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BorderLinks Challenges Christians
by Rick Ufford-Chase
Click to view photo gallery
Crossing the border from the United States into Mexico is a study in contrasts, a still-life painting of the new world order. Suddenly the water carries parasites and amoebae and is unsafe to drink. Raw sewage flows through the streets during heavy rains.

Children clamber onto hoods to wash windshields of cars waiting to cross the border, or simply hold out their hands hoping for spare change. Homeless kids wander in gangs through the underground sewer tunnels, terrorizing the local residents.

Homes made of packing crates, cardboard, scrap lumber and corrugated tin, hugging the sides of the steep ravines, stand so close together you can reach from one to another. Most city streets are narrow, rutted dirt paths winding up the sides of the hills. Early morning air hangs thick in the canyon, the car exhaust and wood smoke from home heating seeming to conspire as they move slowly north up the canyon and across the border.

As you cross the border the minimum wage drops from $5.15/hour to roughly $4.15/day. "Family" is redefined to mean whatever assembly of extended cousins, parents, aunts, uncles or friends can be squeezed into a two-room house in order to help provide income to pay the bills.

As you cross the border the
minimum wage drops from
$5.15/hour to roughly $4.15/day.
Children roam the streets for at least half the day, often unattended by the time they are 7 or 8 years old. Their parents sew women's underwear, prepare surgical prep kits, assemble electronic computer boards or power supplies, sort coupons, or perform a myriad of other tasks in foreign-owned factories. Their jobs are connected with every aspect of our lives here in the United States.

In 1987 I came to the border as a Presbyterian mission volunteer to help found BorderLinks, and to help North American people understand the complexities of the border. Getting to know the people living along the border has called into question much of what I thought I knew, after a lifetime in the Presbyterian Church, about being faithful.
Christians who come to learn
from the border are pushed
hard to examine their faith.
My encounter with people on both sides of the border from factory managers, politicians and immigration officials to refugees, church leaders, factory workers and community activists has changed my life. Knowing their stories is like looking through a magnifying glass at the impact of the emerging global economy. There is no better place to understand the way our world is changing, the impact those changes are likely to have on our communities, and the challenge those changes present to our church.

Christians who come to learn from the border are pushed hard to examine their faith. Recently a church youth group spent a week with us in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The young people had no agenda other than to build new relationships, learn all that they could, and to try to understand what the Bible had to say to them about what they were experiencing.

... benefiting from a system
that depends on the
deepening poverty of factory
workers all over the world.
When they talked about their experiences in their home church, their stories were so compelling that a group of adults made a trip eight months later to see the reality for themselves. That church is wrestling in a deep and compelling way with its understanding of mission.

The challenge is to squarely face the contradictions that exist for North American Christians who are benefiting from a system that depends on the deepening poverty of factory workers all over the world. An honest reading of the Bible in that context makes most of us squirm.

The border gives us insight
into the divisions that exist in
all of our communities across
North and Latin America.
Most BorderLinks participants return home having discovered something elemental that was missing from their experience of God. When you're spending the night in a home with cardboard walls, dirt floors and no water or electricity and you talk with your host family about God' s power in their lives, God becomes real in a way most of us on the other side of the border do not know. It's all about where we place our faith, and who we depend on when we confront difficulties that seem insurmountable.

The border gives us insight into the divisions that exist in all of our communities across North and Latin America. It highlights both the opportunities and dangers of a world growing rapidly smaller as our economics render national boundaries meaningless. It demands of all of us that we redefine the boundaries of our churches and communities to embrace our brothers and sisters wherever they are. The border can help us understand what it means to be fully "church."

Rick Ufford-Chase is a co-founder and was the International Director of BorderLinks from 1987 through September, 2005. His article appeared in Presbyterians Today Online.

Call us at 520-628-8263 or email program@borderlinks.org
BorderLinks is a bi-national education and service organization.
We have not-for-profit status in the US and Mexico.
© 1987-2001 BorderLinks. All rights reserved.
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