Anyway, this next article is...
Gilbert, Bertram C. (1972, April). Value education. Military Chaplains' Review, 1(2), 49-51.
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Some of us have justified this aspect of ministry by calling it a kind of "tent making" which puts us in a position to go about our Father's real business. Others have considered it a duty in which we as citizens have a special talent and a special training. Still others have considered it an entree with men and women who might not otherwise relate to us. In any event we have been the Army's primary specialists in moral education. (p. 49)
I'm not going to deal with the obvious issue about chaplains in the Army, because I've talked about this enough, but I'm going to use this text as a jumping off point to wonder what the Vienna mission staff (which was completely comprised of U.S. reserve chaplains) were thinking vis a vis their socialization roles at the mission. Did they think of their socialization responsibilities there as being central to their ministry, a ministry to the staff they were socializing, or something else? How did they view it?
Obviously it couldn't have been exactly like being in the military, but it was different enough from the usual run-of-the-mill mission that an off-the-cuff answer seems inadequate in this situation. And then you don't really know how much influence they really had.
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One can hardly expect a soldier to believe he is really free to speak his mind when he has just had a straight talk lecture by his sergeant on "obedience" and when he is one of 500 in a marched-to theater. (p. 51)Amen! Preach it brother! I can relate totally, because the same basic thing - translated to the mission context, of course - happened to me. And that's why I shut up for a year and a half, and I think it wasn't until after I went on the women's ministry trip to Romania and I never made any effort to talk to anyone to try to prolong my stay or discuss issues or anything, but they saw that maybe I could really do something (teach, etc.), that something was going on that I wasn't talking, and they had thought that I was submitting, when I wasn't, I was just sort of biding my time. I didn't feel free to speak my mind any more than the soldier that had been in the marched-in theater. This guy has a mind after my own heart.
But the thing is that it's the atmosphere, and how authority structures are set up. In Vienna there were clear lines, even if they were approachable. I mean, there was an open door policy, but it was always clear who the authority was, probably similar to in the military, although we didn't have ranks, per se.
So with this in mind, really the whole time I was with the mission I didn't feel free to "speak my mind" because I was thrown off guard so early on to just sort of watch to figure out what was going on and then it just unraveled to get worse and worse from there to where I completely lost trust in them and I was sent back to the U.S. and after that I never would speak my mind to them. It was just too late at that point after they sent me back to the U.S. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean I lived in a deaf-mute world in relation with them; no, it just means I lived in a more shallow level in relation with them, because that's the amount of myself I allowed to be vulnerable to them for the rest of the time I was with them. But that's all they wanted from me anyway, so they didn't notice that I withheld anything. (They wanted me to be a secretary, and they certainly never ever gave any indication that they wanted any of my other gifts that might have been applied in Eastern Europe, until towards the end I did a little teaching in Eastern Europe.)
So then at the end they finally understood and my mentor, my boss', boss' secretary kept telling me the story of the little boy who refused to sit down in class and finally did, saying he was still standing up on the inside. I was making moving preparations by the time they realized this though.
If the Vienna mission is out to change lives, I hope it does a better job on the mission field than it did with my life.
