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2009-06-02 issue:

The messiness of 21st-century mission

Being neighbor to trouble and moral agonies

by Jonathan Larson

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In November 2008, I was visiting over a chicken sandwich with an old friend, who is nothing if not, in our current parlance, missional. He has this rare and beautiful quality of being incorrigibly missional among his neighbors. As we prepared to take leave of each other over crumpled fast-food wrappers, he raised his hand as though to say, Oh, there’s one other thing I wanted to mention. He went on to tell a story that has left him burdened, sleepless and perplexed.

Several years ago, it seems, he and his church agreed to host a family in flight from the calamity of Katrina and its shameful aftermath. For a time this family lived in the church hall while arrangements were made to permit them to be viable in the city—arrangements that took months. With the stresses of a new setting, difficulty in finding employment and demons from their past, the family was overcome with a tide of trouble that landed the husband in state prison and ended the marriage, all of it collateral damage that will never be registered in any inventory and for which FEMA can offer no solace.

My missional friend has continued to be a neighbor to this tattered family in its disarray. But his concern turned to turmoil and even alarm when he had a call from the wife, who struggles to look after her family on her own. She told my friend that she had discovered to her dismay that she was pregnant. Already unable to care adequately for her three children, she let him know that she urgently needed to undergo an abortion. “I don’t believe in it,” she confessed, “but neither can I stand the thought of giving up a child who I would never mother.” Would he please be with her when she went for the procedure, which had already been scheduled for the following Tuesday? She could think of no one else who would keep her company in this painful and troubling circumstance.

My friend demurred, pleading for sober reflection and prayer, adding that he would search for an agency that might permit adoption of the child. After research both on the Web and by phone, he could find, to his surprise, no appropriate agency that would step in to provide an alternative to the planned abortion. Now he turned to face me to ask the inevitable question. “What am I to do? As a follower of Jesus, I cannot condone what she is contemplating. Yet I have failed to find any viable alternatives. Nor can I accept that at this moment of extremity, I should fail to be a neighbor to one who has been cut adrift in the world.”

In the end, it seems, being missional means living in the middle of such moral messiness. There is no holiday from such dilemmas for those who seek the kingdom. In fact, such agonies seem inherent to mission. So what does our missional church say? What would you tell my missional friend?

Jonathan Larson lives in Gaborone, Botswana.

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