As the last flight of my trip descended into Winnipeg, I listened to the U2 classic, “Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For”. At risk of being sentimental, I would say that that song captured a lot of what I saw on this trip. I went with ambivalent expectations without a really clear reason for doing so. I didn't know what I was going to find, and what my experience would be like. And although some of what I predicted did happen, I also found myself thinking in ways I had not expected.
In group reflections on the many conversations we had with different church members and leaders, many people mentioned how inspiring it was to watch these people at work. They faced so many difficult challenges and obstacles in their context. Animism is prevalent. The large Islamic population is not always tolerant of Christians. And yet these Mennonites carry on anyway, working at the seemingly futile tasks of bible translation and church development. And then, consistently, these conversation partners would turn to us and ask, what are your challenges? Every time, our group hesitated. I think we found it difficult to answer in the face of that kind of dedication and determination to make a change. This left me unsettled. After each one of these conversations, I was left with a knot in my stomach. Why? Because the challenge we face, as a Mennonite church in North America is apathy. It is a lack of courage to work within our own contexts and inflict change on them. We love going to other places and being inspired by what others are doing there. But what about here? What are we doing in each of our communities and neighbourhoods?
I did learn on this learning tour. I did engage, and I did grow. But it wasn't in the ways I expected. I was impressed by what I saw from the Burkinabe people. And I was unsettled by it. And so the question I come away with, and I would like to see others wrestling with too, is the one of what now? We are back home. We interacted with a people of resistance, a people who struggles to change what needs changing. And they asked us how we face our challenges. I would name our challenge as complacency. Now, after that experience, how are we going to face our struggle of complacency? Are we going to allow ourselves to remain unsettled and to learn in unexpected ways, even in our home context?
