participate. Ask who in a U.S. church wants to go on a fact-finding delegation and spend their days interviewing experts in some obscure corner of the world and few will raise their hands. Ask who wants to go build a clinic or rebuild an earthquake-ravaged house, and the raised hands multiply. We can utilize that excitement to entice people into coming along who would never consider going on something designed to educate or change them. 

    Two thousand people came to Honduras in the last two years under the auspices of a Church World Service reconstruction program that tried, with some success, to break the bad habits of numerous volunteer programs. A few who participated told me they were veterans of as many as two dozen volunteer trips in recent years. They described the parish driveway they paved in Costa Rica or the clinic roof they repaired in Jamaica . Then they admitted that their trip to Honduras was the first time they’d worked side-by-side with local folks. And they loved it. 

    Why has it taken so long? Why do we send volunteers out into the world to work for the poor when they could be working with the poor?

    Fault lies both north and south, yet it’s time for it to change. It’s time to quit treating volunteers as spoiled children, and get them out of fancy hotels and into tents and dirt-floored chapels in the countryside and urban barrios. 

    Some work team chaperones will argue that the risk is too high. They’ll claim that disease and delinquency reign in Third World communities, and they’ll insist they can’t push people that far out of their comfort zones. I argue we’ve got to stop protecting volunteers from interacting with the poor. Two dozen volunteer trips without working side-by-side with the poor is not mission. And as long as the poor remain objects of volunteer trips rather than joint subjects in a common enterprise of faith, then it’s never going to be mission. 

    At the same time, some southern hosts will be uncomfortable with changing the pattern. They’ve practiced their smile for years, learned how not to take offense at insensitivity, and in exchange received personal rewards for their association with northerners. They get invited to speak in the north, their kids obtain scholarships in the north, and as long as the gringos are in town they usually eat better food. As we initiate or renew north-south volunteer partnerships, we must be careful not to simply provide employment to local gringo wannabe elites—or northern missionaries living in the south—who act in the name of the poor but actually place barriers to true encounters because it threatens their privileged role as interlocutor. 

    Many people who live in villages and neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Mitch and rebuilt with volunteer assistance have told me they had a great experience of hosting the church teams. Not surprisingly, few started their recounting by describing the buildings the foreigners helped construct; in this evaluation that the poor make of the groups, what stands out is that they felt accompanied. At a time of great trauma—both that of the hurricane as well as that of accelerating globalization—the poor, simply put, felt important, even loved, from the very moment the overloaded church van pulled in among the shacks. “They didn’t come to tell us how to do things, which is what the gringos have always done in the past,” said Toribio Dubón, a peasant leader in Nueva Victoria, a rebuilt village in the Honduran province of Santa Barbara . “These people came to sweat in the sun with us, to listen, to treat us as equals. We felt blessed by their presence beside us.” 

    According to Don Tatlock, coordinator of the Church World Service program in Honduras , if quickly throwing up housing was the sole priority, church leaders “could ask folks to stay home and just send us the money they were going to spend on airplane tickets.” Instead, Tatlock argues something else is at stake. “What’s more important than how many cement blocks they lay in a week or two are the relationships they build with the poor and what they learn about why people are poor. And by giving up their time and money to come so far to work with the survivors of Mitch, they’re conveying a sense of love that pays off in increased self-esteem and encouragement among villagers. In the long-run, that’s a lot more important than a few more cement blocks here and there.” 

    Nurturing such a healthy encounter requires work at both ends of the journey. Church workers in the south face the complex challenge of empowering local hosts, be they poor peasants in the countryside or urban barrio dwellers, to participate in the encounter in a way that allows them to feel equal to the northerners. There’s obviously a financial gap, but bridging it by simply giving added value to poverty through spiritualizing it simply won’t work. That’s a cheap trick to romanticize the misery of others. What is it, then, that the poor majority in the south really have to offer to affluent northerners? Before the groups arrive, southerners need to reflect together on this question, otherwise the reciprocity that many see as the ideal for this kind of encounter will remain elusive. 

    Northerners venturing south need to know that times have changed in the south. The theologies of liberation that emerged from this region in the seventies and eighties had at their center the experience of the organized poor who suffered repression at the hands of economic elites and their U.S.-financed Praetorian guards. Yet today Latin America is a different place, and in this millennium the theologies with relevance are those that emerge from the excluded, the excess poor who have no place in a globalized economy. They are today not repressed so much as simply nonpersons. Who is God for them? If we from the north are to open our own spiritual and theological lives up to refreshment from the south, we must get close to the people who ask that question. In so doing, we will empower them by simply treating them as persons. And they will make us uncomfortable, as they should. 

    That discomfort, in turn, must lead back home to more than romantic statements about a “life-changing experience.” One of the major pastoral and educational tasks facing the U.S. church today is giving folks the tools with which to process and interpret their firsthand encounters with the grave economic and racial disparities that characterize our hemisphere, whether that disparity is manifested in Memphis or Managua . Sunday school curriculum should be designed to shepherd work team participants through theological and cultural preparation for their trip, and after they return guide them through a process of discerning exactly how their life is going to be changed. 

    The Mennonite Central Committee—which sent 40 “Work and Learn Teams” to help rebuild housing in post-Mitch Honduras —is doing just that. Late this year MCC will release “Connecting Peoples,” a guide for pastors and local church leaders who want to lead groups or establish sistering relationships. According to Daryl Yoder-Bontrager, co-director of MCC’s Latin America-Caribbean Department, it will be a reworked version of a 1997 guide that instructed group leaders how to prepare for their experience abroad. This time around, the manual will include suggestions for converting the trip into concrete solidarity at home. “We’ve become very aware in the last couple of years that although groups were having a great experience, when they returned home they possessed few tools to help them get a hold on their experience and discern where to go from there,” said Yoder-Bontrager. 

    Work team planners from both south and north need to discern together ways to equip returning volunteers with a variety of options for them to convert their emotional experience into concrete action. This could include buying fair trade coffee for their congregation’s social hour, working to close the School of the Americas , or educating themselves and others about the complex realities of hemispheric relations. Not to offer constructive outlets for the energy generated by the trip will leave participants who feel a need to “do something” no other choice than to fall back on old paternalistic models such as sending money to particular families or congregations in the community they visited. 

    This integration of more political responses will be easier if the whole church family gets involved in the volunteer movement. Many volunteer programs around the U.S. have been scorned by progressives who see such work trips as politically unsophisticated. They prefer a Witness for Peace-style delegation filled with talking heads and a final vigil at the U.S. embassy before flying back to the U.S. As a result, in many places the volunteer movement has been left in the hands of people whose political, cultural and linguistic skills are minimal, often conservatives nurtured in a culture of paternalism toward the poor. Charity and justice dearly need each other; if people of more varied ideological backgrounds can participate, the experience of volunteer groups will be greatly enhanced. 

    Despite what some might consider the deficiencies of the movement to date, the commitment and energy displayed by volunteers over recent years are exemplary. They’ve been willing to leave their homes behind and travel to strange places for a week or two of hard work at the service of the poor. Their movement is here to stay. The responsibility for making it a force for long-lasting change—both in the south and the north—falls on the entire church community.

 
Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America . He lives in Honduras .