Ministry of Presence

What are you going to do? What DID you do in Malawi?

I've wrestled with those questions before and after each trip with our Malawi mission team.  In a results-oriented culture, our brains are trained to measure the impact of a mission trip in buildings built, walls painted and boreholes dug.  By those measures, everyone of our Malawi teams has failed miserably.

We haven't dug any boreholes, but we've visited several that our church has funded.  We haven't built anything, but we've visited churches, a tailoring school, a solar water pump and several other structures our church has funded.  We haven't painted any walls, but half of us did fertilize some crops for half an afternoon this year. (If you're a certain member of our group, you find bottoms of doors that catch on the floor, leaks in PVC pipes that need to be sealed and other miscellaneous projects that need to be done.)

By those measures, we don't really do anything on the Malawi mission trip.  We did do two three-hour sessions of Bible school and provide a meal for the children--although we just bought the ingredients, we didn't even cook it.  But even those two days of Bible school don't count for much when measured by the "spreading the gospel" definition of mission trips.  It was maybe 100 kids and 30 adults--that's only about 8 people per team member.

And somehow, the impact of the trip is far greater than anything we can do.

Rev. Daniel Mhone describes the partnership between AFUMC and the Malawi UMC as a Ministry of Presence--and that is exactly what we do on this trip.

Think about the single person that has had the greatest impact on your life.  The person who helped you turn your life around or the person that brought you back to church after wandering away.  Think about the spouse or mother or father or grandparent who taught you what it means to love and what it feels like to be loved.

If the United Methodist Social Principles did not discourage gambling, I would bet they did one thing above all else:

They were present in your life.

When you hit bottom, they were there.  When you failed a test in high school, they were there.  When you got married, they were there.  When you needed advice or someone to turn to, they were there.

That is what we do.  We go.  We visit villages.  We visit old friends.  We participate in a tailoring school graduation, in a church service and Bible study, in a cooking demonstration.  We disconnect from Facebook, from Twitter, from the trivial things in life.  We might stay in contact with home, but during the day, we are fully present.  And  when we go, we bring the presence of an entire congregation with us.  It's not really us and our team that go, it is the love and the prayers of an entire church.

I don't know the verse, but it constantly comes to my mind, "Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am also."  When we are present, when we allow ourselves to listen to God and go, when we join together with our brothers and sisters in Christ in Malawi, God is present.

The thing about a Ministry of Presence is that it's not about making God present in the lives of the people from Malawi.  It's about making Him present in all our lives.  God's love is not debits and credits.  If I give you X love and you give me Y, I don't have Y - X and you don't have X - Y. Somehow love gets multiplied.  We both come back with far more than we gave ourselves.

So if you want to know how you can experience Malawi without going, do your best to be present in all you do.  Don't multitask.  Do your best to be fully engrossed in the lives of the people you love.  Be present, and God will be there also.

I did my best to bring home enough presence for everyone.  I hope you don't mind if I didn't have time to wrap it.

Phil