FAQs

The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission shares and promotes good Christian mission practice, but we do not send out our own missionaries or provide financial assistance to others. AVM has no paid staff. However, some of those who are part of the AVM are missionaries living of personal donor support.

Certainly, vulnerable mission practitioners encounter vulnerable people in their ministries. However, AVM’s use of the word “vulnerable” describes a humble attitude of Christian, cross-cultural workers themselves, expressed through their use of local languages and resources.

Incarnational mission can be defined as being present with people, giving up privilege and sharing in their sorrows as Jesus did. Vulnerable mission may include those things, but it also includes using local languages and resources, which is something that incarnational mission does not necessarily emphasise.

In vulnerable mission, local resources are to be used when working with local people. Support may come from missionaries’ home countries, but they do not channel these funds to local people. Resources to sustain vulnerable missionaries themselves often come from their people, in the same way that resources to sustain local people should come from local people.

While Christians are called to give to those in need, there are at least three situations when generosity can harm rather than help.

The first situation would be when generosity creates ongoing expectations that financial support will continue, thus alleviating the recipient’s responsibility to look for local support and resources. This creates dependency and can lead to strained relationships and bad stewardship of the resources that are available.

The second situation occurs because of “Western guilt” – when the abundance of the West is contrasted with those parts of the world where there is serious poverty. This type of generosity is an attempt to alleviate guilt. It can also contribute to unhealthy dependency, as described above.

Thirdly, Western “generosity” easily creates envy in a community, where some people are supported and some are not.

Jesus commends the poor widow for giving all she had to live on (Luke 21:1-4). Such sacrificial giving is rarely practised in “West-to-the-majority-world” aid. Assisting people in need has to be done very carefully and strategically in order not to create false expectations on the part of the recipient (and the donor unwittingly becoming their patron). Those false expectations could make the donor vulnerable to strained relationships and miscommunication. By contrast, vulnerability in a mission worker, that comes from physical presence and openness to the persons themselves who are in financial need, gives opportunities to work alongside them in a true partnership, without being a financial donor.

English (or French, etc.), when used cross-culturally, conceals the different assumptions we bring from our home cultures and languages. The fact that translations exist for certain terms doesn’t mean that these words carry the same impact and meaning or evoke the same emotions or reactions in a different context. Learning the local languages associated with their cultural context will help one to understand much better what people are saying through English as a second or third language.

We tend to understand each other cross-culturally in a world language to the extent that we share a common context. For instance, people in a multicultural church will all know what will happen when they are invited to pray, depending on the kinds of prayers practised in this church. This understanding, however, does not easily extend to cultural / church / or other contexts that are not shared. We often think we know what the others are saying – or assume that they understand what we are saying. And yet, we can misunderstand each other, due to unspoken assumptions or “culture-blindness”.

If learning several local languages properly is not an option, focusing on one local language that can be used consistently with people of that language group could be considered. It promises a much richer understanding of their context and helps one to become aware of their own cultural and linguistic biases, for example, in understanding and teaching Scripture. It’s true that a focus in language- and culture-learning always means limiting oneself to a certain extent. However, gaining a deeper understanding of one speech community (that may at times even have many things in common with another one) may be worth it and enable much more insightful and relevant ministry.