Missionaries

 I have spent much of my life practicing restraint. I have believed, deeply, in live and let live, in ecumenical humility, in interfaith cooperation that treats difference not as a threat but as a gift. I have broken bread across traditions, prayed alongside people whose theology I do not share, and traveled internationally with mission partners who understand that presence can be holy without being coercive. But there comes a point when silence stops being a virtue and becomes complicity.

That line was crossed for me recently in conversations with mission workers connected to the Southern Baptist Convention. What I heard was not zeal tempered by love, nor conviction held with humility. What I heard was contempt dressed up as faith. “These people are Muslim.” “These people are heathens.” “They worship statues.” The language was not descriptive. It was dismissive. It was the language of disposal, as if whole cultures and centuries of spiritual meaning were refuse waiting to be cleared away.

This is not evangelism. It is not witness. It is not even theology in any serious sense. It is spiritual violence.

Christian mission, at its best, has always wrestled with power. The gospel does not arrive in a vacuum. It enters histories already scarred by colonialism, economic extraction, and religious domination. To ignore that context is not ignorance. It is a choice. And when mission workers speak of the people they encounter with disgust rather than curiosity, with superiority rather than reverence, they reenact the very sins the church has spent generations trying to confess and repair.

The problem is not that these mission workers believe something different from the people they encounter. Difference is not the issue. Dehumanization is. When human beings are reduced to religious labels, when entire communities are flattened into caricatures, the image of God is treated as collateral damage. Scripture offers no permission for that. Jesus never encountered a Samaritan, a Roman, or a foreigner and began by tallying how wrong they were. He began by seeing them.

I cannot escape the nagging question of formation. What, exactly, is being taught by mission boards that produces this kind of posture? Is there any serious engagement with cultural anthropology, religious studies, or trauma awareness? Any reckoning with the history of missions as a tool of empire? Or does all of that get brushed aside as inconvenient so long as quotas are met, numbers are reported, and baptisms can be counted like units moved on a spreadsheet?

When baptism becomes a metric rather than a mystery, the gospel has already been hollowed out.

The theological tradition I stand in insists that God’s work in the world is not coercive but persuasive. Grace does not bludgeon. Love does not sneer. Truth does not require the erasure of another’s dignity in order to stand. If a mission practice cannot honor the humanity, history, and spiritual seriousness of the people it encounters, then it has ceased to be Christian, no matter how many crosses are stitched onto the t-shirts.

This is not about being polite. It is about being faithful. The church has too much blood on its hands, too many graves in its wake, to pretend that intentions alone absolve harm. If mission workers cannot speak about Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or practitioners of indigenous traditions without contempt leaking into their words, then they should not be sent anywhere at all.

The world does not need more religious conquest. It needs repentance. It needs humility. It needs a church brave enough to admit that God was present long before the missionary arrived, and will remain long after the plane ticket home is stamped.

Until that reckoning happens, I can no longer hold my tongue. Silence, in this case, would be a sin.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The War on the Poor Was Never a Secret, It Was a Strategy

Poverty in America isn’t an act of God or some twist of fate. It’s a set of decisions made in smoke-filled rooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms by people who think struggle builds character, as long as it’s not theirs. Every time this country stood at a crossroads where we could’ve built a nation that treats dignity as a right, conservative power slammed the door. They did it with a smile, a flag pin, and a sermon about self-reliance. Don’t be fooled. The war on the poor has never been hidden. It’s been policy. After World War II, America could’ve locked in prosperity for everyone who worked. Organized labor was strong, wages were rising, and a middle class was being born. Then came the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, sold as “balance” between workers and bosses but written to break labor’s knees. It outlawed solidarity strikes, let states pass “right-to-work” laws that really mean “right-to-work-for-less,” and tied unions in legal knots. Truman vetoed it; Congress overrode him. That was the first...
Read more

Moral Failure

In 2003, Rev. Jeremiah Wright roared from the pulpit: “God damn America.” He was not calling for destruction, but for accountability. He was condemning a nation whose policies had betrayed its own ideals, whose injustices had metastasized while its leaders wrapped themselves in a hypocritical patriotism. Two decades later, his words echo with chilling relevance. America stands again at a precipice. We witness the rise of voter suppression masquerading as “election integrity.” We watch as billionaires warp democracy to protect their wealth while working families struggle to survive. We see school boards and state legislatures banning books while children die from bullets politicians refuse to regulate. We hear the shrill cries of “freedom” from those who would take bodily autonomy from women and strip LGBTQ Americans of their basic rights. And above all, we see the soul of the nation, once proudly proclaiming “liberty and justice for all,” cracking under the weight of lies, corruption, ...
Read more

The Conclave...

The white smoke has not yet risen. The Sistine Chapel remains closed to the world, as cardinals from across the globe gather under the frescoed eyes of Christ and the saints. It is a sacred pause in the life of the Roman Catholic Church, a moment set aside for prayerful discernment, ancient ritual, and, hopefully, holy listening. And yet, outside those sealed doors, the world clamors. Political figures, media personalities, and power brokers, many of whom show little interest in the church except when it serves their ideology, are already attempting to shape the outcome. As a Reformed Christian watching this unfold from outside the Catholic tradition, I do so with both deep respect and honest concern. The election of a pope is not just a moment of internal church governance. It sends ripples across global Christianity, international diplomacy, and the moral witness of the faith itself. But what should be a moment of spiritual gravity is now being treated, in some corners, like a campai...
Read more