THE TRAINING OF MISSION WORKERS FOR THE KAZAKHSTAN MISSION

By Theo. Kuster, Almaty, Kazakhstan, October 15, 1993

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"And teaching them . . ."  Matthew 28:20.

     The goal of the mission in Kazakhstan is a church composed of many assemblies of Christian believers responsible to make the Gospel audible and visible, gathered around correct teaching and administration of the Sacraments, eager to scatter as seed throughout Kazakhstan and the whole world.

     Few have the opportunity before us in Kazakhstan to explore mission possibilities and to initiate the development of a strategy for a new LCMS mission effort.  A major concern is: how will the men and women who will work the strategy be recruited and prepared?  The preparation of suitable missionary candidates for Kazakhstan, an unknown area of the world, presents a formidable challenge to the typical North American.  So little is known of the area.  How does a mission church prepare men and women for mission in Kazakhstan?

     The missionary candidate in the 1990s receives only brief prefield training and orientation.  Recently some cross-cultural missionary training is offered along with the traditional seminary program with its emphasis on a classical theological program and teaching method.  The student often is forced to choose among many excellent educational offerings, dubious he is doing justice to his career goals.  The student interested in mission with other ethnic settings can find few summer and vicarage cross-cultural mission experiences.  The missionary candidate, unless he brings to his theological studies certain skills, is poorly prepared for long term cross-cultural missionary service.

     When the missionary candidate goes to his assigned field with little training in cross-cultural sensitivity and communication techniques, he is unaware of local communication channels and how to identify and use them for Gospel proclamation.  As a result, the new missionary introduces elements that the new church either cannot reproduce or reproduces to the determent of the Gospel.  Often the new elements serve merely to enhance missionary competitiveness, his individualism and paternalism at the expense of the development of a strong local leadership.

     Lack of adequate preparation takes its toll in stress and frustration.  The new missionary at best blunders through many trial and error methods, at worst upsets and offends the missionaries with more time and experience on the field, and often reinvents the wheel, if he does not give up and return to work in North America before his first term expires.

     The typical theological training method uses a "banking model."  The professor fills the vacuum in the head of the student.  Later, the student uses that storehouse of knowledge to fill the vacuum in the heads of his own students.  Most often, not only the content but also the method of theological education is received, remembered (banked), and reproduced in the new mission setting.  The method, effective in North America because of a long development in response to many cultural factors, does not often produce the hoped for results in the new setting.  Often a dependency develops between the mission and the nacient mission church.

     Part of the problem centers in the what has become the default method used for theological education and development of church leadership.  The missionary models and reproduces his own theological training method.  A disciple of the missionary, the future leader of the church, models the method of the missionary.  For instance, the disciple may adopt the paternalistic attitude of the missionary toward the recipients of his own leadership development and theological education efforts.  He may, following the lead of the missionary, ignore natural local communication channels and adopt those imported or invented by the missionary.  As a result, the person commissioned to present the Gospel creates barriers in place of open communication channels, the work is "slow," frustrations mount, tension grows, people leave the field.

     I am not presenting a new discovery, a new insight.  Many official and non‑official LCMS sources have generated studies and papers on the subject of missionary preparation.  (Endnote listing and summarizing these).  Returning missionaries look back on their term of mission service and begin to ask questions.  To what extent could cultural sensitivity training eliminate the barriers?  Could extending the prefield training and orientation for missionary candidates begin to eliminate "problems" on the field, keep valuable workers in place?  Will identifying individualism and paternalism enhance Gospel communication?  Can the seminaries and other missionary training institutions cooperate with the sending agencies to develop a coordinated focussed continuing missionary training program addressing these issues?

     I am proposing the discussion, adaptation and implementation of a new mission plan similar to that presented by Dayton and Fraser in Planning Strategies for World Evangelization.  (Edward R. Dayton and David A Fraser, Grand Rapids MI, William B. Eerdmans, 1990:149-154.)

     Rather than the "banking model" characterized above, Dayton and Fraser present the "teaching hospital", or "medical" model for theological education, missionary preparation and deployment.  The model offers specific advantages over the methods currently used (or currently not used).  Under a Dayton and Fraser type plan:

     a) The missionary candidates (vicars and recent seminary graduates) arrive in Kazakhstan quickly, in a year (during summer of 1994), early in their course of preparation.

     b) The mission uses the labors of the seminary students during a two year vicarage while offering valuable work experience, similar to the plan used successfully in Guatemala, Panama and Venezuela.

     c) Cross-cultural awareness and abilities would be learned and reinforced in the field, enhancing the development of local leadership within local assemblies.

     d) The missionary candidate would receive incentive for continuing theological and practical education.

     e) Men and women contemplating missionary service would have a clear picture of the course a mission career might take.

     f) The mission in Kazakhstan is assured of a steady supply of workers to follow contacts in major population centers as the work matures in the capital city.  (The country is 1800 miles from east to west [San Franscisco to Chicago] and 1000 miles from north to south [Houston to Minneapolis] with a dozen major population areas of over one million.)

     Here follows, in excerpt and summary, a possible solution to some recruiting and staffing problems on a mission field.

"One of the serious obstacles to training is a lack of commitment by those involved in the missionary vocation to prepare well-equipped men and women.  Mission agencies seldom have personnel set aside and qualified to train others and design career paths."  (Could retired missionaries, CTS DMiss students with missionary experience, or others be employed in intensive and long-term prefield missionary training?)

"But providing a cross-cultural experience is difficult for agencies in North America, despite the fact that most cities are now multicultural."  (Could college and seminary students be provided with inner-city multicultural opportunities during summer vacations?)

