The M-word
Around this time of year, we see lots of groups from U.S. high schools and colleges who come to the Dominican Republic for an “Alternative Spring Break.” Many of the Catholic schools organize what they call “outreach trips,” “service programs” and “immersion experiences,” or else maybe “work retreats” and “pilgrimages.” These names are all significant, and all of them refer to real values. It’s also significant, though, that many of the schools seem to go out of their way to avoid using the term “mission.”
Meanwhile, everybody else – and I don’t just mean the Evangelical Protestant groups with matching t-shirts – seems to be quite comfortable with the idea of doing “mission.” For example, the U.N. uses the term for its official visits to any country, and Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s socialist leader, uses it to describe his initiatives that run outside normal government structures.
What’s going on? Why are Catholics so uneasy with “mission,” while the word has become common currency in secular spheres? Perhaps many Catholics have become aware of the way that “mission” language has been associated (sometimes naively, sometimes not) with colonialism, intolerance and blindness to God’s presence in other religions throughout our history. In this light, the alternative terminology reflects a healthy desire to encounter other people(s) in a way that is respectful and careful.
At the same time, though, we run the risk of thinking that euphemisms are a solution, without necessarily acting all that differently than before. Another risk we run, even when our “immersion experiences” and “service trips” are carried out well, is that we might forget the centrality of mission itself in our identity and vocation as Church.
Mission is about more than respectful encounters with others; it is even about more than solidarity with others. Mission includes all of those things, but beyond them, it is about the commitment to ever-expanding communion with others. If other types of encounter can create awareness or bring help across borders, mission, at its best, creates new relationships in which all kinds of borders (both interior and exterior) begin to dissolve.
The challenge, then, is to responsibly recover the value of mission. Far from being stuck in a Crusades mentality, many Catholic missionary groups have developed deeply respectful approaches – for example, the Archdiocese of Miami’s lay missionary group, Amor en Acción, is rooted in a theology of “mission-in-reverse” (see www.amorenaccion.com for more).
From an appropriate theology of mission, we have something important to offer. Communion, the fruit of relationships built through mission, is more necessary than ever in today’s fragmented and increasingly unequal world. Also, now that mission-language has become so common in non-religious spheres, perhaps what we have learned from our past mistakes, and the more responsible frameworks and practices we have developed for mission, can be helpful to other people of good will with different sorts of missionary projects.
Photo: “Content at Home” by jjoiv from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)
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