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Abigail Nelson, Vice President of Programs for Episcopal Relief and Development, on how the Church thinks about mission.

Two years ago, my phone rang. On the other end was a friend who had once opened his home to me during my travels in Central America. I had fond memories of his wife slapping tortillas into distinctive round shapes under the shade of their rickety front porch. His daughter liked to jump on my lap when she could, eager to play with my braids. But today, his voice came from far away, crackling with anxiety.

How he had made it to the United States, I don’t know. It was a story that he would never tell, although it is a story we can see in articles and statistics, stories of women and men who risk death in the desert walking, who are trucked in living ovens into the U.S. to work illegally. Today he was calling from a deportation cell, his one phone call. “Can you help?” he asked. He had been caught by the police, and was being sent back. He was frightened.

People often talk about mission in the church. We vow to respond to God’s call, the Missio Dei, the Mission of God, in our baptismal covenant. We embrace our identities as co-creators, building a Kingdom of God in this world, a place of justice and mercy as promised by the ancient prophets. At its most personal, I believe that the work of “mission” is simply what the word says — misere, to send, to be sent, to respond when the call comes.

Almost every Episcopal parish I visit is actively engaged in mission. This mission is often expressed in car pools and visits to parishioners who are shut-in by illness, by baking homemade coffee cake for the spring cleaning crews, in volunteering to make beds for the homeless who sleep in their churches. These are all critical things upon which we build communities — caring for those among us in need, and responding to Christ’s call to love as he loves us in ministering to the sick and the friendless.

In this age of globalization and speedy travel, our capacity to physically respond to our brothers and sisters is now stretched to include all parts of the world. No longer do you have to give up all you know, and send travel-stained postcards back from dusty rail stations, or travel on creaky barges down the Zambezi to places never seen by your countrymen. Mission is no longer solely the work of “missionaries”; we are all sent out by God to transform the world.

Each of us can now fly to Haiti, Sudan, or Bangladesh — unstable and abundantly lovely places — and engage in global “mission.” Short-term mission trips, parish-to-parish exchanges, university shares, youth trips and diocesan companion relationships are personal ways for people of faith to love their neighbors globally, know them as people, and embrace them in relationship. These visits are extraordinarily powerful. Most of us have heard or said upon return from such a trip, “I thought I would go and dig that well or build that school, and I realized when I came home that I had been changed more than those I went to help.” This transformation in our own lives and our own communities is a real and an important part of mission.

Yet who among us has also not wondered at the trip’s expense and asked if it might not be better spent in directly sending the funds to the community? Sometimes our greater monetary wealth, our ability to get medical help and drugs to the right places is what God calls us to do. But, increasingly, those in the Church who are engaged in mission see their relationships — and the listening that makes those relationships possible — as a cornerstone to their way of engaging in the mission of building up the Kingdom of God. The first conversations that parishes or institutions are (or should be) having with their partners begin with an invitation: “Tell us who you are. Tell us who your diocese is. Tell us what your concerns are.” What ends up happening, in these conversations, is that the solution or the plan that evolves is different from what both partners expected. It is hard work that takes a great deal of listening and discernment, but responding to God’s call to mission begins with listening.

As we return from our overseas mission trips or relationshipestablishing meetings, the “what next” part of our journey is as important as building that school or hospital. It’s a temptation to promise self-transformation through a mission trip to our congregation or ourselves, to treat the rest of the world like they’re our field trip for transformation. Transformation is not something that we feel as we return; it becomes something that we live into as we integrate our profound experiences into our sense of justice and mercy. We act out a new vision of love to benefit the people we know and those we will never know, both at home and globally. Transformation means we must be willing to engage ourselves, our governmental policies, and our consumer options in fixing the systems that made our help or our funds necessary in Haiti, Sudan, or Bangladesh. We have to support the institutions that are part of the solution, and challenge the systems that would undermine the vision.

In the end, living within the Missio Dei comes down to inhabiting a spiritual place of constantly mindful listening, to the voice of Christ calling to you, to the expressions of need and concern in the neighbors that you work and live among, to the global community as it articulates its resources, hopes, and hurts, and to respond. Build the latrine or the school in Central America, yes, but demand that your church leaders, institutions, governments, and corporations listen and respond to those in need, as well. God calls each of us to respond in a unique way. This is part of the challenge and tension of living into that willingness to “be sent.”

My friend called from jail. In his home he had been one man struggling to make choices in a country with little hope. Despite their poverty, after he was gone, his daughter would look up occasionally and say, “Doesn’t Daddy love us anymore?” His family was disintegrating while he searched for better economic opportunities. Then, he was quite literally caught in a trap and returned home. My call at the time was very practical really: to be his friend and call his family, to be his connection here as he grappled with the legal journey, to not let him get lost, and to help him journey home. Now, working through our global church, we are supporting him in his renewed commitment and transformation at home, creating economic opportunities for his family and others so that the future is not so stark in his home. God’s challenge to us in mission is to break the cycle that will create hundreds of thousands of similar stories before we rest, remembering that ancient message that justice and mercy can exist.