An African Baptist Response to the IMB: Part 2

[Bruce Gourley]

An African Baptist Respone to the IMB: Part 2
by Patrick Dube, Botswana

Identifying of needs on the mission field
More often than not, the identification of needs on the mission field is done by the self-acclaimed experts, the missionaries. It is not done in consultation with the local leaders who obviously understand their own needs better than foreigners. This gives us the impression that we don’t know our own needs and/or we don’t know what we are doing. We get the impression that we are incapable of thinking for ourselves and coming up with possible solutions before looking to the mission agency to send help. Consultation with the local leadership would help internalize possible solutions first and exhausting our own resources. Lack of consultation produces a heavy dependency syndrome.

Recruitment Exercise of sending agencies
The recruitment of missionary personnel is done by the sending agency with little or no consultation with the recipient Conventions/Unions on the mission field. For years we’ve seen missionaries arrive at our local airports without any prior announcement and our leaders are expected to go to the airport to welcome them without even knowing why they have come. Often the caliber of mission personnel sent to the field are those who are incompetent and who also come with a spirit of arrogance combined with ignorance.

Orientation processes of sending agencies
The sending agencies have to recognize that their orientation material must be accurate and contextualized. Anthropologists may have vast knowledge of how people behave in certain parts of the world and thereby provide guidelines for doing missions within a particular context, but this does not mean the missionary personnel do not need input from the recipient cultural group among whom they will minister. Recipient Conventions/Unions must be a part of the orientation process. The IMB provides orientation for its personnel for 6weeks at the MLC in Virginia, then when their missionaries go to their respective mission fields they are in language school for 6 months before deployment. While that is good in as far as it serves its limited purpose, more input from the local Conventions/Unions can be made.

Orientation processes of recipient Conventions/Unions
The onus is also on the recipient Conventions/Unions to draw up programs of orientation for missionary personnel. We know how best missionaries can operate effectively in the towns and villages of our nations. Conventions/Unions must take the initiative to meaningfully give orientation to missionaries but the problem we have is that many of our leaders of Conventions/Unions are not committed enough to the process of orientating missionaries. Many of them have an inferiority complex and see missionaries as “miniature messiahs” who have come to do the work for them and some even have the mentality that “the white man knows it all”. This is an unfortunate reality and a bitter pill for local leaders to swallow.

[William Thornton]

[jerryl]

[Sandy]