Pastor Chris' Letter October 2018
Dear Trinity,
As I write this letter, Michelle and I are making final preparations for our trip with Trinity’s Peru Mission Team. We leave October 13, for the Colca Canyon region of Peru. The team is made up of 10 great people (Pastor Angie Kidd, Erin Bloom, Phil Corbin, Frederick Fusco, Jim and Helen Haddock, Ben Keirn, Jessica Martin, and Michelle and me.) I am nervous and excited about this amazing experience, but the hardest part of this ministry is something different than what you may anticipate.
The hardest part of this mission trip has been trying to describe it to other people. Over the last few years we (as a church and community) have started to rethink how we do missions work. I add here that this shift is not to diminish the mission work that we as a church and society have done in the past. I am so proud of the ministry of Trinity Church’s missions and our work through Project 52’s, UMCOR (United Methodist Committee or Relief), as well as many mission trips and community work. However we as a group have worked through the program Helping without Hurting as well as other materials like Toxic Charity and asset-based community work. (In fact as I write this Pastor Angie is at a conference to learn more about asset-based community processes.) These new resources key in on the point that poverty is not just a lack of resources. This means that short-term mission trips where we go and build a bathroom or library are not helpful in fact in many ways these things can hurt the community we are trying to help.
The idea for this trip came from Pastor Angie. She had done a lot of work with Quechua Benefit and had worked with this ministry to form Casa Chapi, their school for the children of the Colca Canyon. So in our work to have a new type of mission trip we contacted the leadership of Casa Chapi, and asked what ways we could truly help. They shared with us a dream that our team would help celebrate their teachers and encourage them. At first we had no clue what this would look like. So I dreaded the idea that people were going to ask me what we were going to do. As a part of this, I listened as the team came back from Uganda and heard how much the relationships they built mattered beyond what they had done. This helped me to take the knowledge of a different way of doing missions and put it together with the idea that what we were going to do revolved around relationships. So we did not have to “do” things in a way that I was used to.
So what is our Peru mission team doing? (I know I just spent the last three paragraphs describing why I shouldn’t have to say what we are going to “do.”) We are going to see what God is doing in another part of the world. We are going to Peru to be learners and listeners. We are excited to support the teachers who raised this school out of nothing. Our hope is to learn about the Peruvian culture and to share who we are (not what we have) with the larger family of God.
We are going to do this by seeing the two schools that are a part of Quechua Benefit. We are going to buy presents (in Peru to help local workers and artisans) for the teachers of both schools to give them signs of hope and encouragement for the work that they are doing. Because we have a couple of engineers going with us we are assisting the leaders in finding supplies for a greenhouse that supports their food system. We are also going to answer the leader’s biggest wish. We are going to interact with the kids of Casa Chapi to help them learn more about our culture, but also to take them on a couple of field trips because they have not had enough adults to help them travel. We will be taking kids to Condor Cross to see the famous Peruvian condors. We will be taking the graduating kids from Casa Chapi to see their new school which is in the nearby town but that lies over the pass. We will also be taking groups to see the markets in the same town. I thank you in advance for all of the support that Trinity has given our group as well as your continued prayers with and for our team.