What News Are You Bringing?

Alejandro Cardeinte- excerpt from his unpublished book "The Gospel Call"

“Then Peter said, "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Acts 3:6

When I sat down one day to watched the news on TV, one of the headline news was about government humanitarian program distributing 2 kilos of rice to each family. Those were distributed in elementary grade school, to alleviate the country’s poor situation. Some government officials were not impress about the program since they felt it did not offer real help to the serious economic problem.

In the mission field, missionary sometimes mistakenly did the same thing. We come to the mission field we bring goodies for the people. As young missionaries, we still have much to learn about how to dispose our mission and our mission itself. But basically, missionary knows that they are involved in the gospel business.
There are two choices the missionaries are going make, to please God or man. This is where problems begin. Scared to loose the financial support from homeland and the confidence of the supervisor, there is often a temptation to immediately turn to good report. Because of this, missionaries tend to use the wrong methods to gain the villagers confidence.

We should understand that we are working among the group of people who have real problems, difficulties, and struggle that needs real help. Missionaries often bring unreal solution by giving temporal relief for the people. The villagers are given something to eat or a small trinket in order to keep them coming back. This is goodnews to the villagers but these things are not long lasting.

I personally witnessed this kind of motivation when I was working as student missionary in South Korea. Snack had to be a part of every activity planned. The church spends a lot of money because the children would stop coming to Sabbath school if they did not get a treat. However, even food didn’t hold their interest for long. It is comparable to home churches that use “rewards” for every activity at the church expense.

I observed that few months later, the children’s desires for snacks died. One Sabbath when my Korean co-teacher distributed the snacks, some children simply return them to her. Many times when I helped the janitor swept the floor, the things that had been distributed were left on the desks or scattered on the floor. Snacks did not satisfy the kids anymore.

My point is that the children need something more substantial to satisfy them, and could not get it from the snacks or toys. The teachers refused to put some time an effort into designing attractive, Christ-centered activities. Instead, they spend a lot of money for things that temporarily attracted the children.
May we bring them the goodnews not the goods news.