A long time ago, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), changed its understanding of what it means to be a missionary. Some people think that the role of ELCA missionaries is to convert people to Christianity. It isn’t.
Rather, the ELCA understands mission work to be work of service we do in accompaniment with people. The ELCA doesn’t “send” missionaries anywhere – rather ELCA missionaries go where they are invited, trusting that communities are best able to determine their own needs and when and how missionaries might help.
There are ELCA missionaries serving as teachers and doctors, community organizers and young adult volunteers. ELCA missionaries believe that mission work is mutually beneficial – that people in the ELCA have special gifts and skills to share as do the community members where they serve. (To find out more about ELCA missionaries, and how you might become a Young Adult in Global Mission, check this link.)
Next week, Tom Schauer, Barbara Payson, Jen Steinberg, and Sue Eliasen and I will accompany youth from Faith and the community on a mission trip to Scranton, PA. We will help paint rooms, fix steps, repair fences, build decks, and who knows what else. We have been invited by residents of Scranton, and our work of service will include the things they have asked us to do.
As we meet in devotional time daily with our youth groups, a main topic of conversation will be about how this particular mission work has been mutual – how we too have been blessed in the midst of our service.
One exciting piece in preparing to head out on a mission trip is that we don’t know how we will be blessed even as we are blessing others. But it will happen! It will happen.
In Christ,
Pastor Jen