About me, FPC, and mission work (1)
My name is Jonathan Mosser. I’m 22 years old, a 2002 graduate of York Suburban High School and a 2006 graduate of Middlebury College (a small liberal arts school in Middlebury, VT). I graduated from college with a degree in Biochemistry and a minor in Spanish, and I’m in the process of applying to medical school.
As many of you may know, my family has been attending First Presbyterian Church of York for a number of years. I was involved in youth group from middle school through my graduation from high school. While I was in high school, I helped out for a couple of years with the middle school youth group. Those years in youth group were really my introduction with what it meant to be a Christian. My family also attended three FPC family mission trips to Allende, Mexico while I was in middle school. I remember being fascinated and overwhelmed with the whole experience of cross-cultural mission. More than anything, my nascent faith was challenged. The trip provoked a sudden, radical expansion of what I thought Christianity meant and exposed me to the global nature of the church in a powerful new way.
I was hooked on mission work. I signed up for any short-term mission opportunity that came my way. Our church fed my interest – I traveled to Washington, DC, Jamaica, West Virginia, and the Bahamas on youth group trips. Each trip challenged my understanding of God and His role in the world and in my life. I set out for college and Vermont, confident that short-term mission was an effective way to continue my spiritual growth, serve God, and leave an impact in the community that I’d visited.
About me, FPC, and mission work (2)
At Middlebury I became a member of the college’s Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) and later served on the leadership board for three years. Middlebury uses a J-term system, which means that we have a one-month, one-class January term after our winter break but before our spring term. When I learned that the college was planning the second annual Middlebury IVCF mission trip to Juarez, Mexico over February break – a one-week break after our January term – I instinctively signed up. A Middlebury junior by the name of David Kaufmann had spent his first J-term there with a group called Life Challenge International (LCI), led a small group over February break of his second year, and was planning to repeat the trip this year.
We arrived in Juarez that February, a group of about 15, and spent the week in a hodgepodge of mission activities: working construction, painting, visiting orphanages, singing in mental institutions, and leading Bible school. Tim Gamwell (the pastor and missionary who leads LCI) explained that this selection was meant to show us the variety of mission work. According to his rationale, if he could expose each of us to a type of mission work that we found compelling, we each might seek that type of work out in the future. If we focused on one type of work, then fewer of the people in the group might find their niche in God’s service.
I provide this example to indicate the contrast with my previous experiences, not to make any kind of statement about its validity. In fact, I returned to Juarez two more times on February trips, and each was very different from the others, as the team at LCI experimented with these one-week mission experiences. Each year, our group grew – and began to include seekers and non-Christians. The trips challenged all of us to look at our place in the world and our place relative to God, and at the responsibilities that result.
About me, FPC, and mission work (3)
What captivated me was the interest that Tim and everybody else at LCI took in exploring the question at hand: why do we do short-term mission? Getting to know the full-time missionaries behind the short-term trips, I started to view my short-term experiences differently. I saw them as the full-time missionaries saw them, trying to both teach the short-term group about mission experientially and effectively utilize the talents of the group in order to augment the ongoing mission work in Juarez.
I also started to look at our group as the people of Juarez saw us. Tim gave a story as an example. What if you were a mother, he said, and you dressed your child up in her best clothes to go to an event that an American short-term group put together – but when you arrived, someone looked at your child and saw the dirty, torn rag that she was wearing and, shaking her head at the poor dirty child, replaced it with a nice new one from a bag. A charitable gift could be an affront to a mother’s ability to provide for her child. So Life Challenge, he explained, was working on alternative ways to distribute clothes.
I list some similar observations and strategies in the LCI section below. I give these examples here, however, to show how my experiences in Juarez started to change the way that I saw short-term mission work. I still believe in the powerful nature of short-term trips. I used to see the trips as easily-definable, one-week, mission-in-a-box opportunities. My trips to Juarez finally convinced me of what all of the other trips had tried to tell me: that an attitude of mission can’t be confined to one or two weeks every year.
About me, FPC, and mission work (4)
Earlier, I mentioned that I’m hoping to attend medical school in the somewhat-near future. In the past three years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel twice to Honduras alongside my father on a medical/dental mission trip through Gettysburg Presbyterian Church. I’ve done odd jobs (oral surgery assisting, medical records keeping), and more recently some mildly-skilled work (running the lab, translating, interacting with patients). Those trips opened an entirely new window of short-term mission work to me: the medical/surgical/dental trip. While I can’t say at this point in my life exactly how everything will play out, I saw in Honduras a collision of cross-cultural mission service and medicine that was inspiring and appeals to me greatly.
As I completed my senior year, I was looking for an opportunity to further explore these connections before medical school – maybe through a program studying global health, or something to improve my Spanish to better equip me for future medical service. As I weighed options in my mind, David Kaufmann – the Middlebury student who began the Juarez trips and is now a full-time missionary in Juarez – approached me with an offer and a challenge. LCI has been growing in the past few years, and they were looking to expand the scope of their medical mission offerings. Would I consider, he asked, coming down to Juarez and working alongside him, dedicating a few days each week to developing the medical mission program and the rest of my time to being a longer-term missionary?
After weeks of conversations and prayerful consideration, I decided to accept. In my life, I see the next year or so as an opportunity and a challenge: an opportunity to study mission work, to learn about medical mission, and hopefully to serve effectively in Juarez; a challenge to actually extend my concept of mission work beyond the one-week single-serving box and to dedicate myself to the Lord’s service, despite my shortcomings and fears. That’s where I am right now, raising support and trying to share the experience with others – a little scared, a little excited, but in everything grateful for the opportunity to serve that God has provided.