The struggle of every missionary
I am a lousy secretary. Really. Maintaining and updating detailed records is not my strength. Len and I actually have a perfect division of labor in place – he manages all of our financial records, and I let him!
But one task I cannot avoid is writing activity reports. Not that I’m complaining. I realize that periodic evaluations of my time and effort are necessary, that accountability is an essential component of both discipleship and ministry. Furthermore, without goals and objectives, I lack direction.
Yet I cannot help but ask myself if the quantifiable results I so often list on my reports are actually an attempt to justify either my presence here or the financial and prayer support invested in our ministry in Bolivia. At the very least, such itemizing could be an attempt to reassure myself that I have been “productive” through the past month or year. Regardless, a concise review of my activities is woefully inadequate as a means to express the truth of what has transpired.
The unquantifiable
I wish there were some way to include the intangibles of ministry in my reports. I’d like to find a way to first know, then list the moments of eternal influence I may have had on someone’s life through daily, seemingly insignificant interaction. Should I keep count of prayers invested in the flock God has trusted to my care? Would anyone care to peruse a list of victories and defeats in my own experience with the God who has called me to be where I am and to do what I am doing? Could I possibly catalogue the moments of amazing grace when God suddenly reveals Himself anew as He works in and through me?
But it is not only written reports or quarterly newsletters that present limitations in communicating the sometimes inexpressible mercies of God manifested as we serve on the mission field. As we look ahead to a year of Homeland Ministry assignment in the United States, I struggle with preparing myself to condense four years of life and ministry into 20-minute-or-less segments. How can I possibly convey the passion, the pain, the weariness, and the joy of sharing the reality of the Kingdom of God with those I only see once every five years? Behind the words on paper and the often well-rehearsed spoken presentations are days, weeks, and months of struggles, doubts, labor, love, grief, and celebration. My heart longs to share the significant, to ponder together the mysteries of the unseen moving among us as we contemplate our recent past.
Maybe we all need to learn to read “between the lines,” to delve beyond the superficial and seek to discover, acknowledge, and applaud what God has done and is doing through His people. As Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) I want to move beyond the imparting of information to a transparent revelation of what our eyes cannot see. I don’t want to do so in order to commend myself. No, I want to do so in order to glorify God for His work “between the lines” that, surprisingly enough, can be revealed through a fragile and unreliable vessel like me. That would make a report worth reading.
Betsy Phillips, her husband, Len, and their three children work jointly with The Mission Society and World Gospel Mission in Bolivia. They serve in areas of church ministry, discipleship, leadership training, and theological education through the Bolivian Evangelical University and the Santa Cruz Christian Learning Center in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.. Before moving to Bolivia, the Phillips family ministered in Honduras for 10 years.
