Overturning Tables by Scott Bessenecker

One of my favorite books on missions was "The New Friar" by Scott Bessenecker, so when he came out with a new book, "Overturning Tables: freeing missions from the Christian-Industrial complex" I had to read it. It is right in line with what God has working on me/my Bible study of what God has to say about poverty and power inequalities. I typed up five pages of quotes I wanted to share, so am dividing them up into three main subjects: Diversity in Missions, Capitalism in Missions, and the History of Missions.

Diversity in Missions: quotes from "Overturning Tables"

“The demographic of most protestant missionary conferences in the US could be described at male, pale, and frail…The number of black Southern Baptist missionaries in the US is only one-half of one percent, and of the 4,900 missionaries only 423 (8.6%) are minorities (and they have a more minorities than any other large denomination). This raises the question: is there something about how protestant mission is shaped that makes it easier for white folk to enter and more difficult for others? Surely ethnic minorities are no less spiritually gifted or qualified for missionary service.”

“With exceptions like YWAM, I have observed the graying of North American missionaries. I was speaking to a missionary recruiter from the Evangelical Free denomination who told me the average age of the freshly minted missionaries they send to the mission field is forty years old…What began as a youth movement is now a middle-aged movement.”

“The US missionary community continues to grow, but that growth is slowing. The European missionary effort is in decline while the missionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin American are picking up. The Brazilians, for instance, now have more cross-cultural missionaries than the Brits.”

“Protestant churches and mission ought to animate structures that are economically lean and easily allow the poor to serve as missionaries, resisting the creation of a professional missionary class occupied almost exclusively by middle class, formally educated individuals.”

“As long as the middle and upper classes are onboard, those with access to these funders can find financial support. One reason there are so many white, individually supported Christian workers (I am one of them) is because we can more easily afford to buy our way into mission with help from our friends, not necessarily because we are more qualified than everyone else. Many of my highly qualified Majority world friends, and some of my Western friends who didn’t grow up in the middle class, simply do not have the kind of connections required to pull together the $50,000 to $100,000 price tag of yearly financial support.”

“The introduction of a second church in a town that previously had only one church for everyone proved a great dilemma. Before that time it was assumed that a resident would worship at whatever Christian church had been established in a town or village, regardless of the denomination. Neighbors and workmates would quite likely share the communion table, no matter how they may have differed in theology. But a second church meant there was a choice.”

“It is relatively easy to build community with those who are like us. It is another thing altogether to build community with people who have significantly different backgrounds, ethnicities and nationalities. In Christian mission, I have found the most robust communities are extremely diverse. Unhealthy forms of idealism are sacrificed on the altar of compromise and practicality in a diverse group. As we move away from individualism and toward a communal understanding of life and Christian mission, diversity will force us to balance the need for individual expression, culture and personality within a functional collective. “

“Multiplicity happens when these emerging ideas and ministries can be released to operate on their own. The incubator is no place to live for very long. Allowing our churches and parachurches to spawn smaller, local ministries that may or may not choose to loosely affiliate will have the effect of pushing ministry and resources out to the margins rather than bunching them up in one place.”

“Let us rethink our orientation to the cultural, political and social centers we have constructed for the faith, and draw into mission those who are on the margins. Otherwise we will naturally build insular systems that work well for those at the center but will exclude those in the margins.”

“The dichotomy that we must either absorb locals into our structures or allow completely local structures to emerge is a false one. It is born of similar fears inherent in the racist prohibition of mixed marriages. It is also fueled by a cultural preference for independence. Americans especially love or independence…Both the patron-client mindset in poor countries and the highly independent vision of partnership in rich ones are unbiblical.”

“The survival of individuals depends on the collective in ways lost upon those of us living in societies that are WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic)…the truth is that we need one another, and not always in the ways we imagine. The poor don’t primarily need the wealth of the rich—though some redistribution can be helpful. They need the dignity and honor that standing shoulder to shoulder with the mainstream can provide. The rich don’t need the labor or cultural insight of the poor. They need the boldness, the faith and the humility that come with the poverty of spirit evident in so many of our brothers and sisters in the margins.”

“We can no longer afford the price tag attached to the middle-class version of Protestant mission—particularly those living in the majority world or who are otherwise cut off from middle-class or wealthy donors.”

