My name is Bill Gafkjen. I am a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who serves the church these days as Assistant to the Bishop in the Indiana-Kentucky Synod. One of my responsibilities and great joys is to also serve as the synod's Director of Global Mission. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this blog and to invite you to follow along as a bunch of folks from our synod travel to Chile to accompany for a time our sisters and brothers in Christ who live and serve in that fascinating country.The group leaves Indianapolis on August 1 and will return August 13. During that time they will work alongside members of Buen Samaritano Congregation in Santiago to build a covering over a walkway between the church building and the preschool by the same name that the congregation offers as part of its ministry. The group will also visit other congregations and ministries of the Iglesia Evangelica Luterana en Chile (IELCH), our companion church. Having experienced a similar sojourn with the IELCH myself in 2004 I know that the participants in this trip will experience the amazing presence of God in their midst as they laugh and pray and talk and work and play with the good people of the church there.
This trip is part of our companion relationship with the IELCH. This companionship, appropriately enough, has been established under the "accompaniment model" of global relationships. This model is a departure from what most folks think of as traditional models of global mission -- and it is countercultural as well. Accompaniment is about a mutual relationship between equals who trust each other to be faithful stewards of God's mission in their respective parts of the world. This means that relationship is more important than resources and we steer clear of donor/receiver dynamics in the relationships. We commit to learning from each other and to doing what we can to encourage and support one another's mission and ministry.
This is one of the reasons we have chosen the theme "God In Between" for this trip. This is the title of a delightful book by Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and beautifully illustrated by Sally Sweetland. In that book a bunch of individuals slogging through life are claimed by new joy and delight in community through the discovery that God is "in between." God is in between us, in the relationships we have with one another. The participants in this trip (US travelers and Chilean hosts alike) will be guided by this expectation, this faith, this promise. Walking side by side with one another they will see God.
