Ethics and Accountability in Missions

I recently bought a book titled “Serving Jesus with Integrity: Ethics and Accountability in Mission” edited by Dwight Baker and Doug Hayward. On a quick glance through, it looks like it should be a good read.

It got me thinking. I used to be a mechanical engineer. I served as an Engineering Officer in the Navy for 5 years, and as a mechanical design engineer for 8 years. I also have both a BS and an MS in Mechanical Engineering. That adds up to about 20 years. In all of those 20 years, I never received any training on engineering ethics. That is not to say, such a course does not exist. I have seen it in college catalogues before. However, it was never a core or required course, and it was never recommended for me to take. Serving in an engineering role, I never was in a seminar on that topic either.

I was in the US Navy, as noted before— a little over 5 years active. I don’t recall ever having an ethics class at OCS, SWS, NPC, NPP, or any shorter training. I vaguely remembering taking leadership training at Officer Candidate School with some talk of martial virtues (I think). However, more training was on law (Uniform Code of Military Justice— UCMJ, and Non-Judicial Punishment—NJP).

At seminary, we were required to take Christian Ethics. It had value in high end thoughts of ethics— like deontological versus teleological, or absolutist versus non-absolutist systems. Then ethics is applied to hot-topic current issues. The course is valuable… but a bit uncertain as to its relevance in regular ministry. I think it has value, but there is commonly a need for ethics that are specific to individual ministries.

In the book that my wife and I wrote on Clinical Pastoral Care, we had a section on ethics as it applied to pastoral counselors or clinical chaplains. In this, relevant topics would be such things as confidentiality, referral, exploitation.

I have never taken course on missionary ethics. However, there are so many ways in which a missionary can be unethical— issues of contextual ethics, as well as professional and ministerial ethics. Hopefully the book will be a big help.