Capitalism in Missions: Quotes from "Overturning Tables"

“It is not so much the content of Western mission that I am challenging here; it is the container (a capitalist mentality) of Western mission I have a problem with…Those in Christian ministry experience burnout as much or more than those in other fields, which indicates that the industrial complex we have constructed for our faith is failing us.”
“I am not sure why Christians, Protestant evangelicals in particular, feel so keenly the need to defend unregulated capitalism. Perhaps it is a belief that capitalism takes economic power out of the hands of the state and gives it to the people. Both capitalism and Protestantism were responses to elitism. But movements that set out to overthrow elitism only create new elite and new excluded. We must never tire of reform; it must remain the one constant in a world that beckons us toward calcification.”
“One reason that the corporate business model has become such a standard organizational model is that it mostly works. What’s more, the economies on which the entire planet now operate are built on a vision for wealth creation and distribution based largely on a capitalist worldview. This is because most alternatives have failed so miserably. Like it or not, capitalism is the economic ideology by which the world produces and exchanges goods and service, and the corporation is not going away anytime soon.”
“For Weber, the spirit of capitalism was not so much the pursuit of greed as it was the pursuit of profit…Weber’s understanding of Protestantism, or more accurately, Calvinism, is that making a profit because of thrift and industry reflects your goodness or even your godliness…Poverty, hardship and suffering are by and large not part of the Protestant American construct of the Christian faith, and so our theology around these topics is weak and sickly.”
“It is telling that there are two main classifications of organizations in America: for-profit and nonprofit, as if making profit is the only way to understand how we can establish ourselves, the only lens through which we can imagine human collaboration. An organization pursuing profit is a for-profit business. But if a group of people establish an enterprise focused on any number of other noble pursuits, it is identified not by what it is, but by what it is not.”
“The materialism of Sodom translated into sexual misconduct, because coveting, objectifying, owning and consuming becomes a harmful and idolatrous way of life. Our posture toward indulging material desires is easily translated into indulging our sexual desires. Desire-consume-repeat. This is the energy the world is powered by, and the people of God are to carefully avoid it.”
“Christians often define the slippery slope in terms of sexual immorality, but according to Scripture, the slipperiest slope on earth is greed and the idolatry it inspires (Col. 3:5). Jesus warned against the corrupting power of wealth and possessions in the Gospels five times more than he addressed the issue of sex outside of marriage.
“We’ve attempted to press the gospel into product form—a privately owned salvific experience obtained through a business-like transaction…When Christianity impersonates the corporate world, we don’t need God. We can accomplish our mission with more money, a building and a bit of ingenuity.”
“The highly individualized salvation experience sold through skills of persuasion is a shadow of the all-encompassing power of the Gospel. But these are the methods we often use to measure and celebrate our mission successes.”
“The journey away from collectivism and toward individualism has been served by capitalism, which turns private ownership into a way of thinking about things. In the Bible there is an expectation that the human fabric is held together by a larger understanding of communal responsibility.”

History of Missions: quotes from "Overturning Tables"