"What kinds of training are essential? ... We would suggest that acquiring the missionary role is a difficult process.  Probably no profession requires greater commitment and flexibility.  It requires equally high levels of spiritual insight and education.  Yet probably no profession has paid less attention to its potential members and how they are recruited, and to what standards govern excellence."  (Seminary and college mission faculties would have valuable insights, as would people with missionary exerience.)

"The difficulty is not that there are no graduates who desire an overseas Christian career, and few graduate schools interested in training missionaries.  The difficulty is that the profession is not known for on-the-job training.  The result is too many poorly trained missionaries.  Too many talented men and women are challenged but never make it overseas.  Too many complaints come from national churches that missions and missionaries are insensitive to their situations.  How can the problem be rectified?  Is there is good model to follow?

(The "medical model" explained.)  "As a point of departure, let us consider the training required to become a medical doctor.  After completing undergraduate work in 'premed' the student enters a three-year medical school associated with a teaching hospital.  The daily mixture includes classroom and laboratory work and direct experience with patients.  As the student advanced, he or she is given more and more opportunity to diagnose and develop the treatment for patients.  After this, the person graduates with an M.D. degree.  The next step is internship, working in medical practice under the supervision of more senior physicians.  This normally takes from a year to several years, depending on the specialization being developed.  Still the education is incomplete.  Before the doctor moves out into full and independent practice, he or she will serve a residency in a hospital.  Here another year or two is spent in practice, this time supervising interns as well.

"It is our contention that the 'doctor of souls' in cross-cultural settings probably requires a similar level of preparation.  We use a number of terms to label the stage a medical doctor has achieved: pre-med, medical student, intern, resident, practicing doctor.  We do not expect the medical student to perform major operations.  In like fashion we need to understand the different levels at which missionaries exist.  The 'missionary' title masks the vast differences in training and experience.  Terms to designate the candidate, the missionary student, the apprentice missionary, the assistant, the associate, and the senior missionary would be worthwhile.  Somehow the stages of skill and experience acquisition need dramatization.  That way we have some sense of the different levels among 'missionaries' that reflect the differences in ministry capability (and responsibility).  With these six designations, we could imagine a much clearer, more rational career path.

"Such a set of stages would signal the need for continuing education.  If we recognized the various components necessary to produce the full-orbed senior missionary, we could then channel those who want to be missionaries but do not know how to do so.  Further, we could enhance the missionary vocation.  Such stages would signal the interdependence of missionaries, with senior and associate missionaries involved in the apprenticing of younger missionaries.  It would also provide relief from the guilt that entry-level missionaries often feel when they cannot reach effectiveness immediately.  The 'teaching hospital' for the missionary candidate would be the cross-cultural setting.  On-the-field training means settings where such ministry is already happening.  Mission agencies need to accept such training as part of their job.  Some of this is occurring with short-term missionaries, but it needs to be more systematic and integral to the missionary career.

"This approach to the missionary task opens an entirely new world for recruiting and missionary education and training.  By recognizing that it is impossible to make the leap from layperson to professional missionary in the span of a year, (or in the span of an overseas flight!) missions would give their potential recruits a clear path to follow.  Local churches would understand the long-run process and could support their own people in all the phases through which a missionary passes.

"In this way every mission agency (and every LCMS educational institution) would have pre-missioners, interns, missionary associates, missionaries, and senior missionaries in its ranks.  The general expectations at each level would be clear.  Each missionary would be modifying and applying common standards to his or her own progress toward missionary excellence.  To be complete we would have to add a category of retired or emeritus status for missionaries who complete the full career.

"The task of on-site training of missionaries needs to be viewed (by those in the field) as the highest missionary calling, not an interruption of the real task." 

            Missionary education and theological training, in both the United States and a foreign country, are complex topics. LCMS official and nonofficial circles have produced pages and pages of reports, yet missionary training procedures have not changed greatly since the 1940s.  Many interests intersect at the point of the church in mission.  Can the influences on cultural sensitivity and message transmission be identified?  Will successful results from an experimental model warrant development and implementation of alternative models?  What is the possibility of repairing and adjusting existing educational models over against developing alternative models?  How "deep" would effective change go into existing planning and management for mission?  Can a connection and correlation be established between cause and effect in such areas as communication barriers, longevity of missionary service and cross-cultural training, use of improved educational models and development of the church in Kazakhstan?  Is apprenticeship a viable method for cross-cultural training and skill acquisition for students, vicars and first term missionaries?  Can we risk not finding the answers to these questions?

            The plan would suggest developing an experimental training model for use in the United States and in Kazakhstan.  Meetings of all interested parties should be conducted during early 1994.  To prevent the plan from joining all the other plans on a dusty shelf, the broad general outline of the plan should be tentatively adopted and the work in Kazakhstan started with the resources available.  The first stage will field test preliminary solutions and encourage future workers to access appropriate education and experience requisites.  A "Kazakhstan Plan" might lead toward a more adequate prefield and onfield missionary training method, rapid deployment of mission personnel, and longevity of career missionaries as more "mission starts" are contemplated in this hemisphere..

            My prayer is that the work in Kazakhstan will not only be a new "mission start," but indeed, a new mission.  That within a decade the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will have created in Kazakhstan, using our best efforts, a church composed of many assemblies of Christian believers responsible to make the Gospel audible and visible, gathered around correct teaching and administration of the Sacraments, eager to scatter as seed throughout Kazakhstan and the whole world.