Ah, You're Paid To Pretend You Love Us!

When I was in ministry, I got that vibe too. Your here because you have to be, it's your job. And really were they wrong? Ministers "Have to be" with some people, maybe not you, but somebody or they loose their job, right? But the truth is you were chosen to be with, and that says a little. Are we willing to enter peoples culture to bring kingdom light? Or are we only willing to enter the not so dark places, the places with people like us, who already have some light?
Some interesting comments made in this quote. It sounds like what we have been taight, live and practice in africa. However, these men are speaking to Westerners who need to realize they are missionaries to their own culture now, for the church as we know it now is very foreign to the community.

"Urban Neighbours of Hope (UNOH) in Melbourne and the InnerChange workers in San Francisco, identification with the poor is an absolutely fundamental principle to their mission among the poor. All the missionaries and workers in these two missionary orders voluntarily live under the poverty line and refuse to be paid by their organizations for their work among the poor lest the people say, “you are paid to be kind to us.” They choose to live like the people with all the struggles and problems that poverty creates for people without power and resources. This incarnational act not only creates credibility for the missionaries, but it thus creates the relational- social context within which they can meaningfully and humanly share their faith. Because it means that for all intents and purposes, they have actually become part of the people group that they are trying to reach and have thereby overcome a very significant cultural barrier to the communication of the gospel. To identify incarnationally with a people will mean that we must try to enter into something of the cultural life of a “people’; to seek to understand their perspectives, their grievances and causes, in other words their real existence, in such a way as to genuinely reflect the act of identification that God made with us in Jesus.........................


"......incarnational mission implies a real and abiding incarnational presence among a group of people. Quite simply, it means that if you want to reach the local gangstas, you are going to have to live where they live and hang out where they hang out. Or it might mean that if you want to plant a church in a given suburb, you should really think about living there. Why? Because you cannot become part of the organic life of a given community if you are not present to it and do not experience its cultural rhythms, its life, and its geography. ................This is true whether they are the local ravers or members of bohemian art cooperatives, sports dubs, common interest groups, or parent groups—we need to identify a whole lot more before we can expect to really share Jesus in a meaningful way with them."

(The Shape Of Things To Come: Innovation and Mission For The 21st- Century Church. Michael Frost & Aln Hirsch, Hendrickson, 2003. pp 38,39)