The Mission Diaries

It was sometime in late Fall of 1988. The Mexico City Church was approaching the end of its first full calendar year, having been planted in October of 1987. The original mission team members, plus a few of the new small group leaders who had been converted during that first year, were all gathered at a very special restaurant for a very special celebration. The restaurant was La Hacienda de los Morales. The occasion was the celebration of the young church’s 100th baptism. There was something unusual about the celebration, though: at that point in time we had only seen about 90 people baptized! Nevertheless, the evangelist and leadership group decided that this should be a celebration of faith, not of sight! And so we celebrated that 100th baptism, a few weeks before it actually happened!

Such was the spirit of the Mexico City mission. As we have said in a previous post, the Mexico City Church was planted by a group of missionaries who were deeply convinced about God’s vision for that city. One of our favorite scriptures was Proverbs 29: 18 “Where there is no vision, the people perish”. We didn’t have the Message Bible in those days, but I like the way it renders this passage:

If people can’t see what God is doing,
they stumble all over themselves;
But when they attend to what he reveals,
they are most blessed.

As we approach the beginning of a new year, actually of a new decade, let us try to capture not an abstract vision for our lives, or one that is the product of our own ambitions or imagination. Rather, let us focus on what God is doing and attend to what He is trying to teach us.

May you be richly blessed in 2010!

J De Anda

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As our readers are aware, I enjoy studying about the history of mission work in other denominations. Recently I came across an article about the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), a missions initiative launched in 1886 that had global impact for a whole generation. Several things are interesting about this movement.

1. It got started at a conference in Massachusetts, organized by famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody. However, it really came out of a grassroots movement initiated by some of the attendees at that conference. Following a series of meetings and talks, about 100 students pledged themselves to become missionaries.

“The SVM formed organizations on college, university and seminary campuses across the nation. Students signed pledge cards stating their intention to become missionaries and joined weekly meetings to study missions. The watchword of the movement illustrates the boldness and optimism of the Christian youth of that era: “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.” ”

It is interesting to see that we of the International Churches of Christ (ICOC) espoused the same mission statement of world evangelism.

2. The SVM was tremendously succesful for thirty-something years. Thousands of students were recruited to serve as missionaries around the world. Besides the impact on churches, the movement received secular recognition: its first leader John R. Mott was awarded the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize for helping bring cooperation and reconciliation between Christians from nations that had been at war.

One of the interesting aspects of their work was that, following a conference in Edinburgh in 1910, “…the denominations and mission organizations made numerous agreements that divided the work on the mission field. Their goal was to collaborate, avoid the duplication of work, and thereby bring about the evangelization of the world within a generation.” This is quite similar to the ICOC’s initial strategy of dividing the mission work into “world sectors” in 1988.

3. What happened to this movement? “Following the end of World War I in 1918, the SVM found itself in a new world. The optimism that was so common before the war was now passé. In its place, the 1920s witnessed the rise of cynicism and secularism. Protestant denominations also experienced divisive battles between theological liberals and conservatives who vied for control of the churches. These divisions undermined the unity upon which the SVM had been built. Moreover, many SVM leaders, who now had a few decades of experience under their belts, began to feel that “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation” was not a realistic goal. Doing missions properly would require more than, as SVM leader Sherwood Eddy put it, “a Paul Revere’s ride across the world.” The SVM declined throughout the 1920s and, with the Great Depression, was moribund by the early 1930s.”

Sadly, it sounds like the movement rode the crest of an era of great idealism and vision, and was eventually infected by society’s growing skepticism. I believe that this is a warning to us. A lot of the initial thrust of the ICOC came from the idealism and social transformations of the 60′s. But the world around us has changed, and not all of it for the better. The present generation is being raised in a cultural climate of post-modern moral relativity and self-indulgence. As a movement, we are exposed to the same risks as the SVM was in the early 20th Century.

Let us not give up!

