In the excellent “Christianity out of context,” E. Goodman makes a very good point: we have difficulty understanding Christianity or applying it today because the world that many of us Westerners live in is completely different from the world in which Jesus lived. Jesus’ followers lived in a world in which they were “strangers and exiles”—they were not the dominant cultural factor in that world. Yet, we Westerners are the dominant cultural factor and influence in the world we live in. Goodman suggests that in order to actually be Christians we must pursue life in the margins—where we are the minority, where we suffer persecution, opposition, and intolerance. That is the mission field.
I can see Goodman’s point, and I think it’s very important. The mandate given to us at Creation was to go in to the world and “tame the wild” (my translation). Yet too often, as I have pointed out before, we tend to remain where it is, in fact, already tame. And then, because we are bored, we sometimes “go a little wild” ourselves. Perhaps because an innate part of our being recognizes that we are not meant to remain where it is constantly safe.
Yet when we go into the dangerous places, we are faced with the challenge of preparation. I am reminded time and again of the need to prepare our missionaries for the real dangers and risks they will face, which are not always obvious. We think, for instance, of the need to prepare our missionaries to “suffer persecution, opposition and intolerance,” as Goodman points out above. But what about the need to prepare for suffering constant exposure to the stream of sin?
We have grown up in our particular culture, and to some degree we have worked out our ways of becoming more or less dealing with (or preferably, inoculating ourselves against) the more pervasive sins our culture has to offer. But the pervasive sins another culture has to offer will be rather different—and they may be sins that we are not prepared for.
Another article I encountered in the last day illustrates this point. “Thai-style morals” (and yes, that link is safe for you to read) is about a recent incident at a Thai festival in which three teenage girls danced topless during a street party in the Silom nightlife zone. At first people were appreciative of them – particularly in comments on the videos that surfaced on the Internet. But when it came to light that the girls were 13, 14 and 16, a furor resulted. The article focuses on the numerous hypocrisies in the case and suggests that the society tries to blame certain pervasive sins on a few bad eggs when really the bad eggs are just the natural result of the pervasive structures of sin.
These pervasive structures of sin which we face on the margins will be drastically different (and perhaps to us more in-front, bald, direct) temptations than anything they have faced at home. We cannot assume missionaries are automatically super-saints that can repel any temptation. We must prepare them for the realities of what they will face, and some ways in which to deal with it, and accountability structures to serve as ongoing diagnostics of their spiritual condition so that early help can be provided rather than wait for some inevitable flameout. At the conference I was at, one of the workers commented that sexual sins are not uncommon on the field. I’ve heard that comment many times in other places, too. I’m not saying they are as pervasive as perhaps they are at home, but they are not “rare” by any stretch of the imagination. But they don’t have to be inevitable.
The point is not to prepare for in-your-face sexual temptation. There are other kinds of temptation, too: rampant materialism and wealth, drugs, alcoholism, intellectual pride, wealth caused by disparities between Western income and local income, and more. The point I am making is that too often we consider dangers to our missionaries as physical dangers – arrest, imprisonment, and the like – that are kind of “celebrity dangers.” Too often we don’t consider dangers to our missionaries that are dangerous to their souls – as well as to their work on the field.
We often send missionaries “on a shoestring” to pioneer new works—fragile swarms in places where they are beset with great dangers. If they are destroyed by the enemy through persecution we can hold it up as almost a “good thing”: the “martyr” or a cause for celebration. Yet because we are sending people on a shoe string I often find that we send them without either adequate preparation or adequate support. We do not consider that this is the way the Enemy can destroy our workers—not making them into martyrs, but making them into people we whisper about, who we cluck over, who turned-out-to-be-not-so-great. And we make it possible.
If you are a friend to a missionary on the field, a good friend, you need to be the kind that gently but persistently inquires about the health of their soul and their relationships as well as the health of their body and finances. We must, indeed, work in dangerous places on the margins. But the real dangers may be the ones we aren’t expecting and often don’t like to talk about.
And if you as a church are sending missionaries to the field who have not gone through any kind of training program to prepare them for what they will face, who are not part of a team (more than just them and their spouse), and who do not have accountability partners, processes to nurture spiritual health, and direct, regular oversight—shame on you. You are plainly setting them up to fail, catastrophically, and be walking wounded for the rest of their life.
Updates:
- “Why train with New Tribes” takes a similar look at this subject. Why spend two years training when there are lost people dying right now? Why not just go?
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