Why guides?
Not all the world thinks like us. What to us is good, a mission, and a helpful service in witness to God's love can come across to other cultures as arrogant, insulting, and enabling dependence on American ideas. Our learning from others and relating with them will often accomplish much more than the money we send or the mission projects we do. Plus in the learning and relating we will be changed!
The ELCA Companion Synod Program is unique. It is at the very heart of who we are as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. For it reveals and leads us in experiencing that we are not congregations nor a synod nor a national church body. We are a church, the Body of Christ. As such we need to be all the above but always together, building relationships and networks, and lifting up the name of Jesus in praise to Almighty God and in service to all humanity.
This trip will be challenging! It will challenge our "mission trip" mentality that is often the work of a lone congregation or a small group of congregations, and which is often OUR action done for others. All the above are important as a starting point.
The orientation beforehand and in South Africa, the immersion in our companion parishes, and the review with Bishop Ditlhale at the end will challenge and push us to experience the church as worldwide, the Body of Christ in which all have gifts, and called into mission that is most effective when it is cooperatively engaged in mutual witness and service hand-in-hand with sisters and brothers around the world.
Lutheran World Federation, "accompaniment", mission, mutuality - will all take on rich and deeper meaning that will transform how we live faith and mission in our personal lives and in our immediate locality. The irony of this trip to a far-away land is that it will lead us to see ourselves and our immediate setting with new eyes.
The ELCA Companion Synod Program is unique. It is at the very heart of who we are as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. For it reveals and leads us in experiencing that we are not congregations nor a synod nor a national church body. We are a church, the Body of Christ. As such we need to be all the above but always together, building relationships and networks, and lifting up the name of Jesus in praise to Almighty God and in service to all humanity.
This trip will be challenging! It will challenge our "mission trip" mentality that is often the work of a lone congregation or a small group of congregations, and which is often OUR action done for others. All the above are important as a starting point.
The orientation beforehand and in South Africa, the immersion in our companion parishes, and the review with Bishop Ditlhale at the end will challenge and push us to experience the church as worldwide, the Body of Christ in which all have gifts, and called into mission that is most effective when it is cooperatively engaged in mutual witness and service hand-in-hand with sisters and brothers around the world.
Lutheran World Federation, "accompaniment", mission, mutuality - will all take on rich and deeper meaning that will transform how we live faith and mission in our personal lives and in our immediate locality. The irony of this trip to a far-away land is that it will lead us to see ourselves and our immediate setting with new eyes.