J De Anda

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I write this because yesterday marked a special anniversary. On July 25, 1987, I landed in Mexico City with my wife Mimi and our children Ruben (7), Bianca (5) and Darren (21 mos.) We had left Boston on July 13 after a whirlwind of activity: packing, preparing paperwork, re-structuring our ministry group, and finally a big farewell Sunday service! We had spent two weeks in Puerto Rico with our families. Some of that time had been tense because I knew my parents had serious misgivings about our decision to move to Mexico, but they wouldn’t talk about it.

I had been praying since June about my own fears about moving to Mexico City. From a non-faith point of view, it was a crazy idea. The city was overpopulated and known worldwide for its smog and crime problems. My son suffered from asthma. Although I had a job, from a professional perspective it was a step backward from my original career plans. Because he didn’t speak Spanish fluently, our son would have to repeat second grade. And, ministry-wise, we were up against a very traditional religious culture. We didn’t have a place to live, we didn’t know anybody there, and, although we were Hispanic, we didn’t really know the local culture…

So on that Saturday afternoon of July 25, 1987, we stepped off the plane, went through immigration, luggage retrieval, and customs, and took a taxi to the hotel where the rest of the mission team was staying. After we had settled in, the whole group came over to our room to welcome us and cheer us up. They were all so excited … I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was scared and wanted to go back!

Little did we know that we would end up having to stay in a hotel for about a month! To rent a house or apartment in Mexico City, you need a cosigner, someone who owns real estate property. But we didn’t know anybody!

Well, everything worked out in the end. A member of a local Church of Christ cosigned for us (for a fee!) We found a bilingual school for the kids. The house that we rented ended up becoming the meeting place for a whole house church group for three years! The institution that I worked in was full of wonderful people and I felt that I could make a valuable contribution to their research. And the church … well, God took care of that and you can read about it in this blog! The rest, as they say… is history!

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Time for some history! MCA Missions is part of a movement of churches, generally called the International Churches of Christ, that has been very succesful in planting new congregations all over the world for the last two decades. As mentioned in previous posts, our mission strategy in Latin America, and also in other continents, was to build pillar churches in the major metropolitan areas, and from there to spread out to the smaller cities of each region. The majority of the church plantings during our first “wave” of missions was done by first world, English-speaking missionaries who learned the languages and adapted to the local cultures of the planting sites. However, many second- and third-wave plantings were done by native missionaries, converted and trained during the first wave.

In contrast to the mission strategies of other organizations, our work has focused on large urban centers. However, at some point we will have to reach out to and into the remote villages and peoples who have little contact with the rest of “westernized” Latin America. When I think about that, I become more impressed with the work of other missionaries, in other times when the world was not as small as it seems now. One such man was Adoniram Judson.

Adoniram Judson

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The history of the International Churches of Christ points to a 1979 meeting in the house of Bob and Pat Gempel as the origin of this worldwide movement. Thirty people were at that meeting. Each one was called out by young evangelist Kip McKean to be a totally commited disciple of Jesus every day and in every aspect of their lives. By 1988, the Boston Church of Christ (originally called the Lexington Church of Christ) had grown to a Sunday attendance of 4200 people. The congregation had sent mission teams and planted churches in London and Chicago (1982), New York City (1983), Providence and Toronto (1985), Paris , Johannesburg and Stockholm (1986), and Bombay, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires (1987). The church had also sent teams to rebuild pre-existing congregations in Atlanta, San Francisco and Kingston (Jamaica).

Cover of the 1988 World Missions Seminar booklet

In September of 1988, disciples of Christ from around the world convened in Boston for the World Missions Seminar, entitled God Almighty Reigns. Words cannot fully describe the electricity in the air during that weekend. The Mexico City Church sent its first group of ministry interns. These were three young men and three young women who had been converted during the first year of the mission, and were now being trained to become the future leaders of churches. During that historic weekend, they would grasp for the first time a real vision of what was to become a truly international movement….[to be continued]

 J De Anda 

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