There are at lest three questions every helping venture should ask:
1. Could I get to the heart of the issue rather than ONLY help the surface issue?
Street missions are necessary. They must be some of the closest human efforts to God’s heart. A further look will show that most of the homeless people we seek to help on the streets suffer from a number of mental illnesses.
Ronald Reagan closed down most institutions that helped these people. They released nearly all of them to the streets without a support system. It went by with little notice. One of the arguments was we weren’t helping them anyway.
One of the great facts of our times is we now have medications which can help a great deal.
I have been involved as a speaker with a group that majors on helping people with mental illness by spreading the word. A deeper effort than feeding the homeless (though that must be done) would be to begin lobbying the government to reinstitute institutional care for many of the people living on the streets.
I personally believe that we are going to be judged by the manner with which we have dealt with the mentally ill on the street. We are so used to it we overlook how severe the problems are.
Is this effort going to be harmful or helpful in the long run?
I was part of sending a team to southern Mexico near the Guatemalan border. The team was to build a medical clinic for a missionary. The missionary suggested that we hire local craftsman for the work but our team insisted on doing the work. When it came time to use the clinic or come to our outreach meetings no one came.
They were a very poor village and unemployment was high. They felt our ministry team was taking work out of their hands. We reviewed our ministry when everyone got home and we decided that we were building things just for our high and had not considered how it would impact the ones we sought to show God’s love.
In all future ventures we raised money to pay local craftsman and our teams were servants for them. We did as little actual crafts work as possible. The outcome was we saw the clinics used later and 1000 people came to know Christ at one of the outreach meetings.
I am convinced that a lot of missions work is as harmful as helpful. And missional efforts aren’t about us but the ones we serve.
Am I the best one for the effort?
I may see a major need but I am I the best one to carry it out? I think we ought to see if someone isn’t already doing what we needs to be done in a better way. If so let’s help them.
I wonder sometimes if Christian efforts wouldn’t be better handled by volunteering to help the Red Cross, or working with already existent groups already trying to fight cancer.
It seems to me we spend a lot of time building new structure when there are others doing it better than we could.
Maybe it would be better to financially support someone else to go on a missions trip rather than get myself there. I did prison work for awhile. I had to conclude that often as a pasty white redhead I wasn’t as relevant as others of my friends. I found my better role was to recruit the kinds of leaders who could relate to the prison culture. I found people who were far more effective than me and I fulfilled a function that allowed them to carry out the aim.
I think we ought to be as missional as we can possibly be but these three questions ought to be asked before we launch too far ahead.
