At the end of the day

Back in March, I wrote about standing back a bit in your cross-cultural ministry, to ensure the locals get a chance to do the job. I'd like to add some caveats to that approach. First is that I've been told that, in a relationship-based culture like this, I need to throw myself into church in the first few years. I have to get to know people super-well and go through the highs and lows of life with them if they're ever to really listen to what I have to say.

Later on though, the ideal is still to back off a bit and begin to support wider church structures, rather than fill them yourself. I can see a couple of potential problems with this. The first is that providing an example yourself may in some cultures be the best way of teaching someone how to do a thing. [I think this may have been what Fiona H had in mind in the comments section of my earlier post.] I don't know enough about Chilean culture to know if that is so. The second is about the scope of ministry. The ideal is to become something of a parachurch, supporting a variety of churches at the one time. But perhaps it could work better to invest intensively in a small group of individuals, and when they are ready to stand on their own, to move onto another group. Again, that's one of those things I'm yet to learn.