Jesus is Hungarian

Missions is a tricky thing to navigate these days.

For a start, we have the heritage of many missional fathers and mothers. Some we write a good many books about. These are the ones that sacrificed everything, waved goodbye to family never to see them again. They are usually the ones that gave their lives for the cause and sometimes never saw the results of their hard work.

Some of our missional ancestors we choose to keep a bit more ‘under the carpet’, so to speak. They are usually the ones who left a bit more of their home culture imprinted on the receiving culture than we now think is acceptable. They sometimes treated the new culture they had found as ‘less than’ and don’t seem to have recognised their own fallibilities. Or at least that’s how it’s shown in the writings we have from them. In New Zealand alone, the history and role of missionary in our past is a messy one, fraught with nuance and pain.

Another more present part of missions that is hard to negotiate, is that in current Western culture, it’s not really an acceptable idea to go to a different part of the world and share your beliefs in the hope that they stick. Because there’s a long history of missionaries taking too much and leaving too little, which can leave generations of damage to heal. And we’ve rightfully placed this under the heading of ‘colonialism’. Gross.

Now imagine that’s the heritage that this term missionary has, and imagine you have been called to wear that same title. This expansive past and this confusing present day understanding can cause some of us who now follow in these footsteps to hold the term ‘missions’ or ‘missionary’ loosely.

But I’m of the mind that missions, like all other things in the world, can be and is being redeemed.

For me, the most beautiful part about missions is connecting different groups of people together through a shared life, through shared stories. The ways that our thinking can change when we meet and interact with foreign stories is a beautiful dynamic that is woven into the very fabric of missions. Think of an intercultural marriage. Sometimes that’s visual, like when we see a black man walking around town holding the hand of a white woman. It’s a beautiful thing to see, but what we don’t see the hard work that is involved when combining two very different cultures. That deserves genuine respect. I just think of the work it has taken to maintain and grow my marriage to my husband who is from the same heritage and shares the same skin colour, but grew up in a town 4 hours away. That was hard enough! But it is exponentially harder when combining very different cultures, not to mention the differences that come when growing up with different colour skin.

Acknowledging our differences but choosing to marry them together is a beautiful thing, worthy of respect.

As someone who is living in a foreign land, when I write, there are tentative questions connoted in each post, in each letter. “Are you interested in staying connected? Do you wish to see a different world through my eyes? Are you interested in learning a viewpoint or experiencing a world outside your own?” We as missionaries are facilitating a marriage between you the reader, and the foreign land we are called to. We are one of many connecting lines helping people to see a viewpoint that may not be their typical one.

But here’s the pearl, here’s the kicker. As missionaries, we are also to be the watchers and the listeners. We also need to desire to see a different world and to learn a new viewpoint. We also have to want to experience a world outside our own and see the gold in the different way things are done. We actually have more to learn and less to offer than we think, and the sooner we learn that, the more useful we can be.

I did not bring Jesus to Hungary. He was already here. My job, and the job of other missionaries, is to find where he is working, and work alongside him.

And in Hungary, I’ve actually found him to be Hungarian.