Mission partners are the new face of mission
by Rich Preheim

Liliana Ocampo preaching at the Mennonite Christian Community of Peace in Armenia, Colombia. Ocampo was sent by the Colombian Mennonite Church Commission to serve in Ecuador.

Mennonite Mission Network is not the mission agency of Mennonites in Colombia, Indonesia or Brazil. Yet it sometimes became that when churches in other countries wanted to send, not just receive, missionaries but lacked the necessary structures and finances to do mission outside their boundaries.

“In the last couple of decades, mission energy has come from all continents and gone out to all continents,” said James R. Krabill, Mission Network senior executive for Global Ministries. “It’s no longer a question of just North Americans doing mission. The desire to do mission is evident around the world in a multitude of ways. The question is, how should we at the Mission Network relate to it?”

An initial answer to this globalization of mission was to treat Mission Network workers who come from a country other than the United States or Canada the same as North Americans. For example, when the Colombia Mennonite Church identified Ecuador as its first foreign mission field but did not yet have a mission agency, their workers became Mission Network employees. They went through the Mission Network application process and, once approved, received the agency’s benefits and followed its policies, just like a worker from Mennonite Church USA.
But that arrangement has been problematic. “We cannot be and don’t want to be the Grand Central Station of mission to the world,” Krabill said.

So instead, the Mission Network has looked at ways it can support Mennonites from other countries through a relationship with their national churches. Mennonite Mission Network currently supports about 50 of these mission workers, who are chosen by and work under the auspices of the national churches in their home countries.

Rather than being a sending agency for missionaries from outside of North America, the Mission Network wants to be a resource for churches in other countries to do their own mission work. In Colombia, that has meant helping create a national Mennonite mission agency and providing some administrative support. A similar effort is being explored with Indonesian Mennonites, who have sent a couple to Mongolia through the Mission Network. In Benin, the Mission Network helps to fund several local faculty and administrative positions at a Bible school for pastors and evangelists.

But Krabill emphasized that the Mission Network is not in the business of just sending money instead of workers. Relationships remain paramount, but they are different types of relationships. Rather than creating a division between mission subjects (or senders) and mission objects (or recipients), the goal is “all of us experiencing what it means to be the subject of mission,” he said.

“It’s listening to the partners and finding creative ways of doing mission together,” Krabill said. “That kind of partnership only emerges if you have a relationship. It doesn’t emerge if you only throw money at someone.”