At my ordination the people of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles presented me with Gracias: A Latin American Journal by Henri J. M. Nouwen. This slender volume, in which Nouwen chronicles his six-month journey to Bolivia and Peru to work with the Maryknoll missioners, continues to be the story at the heart of my theology of mission.

In his journal Nouwen tells of leaving his rather comfortable position as professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School to go to South America to learn Spanish, to learn of the people’s struggles and to help them. He correctly understood such goals would not be easily accomplished. What he did not anticipate was the extent to which he, and his understanding of mission, would be re-shaped. 

As he struggled to find his place in his new setting he found that others often helped him more than he helped them. He came to understand that “what I have to offer others is not my intelligence, skill, power, influence or connections, but my own human brokenness through which the love of God can manifest itself . . . the true skill of ministry is to help fearful and often oppressed men and women become aware of their own gifts, by receiving them in gratitude.” 

How different his emphasis on encouraging and receiving the gifts of others as the heart of mission was from the religious tradition I grew up in. In the church of my youth, the operative definition of mission was something like this: “The sending of representatives, or going oneself, to another person or community with the purpose of demonstrating to them the superiority of the Christian faith.”

There may have been a benevolent intent in this understanding, but there was also a clear conviction that the hope of salvation could not be known in any setting until the arrival of the Christian messenger. The missionary could assume that they came from a position of superiority, that they came with some missing information or insight and that they came to fix and make right.

Nouwen’s emphasis on receiving, listening and learning as the acts at the heart of mission, as the perspectives that shape a theology of mission, mirrors the understanding of the Apostle Paul as he writes to the church in Thessalonica in 52 C.E.  “For the word of the Lord has been sounded forth from you, and its sound has been heard not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place where the tidings of your faith toward God have been spread abroad, so that I have no need to speak of it.” Paul, the missioner, finds himself comforted, encouraged, and ministered to by those he came to help. His words are evidence that an adequate theology of mission must begin with the emphasis on receiving the God-given gifts of the other.