by Jim Reapsome
In our ranking of mission priorities, where do the world’s kids fit? Are they being slighted by more majestic issues, by more serious concerns? Do we subconsciously, perhaps, look down our noses at agencies that work with children?
In our ranking of mission priorities, where do the world’s kids fit? Are they being slighted by more majestic issues, by more serious concerns? Do we subconsciously, perhaps, look down our noses at agencies that work with children?
One reason that we are tempted to do so is that the world’s desperately needy children have been used to raise huge sums of money. So, if we can’t work that angle in fund raising, we’re tempted to categorize agencies doing children’s work as not full-fledged members of the missions community.
Unfortunately, enough bogus fund raising has come to light to make us more than a little suspicious. It’s hard to document where every dollar goes. It’s even harder to document the existence of individual children, schools, and homes that are pictured for soft-hearted donors.
But such abuses are no warrant for putting children at the bottom of the mission strategy priority list. Instead, abuses should inspire us to do a valid work for children, rather than exploiting them for fund raising purposes.
If we’re suspicious of schemes based on emotion, then let’s be up front with the Christian public and do something better. Let’s also broaden the base of our children’s ministries. There’s sufficient scope – and critical needs – in many areas.
Take street kids, for example. They are a distinctly new kind of orphan, if you will. Whether runaways, school dropouts, or abandoned, the number of children who live in the world’s streets reaches into the tens of millions. Their number rises as countries become more and more urbanized. The United Nations Children’s Fund puts their number at 90 million in poor countries and 10 million in rich ones. The problem seems greatest in South America. One report out of Brazil puts the number of street children there as high as 30 million.
In fact, two out of every 10 children under age 15 live in poverty in poor countries. Millions never go to school of any kind. The International Labor Organization calls them a "legion of misfits." Some of these children are so desperate that they hang around the streets waiting for someone to steal them for adoption in North America.
We’re well acquainted with the plight of starving babies and children, but not so familiar with the shocking circumstances of child prostitution and the use of children to produce pornographic materials. Anyone who has traveled overseas knows how children are used to beg. But rarely do we see scenes of child labor behind factory walls.
Where does the missionary enterprise begin to attack these ills? Going back to the days of George Mueller and Amy Carmichael, mission agencies have rescued thousands of children and rebuilt their lives by giving food, medical attention, foster homes, and education. Even now, thanks to oral rehydration therapy and immunization campaigns, up to a million child deaths a year are being prevented. But researchers say that simple diarrhea still kills more people now than bubonic plague did in the Middle Ages. There’s no reason to let up on major campaigns to eradicate disease-and the causes-that still wipe out 13 million children under five each year.
Beyond food and medicine, however, we must expand into planned programs that will give hope and meaning to kids who have to beg, sell their bodies, and sleep on the streets. This will be for some agencies an entirely new missionary opportunity and challenge. They can find both inspiration and instruction in the model of Rosario Rivera in Lima, Peru (see p. 333, this issue).
We’d like to see the world’s children and youth kept high on our mission priority list.
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