“The death of Jesus not only changed the location of salvation, but also clarified the nature of mission…Mission is no longer “coming” but “going” (Isaiah 19:23-25, Hebrews 13:13)
“We are all trapped in a mental and theological framework born out of a miniscule fragment of time and space. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century clergy and missionaries, along with the structures that supported them, were just as much prisoners of their culture and era as I am of mine. But they were also people of faith and courage, progeny of the “hall of faith” recounted in Hebrews 11.”
“Adding a marginalized community to the ranks of the church exposed the tendency for exclusionary systems to crop up even among the followers of Christ…Giving power to the margins and then experiencing revival at the margins brings tension. Both the Roman Empire and the Jewish religious empire opposed the emergence of a Gentile church. It was the exclusivity of Christ over state that offended the Roman Empire, and the inclusivity of Christ to save any prostitute, tax collector or criminal that offended the Jewish empire. The calcified structures of human empire cry out in pain as they are resisted by the pressures from the excluded.”
“(In the Bible) They were to plant themselves in local soil and survive off the local food and customs. In a sense, they were not to be owned and run by investors as in a corporate model, but they were to be locally owned and operated.”
“The earliest expression of mission was accomplished by loosely structured and minimally financed traveling wayfarers, as well as through the migration of Christians on the run from persecution. Both sorts of missionaries were significantly woven into local cultures and supported by local economies.”
“The bivocational option is standard fare for ethnic minority urban church pastors, but relatively unaccommodated and only marginally tolerated in the white parachurch ministry world. A more aggressive approach to defining ministry positions for bivocational ministers without burning them out could open the door for many. It also embeds ministers in local institutions, connecting them more personally to the economies, services and cultures of a local community.”
“Rather than producing new, smaller, more localized churches or missionary bands as they grew, the tendency was to consolidate money and power and to build monoliths. And so intimacy is sacrificed on the alter of efficiency, more becomes confused with better, and talented local leaders are lured away from smaller operations because of the clout that comes with working for an organization that commands popularity, possessions and pizzazz…Rather than fighting Goliath in Saul’s armor, our Majority world sisters and brothers are picking up five smooth stones and a sling. Perhaps we need to learn something from them.”
“In fact our word mission does not originate from Scriptures. While the term sent one was used to describe those disciples who intentionally traveled announcing good news, their work was not referred to as a mission. It is a word which comes from a sordid past and is about as helpful to the church today as the word crusade is for Christians working among Muslims. So mission was born out of the exploitative, sixteenth-century economic and political quest to acquire land, labor and raw materials, and to leverage them either for Catholic kings or Protestant investors.”
“British and Dutch Protestants each developed their own East India Companies as investment opportunities, vehicles for the rich to take advantages of the winds of trade that commercial shipping afforded. The Dutch East India Company was explicitly engaged in Christian mission, founding its own missionary training school and contracting missionaries to join their commercial ventures. Dutch missionaries were compensated by the East India Company for each baptism that they performed. English investors, by contrast, were at first opposed to combining mission with commerce, not because they had theological problems with the notion but because their efforts to control or exploit the populations where they had planted their flags might begin to appreciate the liberty afforded to all those made in God’s image and then exercise that liberty.”
“This structure required colonists willing to transplant themselves to a foreign country. To do this meant re-creating their European lives with as little disturbance as possible. So when European and American missionaries translated this organizational paradigm into their vision for expanding God’s kingdom, it took the shape of a mission society run by a board of mostly wealthy philanthropists and businessmen sending Western clergy and missionaries to lie within a missionary compound patterned after their homelands.”
(But, that doesn’t mean God wasn’t working:)“Where independent protestant missionaries had a significant presence, free democratic states emerged. The research suggests that powerfully democratizing elements such as literacy, education for women, robust nongovernmental associations and economic development were key catalysts for democracy and were either wholly generated or strongly promoted by these missionaries.”
“Carnegies, Vanderbilt’s, and the Morgan’s invested heavily in their Protestant churches and in domestic and foreign missions. These wealthy philanthropists were builders of the great educational institutions out of which most Protestant missionaries came, and promoted a positive attitude toward the corporate worldview within American Protestantism.”
“It is true that wealthy Christian benefactors do not always use their wealth as license to dictate mission, though some do. More often it is the fear of losing a benefactor’s contributions that shapes our decisions…The International mission board of the Southern Baptists say that the average cost of an individual missionary is $4,250 per month. The Evangelical free church in America places the cost of a missionary family in Germany at $10,338 per month.”
“It may be fair to say that the Judsons and their missionary colleagues were the first college-educated Americans sent out by a formal missions society on an oceangoing vessel, organized with the help of businessmen and invested with funds from charitable contributions. But if the story of spreading the good news about Jesus Christ belongs only to the highly educated and the highly financed sent by the highly structured, then a good many missionaries would be blotted out of church history, including the “ordinary and unschooled” followers of Jesus in the book of Acts, who started the church’s missionary enterprise two thousand years ago. The fact of the matter is that the mission of George and Hannah Leile (freed slaves that went to Jamaica themselves) had a lot more in common with the first disciples than did Adoniram and Ann Judson’s mission.” (it is all about who writes the history books☹)
“A faithful and yet nearly invisible form of Christian mission has been taking place for millennia on the backs of slaves of the empire. It has been advanced by people from the margins working quietly among their forgotten neighbors. Meanwhile the Christian-industrial complex has ballooned in size, but not in effectiveness. We have erected massive constructions accessible only by middle-class and rich missionaries, while absorbing into our bloated organizations poorer, local coworkers who are, in the words of the mission agency that sent Betsey Stockton (the first single woman missionary who was a freed slave and went as an indentured servant) “Regarded and treated neither as equals no servants.” This book represents an attempt to describe the mainstream Protestant mission world I find myself in—one born of a corporate, culturally white, individualist paradigm. This paradigm has achieved cultural dominance over most every human construct—political, economic and religious.”