The Necessary Stranger
The outsider advantage in missions
I worked my way through college as a barista at a small, family owned espresso bar called The Coffee Nook. It was the kind of place where we knew most of our customers by name and could start their drink when we saw them pull into the parking lot. There was an actual bar, with bar stools, where regulars and strangers would sit to sip their favorite brew. Inevitably, these customers would tell us things about their lives that I’m sure their closest friends and relatives didn’t know. This is the same phenomenon that happens to pastors on airplanes. I think it happens when children, who have been raised in a Christian home and go to church every single week, don’t grasp the truth of the gospel until they hear it preached by stranger at summer camp.
The wonderful couple who owned The Coffee Nook were believers, and they saw these intimate moments with customers as the heartbeat of their mission. They encouraged their employees to listen deeply, they taught us to share the gospel in simple and authentic ways, and when appropriate, they allowed us to pray with customers. They said that many people in the world were lonely, and we (their baristas!) could be their “safe distant person,” i.e. a person who they saw every day and felt comfortable with, but with whom they had no critical relational ties or responsibilities.
Fast forward 20 years, when God called us to cross-cultural ministry. As invested outsiders in our host country, we see this same phenomenon play out over and over again. I now call it the “necessary stranger.” Just like a teen might be more open to hearing the gospel from a stranger at summer camp, or a business woman might seek counsel from her airline seatmate, or a policeman might share a deep regret with the college student who makes his cappuccino—I find that as a foreigner I sometimes have an advantage when it comes to people being open to discuss their faith. As a foreigner, I am already considered odd or exotic, so it is less of a risk for me to expose my beliefs. And my accent makes people curious and strangely open to my perspective.
Another advantage an outsider has is the ability to humbly ask for help. This posture sits in stark contrast to the colonialist mentality of coming with all the answers. My “weakness” of not knowing which bakery is best or needing help finding a mechanic, and being willing to seek out the help of a national, makes me less of a threat. My greatest success in sharing the gospel came through asking a neighbor to edit my sermons and correct my pronunciation when I first started preaching in French. She was the one helping me hone my language skills, but in the process, she became intrigued by the messages that she was hearing. Jesus wooed her to Himself, not because of my communication skills, but in spite of them.
While there is a place for indigenization of mission, or near-culture mission, I think we would be remiss to eliminate cross-cultural missions. Besides the benefits of the necessary stranger, every local church is strengthened by the perspective of outsiders. Insiders can easily be blinded to their own cultural biases and unwittingly sanction certain sins. When we no longer have a diversity of voices helping us to interpret and apply the scriptures, churches may fall into nationalism (hello USA!) or syncretism.
In an article entitled, “Ironies of Indigenization,” Harvard lecturer Susan Billington Harper reveals that V. S. Azariah, Indian missionary and the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Church, was “fundamentally uninterested in becoming more ‘indigenous.’”[1] Harper quotes Azariah as saying, “The religion of Christ is one of the most dynamic factors in the world. It always bursts its boundaries, however strong and rigid those boundaries may be.... It refuses to be confined to any one race, class, or caste. It seeks to embrace all.”[2] For Azariah, indigenization flowed too easily into the caste system that sought to divide the people of India.
How have you experienced the phenomenon of the necessary stranger in your cross-cultural work?
[1] Susan Billington Harper, “Ironies of Indigenization: Some Cultural Repercussions of Mission in South India,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19, no. 1 (January 1995): 18.
[2] Ibid., 19.