Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter
Musician/composer Quincy Jones (right) visits an AIDS orphanage in the South African port city of Durban on April 5. Dr. McConnell maintains that there needs to be greater efforts on the part of the Christian community to reach 'Children at Risk'.- REUTERS PHOTOS
WITH THE manner in which the world has changed in recent years, any Christian missionary engagement must place due focus on children at risk and the AIDS pandemic as major strategies to communicate the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
That was the view expressed by Dr. C. Douglas McConnell, dean and associate professor of leadership in the School of Intercultural Studies at the Fuller Seminary in California.
He shared his perspectives on a wide range of issues during an interview with The Gleaner last week. These issues covered ministry to children, missions, and leadership. Dr. McConnell and his family were in the island last week to share in the annual missions conference of Swallowfield Chapel in Kingston. Dr. McConnell was the main guest speaker.
Dr McConnell and his wife Janna served as missionaries to Australia and Papua New Guinea. He told The Gleaner that churches should seek to better incorporate children into the life of congregation. In this way, he said, "children will feel they belong and gain identity from being a part of the family of God."
While not against the institutions of Junior Church and Sunday school, Dr. McConnell said those activities by themselves were not enough and that children should be involved in the multi-generational activities of the church such as care groups.
Dr. McConnell said churches need also to view children as a mission field and target outreach to this group. This is even more urgent, he argued, for children who are:
Orphaned by war.
Orphaned by AIDS.
Sexually abused.
Psychologically abused.
At the local and global levels churches need to be engaged in advocacy to protect children, he said. For sure at the local level, churches need to engage their members to mentor children, especially 'children at risk'.
SPOTTING ABUSE
But even more immediate, churches need to do a better job, he said, of spotting abuse within its ranks. He continued, "Internally, the Church must ensure that it is not harbouring people who are abusive to their families. I have found in my experience and in my research that that has not always been the case for churches. We don't always wake up to see that we actually have people in our churches that have been abusive. The abuse is not always in the radical form, but pornography, child abuse, psychological abuse.
Dr. McConnell said it is God's intention for families to be strong and that how children are treated is central to having strong families.
Dr. McConnell who with wife Janna spent 15 years serving as missionaries in Australia and Papua New Guinea, is the co-author of The Changing Face of World Missions and a regular contributor to various publications related to cross-cultural missions.
He made the point that missions have changed dramatically in the last 30 years. When he began his career as missionary, one could get a visa to enter a foreign country on the basis that one was going to serve as a missionary. "The chances of that happening today are very slim. It is globally difficult to be recognised as a missionary." He said in some cases this is for good reasons as some nations are afraid or concerned about the real or imagined political agenda of these missionaries. This suspicion on the part of governments is greatest among nations that are part of the 10/40 Window. (The 10/40 Window refers to the Eastern Hemisphere (including Africa, Europe, and Asia) between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator. It is that region deemed to have the least exposure to Christianity. Many nations in the 10/40 Window are openly hostile to evangelisation and Christianity.)
With the visa restrictions, cross-cultural evangelism means that a person will be allowed entry into a nation, to practise his/her professional skills such as medicine, teaching etc. For the most part, it is when these persons are not functioning as doctors and teachers, that they will get the opportunity to do evangelism, Dr. McConnell explained.
DILIGENT IN 'LISTENING'
The Fuller Seminary professor said, too, that with the coming of the Internet and the effects of globalisation Christian missions has changed. Before the Internet and globalisation, missionaries were more diligent in 'listening' to the culture they were placed in. And so, they learnt more quickly how to adapt the Gospel to the culture. That process has been retarded somewhat, he argued, as more missionaries are spending time online and thereby they maintain too much of a connection to the culture from which they came. He said, the leaders of some missions organisations have had to be stern with the hours that they allow other missionaries to go online.
Turning to his role as a teacher of leadership, The Gleaner quizzed Dr. McConnell to find out what are the main issues that concerns church leaders and pastors who sit in his classes.
He said "leadership is always about character. For the most part the leaders that come to us have sorted out the character matter and they understand the importance of trust and integrity. Often what the leaders are struggling with is 'How do you bring about change to a church so that it would overcome some of the difficulties of traditional patterns that may or may not apply anymore'? The issue then is 'How do I change my church without losing a lot of members'?
"Some churches are like small companies, and a lot of pastors are not trained to run a small company. They are trained in theology and other things. The pastors are asking: How do I manage a budget, how do I administrate a large and growing church?
"How do we change our church to come to grips with changing cultural patterns."
SOPHISTICATED TECHNOLOGY
Some church leaders, he explained, are concerned with reaching upwardly mobile professionals who are heavily engaged in the use of sophisticated technology, and whose lives seem so busy that they can hardly seem to find the time to have devotions. The pastors, he said, are grappling with effective ways to disciple these kinds of persons.
His leadership students, he continued, are often grappling with effective ways to reach the youth.
A large part of the training offered in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary, he said, relates to sensing what God is saying to individuals as they progress on their growth and development paths. In this respect, his students grapple with issues such as 'How do I know what God is doing in my life as a leader? Where am I in my development as a leader? How do I sensitise myself to what God is doing in me?
Against the background of notable increases in press reports of clergy sexual misconduct, The Gleaner asked Dr. McConnell how he works to secure the sexual maturity of his students. He said "Over the years that I have been in leadership, I don't think there has been a month that has gone by that I have not been working on at least one case, either in leadership in the church or in missions. I hate to say that. But it is a major problem and it is exacerbated by Internet pornography. I don't know of any way (to secure sexually responsible conduct) short of strong accountability. We have got to start younger by instilling healthy sexual identity. For the most part, we don't talk about that in the Church and we don't encourage parents to talk about that in the Church. This needs to be part of pastoral training."
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