Melissa Erikson: My Greatest Resource Is Time

I didn't go out of my way to become a missionary. It is the result of many, many years of wanting to take the next step God put in front of me, and that led me to serving on mission in Germany. I studied film and German in college while I worked in camping ministry, running all of their video production, and I studied abroad in northwest Germany for a year. Studying abroad was my first experience with the German church and my first experience with belonging to a church.

I don't come from a church background. I came to know Christ at the summer camp. The German church I attended was small and vibrant, but also anemic: Germans weren't discipling Germans. That broke my heart.

I came back to the U.S., finished my last year of college and God kept me discontent enough in my comfortable American life to keep asking, “How do I get back over to Germany?” 

I went to a missions conference with young adults from my church, and it felt like the last straw. I wasn't actively trying to be a missionary and nobody [at the conference] was talking about Europe; everybody I spoke with was focusing on other parts of the world. I planned on going back to the hotel and rethinking my plans of going to Germany. 

As I'm walking out of the exhibition hall, I see a ReachGlobal booth. I'm like, “Well, I'll go talk with them, spend five minutes, maybe get a free t-shirt and be on my way.” There was no free t-shirt, but when the woman that I was talking with heard I wanted to go to Germany, she just paused and pointed to two young women. She said, “They serve in Berlin. You need to talk to them.”

When I was 22, I told God, “I know I’m coming back to Germany, but I’m never going to the Berlin. It’s gray and the people are mean. I’m going to the southwest.” [But when I spoke with these women], everything they shared about ministry was exactly what God had convicted me of––partnering with Germans and the German church. That had been my heartbreak ever since I was a college student. It was the clearest green light from the Holy Spirit. So I went to Berlin for two years.  

I thought I knew German culture, but Berlin is culturally not Germany in a lot of ways. It’s one of the most unique, weirdest places in Europe. It's like if the Burning Man festival existed in one location, 24/7.  

I'm from a tiny, rural town that doesn't have sidewalks. Now I'm in this massive, sprawling city––it's probably 10 times larger than where I studied abroad. It's loud and it's grimy, and I'm in a part of the city that's full of protests. 

The first flat I had was in the punk anarchist district. It has some of the highest numbers of police calls. It happened to be directly across the street from a church building that wasn't a church anymore, but it was run by the local anarchy group and housed a museum to youth resistance movements. Every day I wake up and there's a church with an iron cross, but it's run by the anarchists. They operate like community engagements, and there's a garden co-op and programs for kids and language cafes for foreigners. At the time I didn't even know how to begin to contextualize it. 

So I visited the museum one time, and on my way out, there were these two middle-aged punks who were standing there, talking. I started talking to one who's got red hair, piercings, dressed all black, and I [accidentally] insulted her because I used the formal way to say “you” in German, and she was upset about it.  

A key tenant of anarchism as a worldview is everybody is inherently equal, and so by using a formal you, I put a hierarchy there. I'm a foreigner, and I'm trying to be polite, right? And she's just spitting fire at me for that, and then she found out I'm American and said, “You live in a third-world country with smartphones, and you don't even have maternity leave.” But then she turned the corner and she said, “Oh, we're having a language cafe. We're starting it next month. You should totally come. It's going to be great.” I was like, “Oh, okay, this is the Berliner attitude I've heard about. They're just blunt and bold and in your face. But they're not necessarily mean.”

So I started to get to know different people in the cities, going to like social meetups. I found a running group; I found a board gaming group; and I started going to a language cafe hosted by my local anarchist punk collective. The city began to get a little bit smaller. And I spent unhurried time with people, especially my East Berliner anarchists, getting to hear them, getting to hear about their experiences and getting to know the city. 

To be a missionary, the greatest resource I have to give people, apart from Jesus, is time I can spend with them, listening to them and giving them that value. And that's opened up doorways and gospel conversations. I think it's been the most transformative thing for me, too. It's all relationship focused––how do you practice that Emmanuel, God with us, kind of presence?