Really, Missionaries in Canada? Why?

“I’m the kind of person Christians hate!” To many of us, that may seem like a way to shut down a conversation, but for ServeCanada missionary Dan Byrne, it opened a door. By asking some follow-up questions, Dan realised that the person he was talking to could sum up all their interactions with the church with pain and rejection.

Dan was happily willing to provide a counterexample.

He explains that when we work with people on the margins, we need to anticipate rejection. On the margins, relationships are especially delicate, fragile, and volatile. When people are exclusively immersed in unstable relationships, they often resort to rejection as self-protection. It’s safe to say that Dan has been treated with vocal skepticism as a form of testing. People are asking: “Do I really matter to you?” or “Do you really care?” He describes what he does as “messy ministry” – when simply being present is a high value, he finds himself involved in a wide range of real-life situations.

In this case, “real-life” means poverty, addiction, disability, desperation, and a host of related food and housing insecurities. Dan pointed out that people on the street often do not fit in well with established churches. In many cases, there is a wide chasm of life-experience between people living on the street and people sitting in a pew.

Dan shared the story of a woman whom he called Cleo. She is an addict in recovery. One night, the house church he’s leading visited Cleo, and together they performed a kind of intervention. Cleo was willing to try to quit drugs, but admitted she needed help. An application was submitted to the EFCC’s Benevolence Fund, and money from the fund helped to get Cleo into Teen Challenge, an addiction recovery centre. At the time of our conversation, Cleo had been sober for 8 months.

The inner-city environment can be difficult for people in safe, established neighbourhoods to even relate to. When we sense any kind of disconnect, it’s important to remain curious. Often when engaging in ministry like this, it’s tempting to come in providing answers, or solving problems. Yet people can sense very quickly when they have become merely a project rather than a person.

To prevent this perception (or actuality!), we need to ask questions about our patterns and expectations, recognising that the familiar structures we’re comfortable with may not connect with others’ experiences or needs. Dan made the point that, for several of the people in his life, the only kind of church they’ll ever know is the one that is brought to them. This necessitates deploying a diversity of models of church, gathering and support.

A key insight from our conversation, one worth paying particular attention to, is that the word “sinner” is often experienced as a way to “other” those it’s directed at. It is perceived as an accusation – an apparent contrast to the “saints” within the church. While it is often meant as a humble, equalising admittance – “sinner” is, after all, a descriptor which applies to all of us – that is not how it’s heard. To those already living with a profound sense of guilt, brokenness, or shame it can feel that we are piling on condemnation. They already know they’re “bad news” – we’re called to show them the good news of the gospel. It turns out that there are a lot of phrases like that in church circles, which accidentally make people feel disconnected, isolated, or unwelcome. It’s worth taking extra care to make sure that our language matches our intentions.

Truthfully, these are all elements of cross-cultural ministry. Dan cherishes our ability to tell stories to enhance awareness of each other. It also enhances our awareness of the needs and the opportunities that abound around us.

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