Is It Time for a Moratorium on Missions from the West?

With every church on "every corner" USA sending their own missionaries out into the world, it is no wonder we have created problems. Consider the following perspective of a Christian on the ground in Kenya.

In the mythology of North American fundamentalism and Western Evangelicalism, we missionaries are the heroes. We've given up our comfortable lives and left family and friends and offered ourselves to bring the light of the gospel to benighted peoples across the globe. We of the missionary slide show/now powerpoint presentation, we of the missionary letters telling stories of our triumphs and sorrows, we of the frenetic furlough spent going from church to church giving our spiel and hoping that congregations and individuals will sign up and be on our financial support team. We have our special anecdotes that always produce the appropriate laugh or outburst of disgust. We always seem to be teetering on the brink of some ministry-threatening catastrophe, skillfully presented to elicit yet more prayer support. People regularly marvel at how we could have taken our children from here (land of milk and honey) and raised them there (the dangerous howling wilderness) and are astonished when they discover that our teenagers can carry on a meaningful conversation with adults.

And yes, in God's providence, he has seen fit to use a rather motley crew of men and women to communicate 'the gospel' in many if not most of the needy contexts of the world. But a case can be made (and indeed has been made at different times in the past fifty years) that while we missionaries have accomplished a lot that is 'good', the unintended consequences of the well-intentioned mistakes may actually be the undoing of meaningful Christianity in the lands that are trumpeted as our greatest success stories.

Let me acknowledge here that when, in Jesus' eyes, 'even a cup of cold water will do', the amount of mercy and compassion shown in missionary-founded and staffed clinics around the globe makes outside intervention more than worth it no matter how great the cost. The same for various relief programs and responses to the disasters that are always happening somewhere. As long as there is poverty, sickness, war, environmental depredation, etc, there will be opportunities for Christians to do what historically has always shown them at their best, that is, help the needy. If one has ever been a war refugee or lost everything in a disaster, than this sort of mercy and help makes a huge difference and an even bigger impression.

But we Western Christians have been less successful in our 'evangelism' and 'church planting.' More often than not, we have taken our own experience as the norm and sought to reproduce what we know in the context of the 'mission field' to which we have been sent. So if we have grown up in a church where 'salvation' comes when one responds to an altar call and accepts Jesus as one's personal savior and is thus 'saved', then is it surprising that we 'plant' 'churches' that impose as a necessity our own saving drama onto the experience of others. Never mind that 'personal savior' is meaningless in the new context, as is an 'altar call'. Not only that, but if we grew up thinking that Calvinists were devil's spawn (or that Calvinists really were the chosen and that Arminians were gospel-nullifying deceivers), or that teetotaling was the only real Christian stance with respect to alcohol, or that the pope, if not antichrist himself was at least his cousin, or that inerrancy is a fundamental Christian tenant or that one is not really a Christian if one hasn't been baptized by immersion as a believer, or fill in the blank with any manner of Western theological imports deemed necessary for the building of a God-pleasing church--in doing so we have succeeded in insisting on answers to questions that nobody 'over here' is really asking and assuming that our theological fights are the only fights worth fighting (never mind that no one here has any idea what the issue is all about!). The end result may be a local church that our sending organizations and supporters back home may be enthusiastic about, but it is a kind of Christianity that requires its converts to think like Westerners and then behave like Westerners before they can grasp the 'real' issues and make the 'right' decisions and thus become genuinely (according to Western standards) Christian. Now, multiply the number of local churches by the number of sending denominations or mission boards, each with their own 'doctrinal distinctives', and what one ends up with is a mess.

So whose 'gospel' are the poor benighted souls in my field of service supposed to believe? The Baptists? (Which of course begs the question 'Which sort of Baptist?') The Presbyterians? The Methodists? The Roman Catholics? The Eastern Orthodox? The Anglicans? The Africa Inland Church? The Pentecostals (all the way from the Swedish variety to the Joel Osteen wannabees)? This is the reality that almost never makes it back to the 'rev up the base' missions conferences or gets included in the 'onward to victory' newsletters.

We Western missionaries have all really meant well. I should know--I is one. But despite our best of intentions, one gets the impression that we have been our own worst enemy, sowing the seeds the ultimate undoing and destruction of the Christian enterprise here along with our noble efforts to 'sow the word'. We have ended up reproducing ourselves, and we refuse to acknowledge that that may not after all be a good thing. And now the crops we've sown are bearing their fruit. And we've got a bumper crop of different denominations, legalisms, health and prosperity entertainment centers. We've generated a lot of busyness, a lot of committees, a lot of 'ministry' programs, a lot of leadership training seminars, a lot of NGOs, a lot of 'support structures', a lot of theological education opportunities, a lot of church services (not to mention kept Toyota in business by buying a lot of land cruisers)--and to what end? Sadly most of us are so focused on our own little ministries that we neither notice nor care about the bigger picture.

A Kenyan friend of mine has just posted a litany of her own frustrations with us gospel do-gooders from the West that's well worth reading. If this is the best we can do, then, in my opinion, it's time to stop this madness and rethink the whole program. Perhaps a place to start is to realize that there is a bigger picture. Humility and repentance would help a lot, too.

Courtesy of William Black in his blog Onesimus Online.