Rev. Dr. B. Hunter Farrell is Director of the World Mission Initiative at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, PA.
Hunter Farrell Hired as World Mission Initiative Director
Prior to coming to Pittsburgh Seminary, Farrell served as director of World Mission for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In his years there he managed a 180-member staff in 52 countries while overseeing the areas of strategic direction and partnerships, funds development, operations, and communications.
This is a paraphrased excerpt from A Presbyterian Outlook Interview by Leslie Scanlon with Hunter Farrell as an introduction to 10 minutes of an audio interview below where Hunter shares about his call to mission. He tells of working with various poor people outside of the U.S. He brings home the importance of kinship and keeping families together.
Leslie Scanlon: What are some of the challenges in working with people in other countries?
Hunter Farrell: There are two primary barriers, two massive barriers, to our engaging effectively with people living in other countries. The first is, they are different. They don’t think like us, they have different experiences, they speak a different language, they come from different cultural traditions. And we consistently as people from the U.S. in our own ethnocentric ways, we consistently underestimate the power of cultural difference.
“The second barrier is we’re convinced that our way is the right way. In social sciences, they talk about an evolutionary anthropology. You assume that everybody’s on the same road. Some day they’ll get to where we are. There’s one road toward human development. And increasingly, we’re aware that that’s simply not the case. People can live in God’s shalom in lots of different ways, and it doesn’t have to be in the way that our country has built itself.”
Click on the audio button … “Call To Mission” …
Full Outlook article by clicking on the link below …
https://pres-outlook.org/2016/09/30-years-of-world-mission-an-interview-with-hunter-farrell/
The staff at World Mission Initiative … https://www.pts.edu/wmi-staff
We pray for the mission outreach and training done by World Mission Initiative.
