"Interestingly, the caring and support stops when those who experience homelessness are brought too close to the rest of the community . . . The moment the social boundary is broken the other becomes a threat."
You and I have talked tons and tons about how communities can only really understand themselves based on who is excluded, so the "threatening" presence of the other brought to near too the community makes sense . . . But I never connected that back to the "feel good" experience of leaving one's community to minister to those excluded from it, *without the intention* of ever pursuing re-inclusion in the community.
Not that we consciously maintain the exclusion, but something about the "feel good" experience of going out to the excluded helps us to tamp down the greater question of why they're excluded at all.
I’ve been thinking about our conversations. In fact, I remembered a lot of our ruminations around the theme of inclusion and exclusion as I wrote this post.
Yes, you’ve captured it perfectly. Consumerist experiences, people made consumable, and social boundaries/structures left untouched/unacknowledged/unthreatened.
Missions looks like it takes guts and glory—but as you know, the emotional pressure is often all on the locals to make the white visitors feel welcome. The dissonance you’re feeling comes from this: the same people who feel honored by "brown hospitality" abroad often return home resentful of brown people here who don’t extend them the same deference—especially when there’s a visible disparity in wealth, education, or power. It exposes something: their missions posture was never really about mutuality or love. It was about comfort, significance, and control.
You see this in domestic missions too. Suburban or rural folks do a 10-day trip to an inner-city neighborhood and preach discipleship, but then leave new believers to flounder once the "harrowing experience" is over. They go home spiritually inflated, but relationally absent. The mission was about them, not the people they came to serve.
Worse still are the serial mission leaders—those who do the same trip every year for a decade and think that equates to understanding the culture or the people. But parachuting into pain doesn't mean you’ve lived it. Ten days of exposure, repeated for ten years, is not the same as one year of true immersion. And it shows.
The hard truth? It doesn’t take much internal work to go on a missions trip. The real work begins after. And if your first thoughts coming home are about clean water, soft beds, and familiar toilets, then the deeper lesson hasn’t landed yet.
I spent two months living with indigenous families across Peru—eating where they ate, sleeping how they slept. I dropped to 90 lbs, got sick from altitude in the mountains, and scorched in the desert heat. I worshiped in churches that had wealth and churches that had none. I saw addiction, prostitution, street evangelism, and bus-side gospel preaching. I was corrected and loved and seen for the child I was.
Then I watched a group fly in for five days to build a dorm room in the jungles of Iquitos. They were clean, fed, joking over cigars, playing the role of “mission men.” They looked down on me—an 18-year-old, rail-thin and changed—because I no longer looked or sounded like them. I had crossed some invisible line where I had become the foreigner to them.
That’s when it hit me: it takes being immersed, being lost, being humbled—not just financially but personally—for love to grow in us. For us to see that these “brown folk” often love the stranger far better than we do. If I had to summarise it, we have never been the stranger and so have never learned to value them or love them as we love ourselves.
"Interestingly, the caring and support stops when those who experience homelessness are brought too close to the rest of the community . . . The moment the social boundary is broken the other becomes a threat."
You and I have talked tons and tons about how communities can only really understand themselves based on who is excluded, so the "threatening" presence of the other brought to near too the community makes sense . . . But I never connected that back to the "feel good" experience of leaving one's community to minister to those excluded from it, *without the intention* of ever pursuing re-inclusion in the community.
Not that we consciously maintain the exclusion, but something about the "feel good" experience of going out to the excluded helps us to tamp down the greater question of why they're excluded at all.
That gives me a lot to think about . . .
I’ve been thinking about our conversations. In fact, I remembered a lot of our ruminations around the theme of inclusion and exclusion as I wrote this post.
It’s the “Not In My Back Yard” syndrome. So tragic.
Yes, you’ve captured it perfectly. Consumerist experiences, people made consumable, and social boundaries/structures left untouched/unacknowledged/unthreatened.
Missions looks like it takes guts and glory—but as you know, the emotional pressure is often all on the locals to make the white visitors feel welcome. The dissonance you’re feeling comes from this: the same people who feel honored by "brown hospitality" abroad often return home resentful of brown people here who don’t extend them the same deference—especially when there’s a visible disparity in wealth, education, or power. It exposes something: their missions posture was never really about mutuality or love. It was about comfort, significance, and control.
You see this in domestic missions too. Suburban or rural folks do a 10-day trip to an inner-city neighborhood and preach discipleship, but then leave new believers to flounder once the "harrowing experience" is over. They go home spiritually inflated, but relationally absent. The mission was about them, not the people they came to serve.
Worse still are the serial mission leaders—those who do the same trip every year for a decade and think that equates to understanding the culture or the people. But parachuting into pain doesn't mean you’ve lived it. Ten days of exposure, repeated for ten years, is not the same as one year of true immersion. And it shows.
The hard truth? It doesn’t take much internal work to go on a missions trip. The real work begins after. And if your first thoughts coming home are about clean water, soft beds, and familiar toilets, then the deeper lesson hasn’t landed yet.
I spent two months living with indigenous families across Peru—eating where they ate, sleeping how they slept. I dropped to 90 lbs, got sick from altitude in the mountains, and scorched in the desert heat. I worshiped in churches that had wealth and churches that had none. I saw addiction, prostitution, street evangelism, and bus-side gospel preaching. I was corrected and loved and seen for the child I was.
Then I watched a group fly in for five days to build a dorm room in the jungles of Iquitos. They were clean, fed, joking over cigars, playing the role of “mission men.” They looked down on me—an 18-year-old, rail-thin and changed—because I no longer looked or sounded like them. I had crossed some invisible line where I had become the foreigner to them.
That’s when it hit me: it takes being immersed, being lost, being humbled—not just financially but personally—for love to grow in us. For us to see that these “brown folk” often love the stranger far better than we do. If I had to summarise it, we have never been the stranger and so have never learned to value them or love them as we love ourselves.
That last line is powerful. White people need to chew that one slowly. Thanks!