“Missionary, go home!” Nationalistic demands for the withdrawal of missionaries have received much attention in recent years.
But what of another demand: “Missionary, come home”? This demand is more disturbing, because it originates among the very people whom Christ charged to “make disciples of all nations.” Some Christians are saying that recruiting preachers for overseas service is anachronistic. The idea of foreign missions, they say, is simply a drab remnant of the nineteenth century, an embarrassing reminder of Western civilization’s now defunct superiority complex—nothing less than Christian imperialism.
Any missionary with an ounce of self-respect will weigh evidence that might suggest he is wasting his life, as will those Christian leaders involved in promoting missionary support. God forbid that we should continue to enlarge our mission crew in an age that requires missionary automation!
From personal experience, I am willing to concede a high degree of validity to two often used arguments against sending missionaries overseas. One is, perhaps, the oldest of the anti-missionary arguments, and the other perhaps the most modern.
The more venerable objection has to do with the difficulty the American missionary encounters as he attempts to adjust to a new environment. No matter how sincere and capable he is, the critics insist, the missionary can never succeed in becoming one with the people of another culture.
Who would deny that this objection is based upon fact? Only a thin river separates the state where I was born from the country where I serve as a missionary, but I am reminded daily of the profound disparity between my own psychological and cultural heritage and that of my Latin brothers.
Elisabeth Elliot’s recent novel, No Graven Image, tells the story of Margaret Sparhawk, missionary among the Quichua Indians of Equador. Margaret decides one day that she will begin to dress like the Indians. Donning the native costume, she walks down the village street and knocks at the door of Rosa, an Indian friend. Rosa looks at her in silence, a half smile playing on her face. Finally, she asks the young missionary why she is wearing runa clothes.
“I wear them in order to be like you,” Margaret replies.
“Like us?”
“Yes.”
“You want to be like us?”
“Yes, Rosa, I want to be.”
“And … your nice clothes? Did you throw them away?”
“No, I have them.”
“What will you do with them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes, when I go to the city, I will wear them.”
“Thinking to yourself, ‘Today I am white’?” (Elisabeth Elliot, No Graven Image [Harper & Row, 1966], p. 167).
And Margaret realizes that, though she might wish it, a white North American can never become a Quichua Indian.
There are other problems besides differences in dress, of course. One finds himself not laughing at a joke the nationals find uproariously funny. Or ignoring a custom. Then, there’s the language. My face still burns when I remember a sermon I preached about Paul and Silas in the calabozo, the dungeon. Not until after the service, on the way home, did my children tell me that I had put Paul and Silas in a calabaza, a pumpkin!
The problem of adjusting to a strange environment is very real.
The other objection is a more recent one. The missionary, like it or not, is identified with a nation regarded by many as an imperialistic power. And sometimes the fact that one is a Yankee weighs more heavily with people than the fact that one is a fellow Christian. One missionary remembers with dismay the day he raised his hand to vote in a hotly contested issue in a national convention. As the votes were being counted, he looked around. Suddenly he realized that some of his national brethren saw, not a fellow Christian who was voting according to his conscience, but a Yankee who was raising a white hand.
Yes, it would be foolish to deny that the foreign missionary faces an increasingly complex problem in his attempt to communicate the good news of God’s plan of redemption. To the difficulties I have mentioned, a dozen others might be added.
Yet I undertake my second tour of missionary service with an even greater enthusiasm than I felt at the hour of my appointment eight years ago. The argument that follows is admittedly more like a testimony than a theological treatise. But I offer it as evidence that sending missionaries is not an option but an obligation for the Church.
In the first place, we must continue to send missionaries because God continues to call them.
What impelled Noah to keep hammering away at the ark for many years, even though his neighbors made sport of the “dry-land sailor”? What made Abraham pull up stakes and move into a strange land? Why did Moses the stutterer march into Egypt, his knees trembling to make a preposterous demand of the most powerful king on earth? And why did Paul move from Lystra to Ephesus to Philippi to Athens, and finally to Rome, in the face of persecution and death?
Beneath the seemingly absurd behavior of these men was their conviction that they acted under orders from God. God gave Noah a vision of the earth covered by flood waters, implanted in Abraham the dream of a mighty nation flowing from his loins, untied Moses’ tongue, and gave Paul itching feet.
God still takes the initiative. We never know what new adventure awaits us tomorrow.
I am a missionary because God took the initiative. I was neither a missionary nor a missionary’s son. After twelve years in the pastorate, I ardently desired to spend the rest of my life in that fulfilling ministry.
Then came an opportunity for graduate study. One day as I listened to a returned missionary in the seminary chapel, I found myself overwhelmed by the immensity of the world’s need for Christ. Was this, I wondered, a call to foreign missions?
Later that morning, feeling I had to share my experience with my wife, I hurried over to our apartment. When I entered, she was standing at the sink washing dishes. I walked into the kitchen, stood behind her, and said, “Dear, I think God may be calling us to be foreign missionaries.”
My wife dried her hands on her apron and turned and faced me. “He may be calling you,” she said, “but he certainly hasn’t called me!”
Two years passed. I had completed my residence and was working on my doctoral dissertation. Once again I sat in chapel one day and heard a missionary speak. This time there was no overwhelming emotional experience, only an inner voice that said with absolute certainty: “I want you in a foreign country.”
Now I was sure; God had called me. But what of my wife? My family now lived a hundred miles away, in the city where I was pastor. That afternoon I returned home and later, after the children had been put to bed, told my wife what I now knew to be true: God’s will for my life was foreign service.
I don’t know what I expected—certainly not what happened. My wife smiled and said, “So that’s what it meant!”
She explained that that morning, at the very hour I was in the seminary chapel, she had been reading the Bible. Suddenly she had found that the words were blurring before her eyes and tears were falling. She had let the Bible drop into her lap and for half an hour had been acutely aware of God’s presence. She had been waiting for an opportunity to ask my opinion of her experience.
Now we both understood better than ever before the kind of God we serve—a God who has a plan for the world’s redemption and who in his own time reveals to each of us our role in that plan.
Is it not preposterous to argue about whether Americans should go overseas to tell others about Christ? As if it were for us to decide! The decision is God’s to make, and as long as he calls, Christians must go.
In the second place, we must continue to send missionaries because the only adequate expression of God’s love is love incarnated.
The apex of God’s dealing with men was the advent of Jesus Christ. Across the centuries, God spoke through miracles and through his prophets; but only when his Word became flesh did the angels sing with such abandon that they were heard by the shepherds in the hills.
Today we have many means to convey the message of God’s love: the printed page, radio, television, even the gift of money. Yet Paul’s words, “How shall they hear without a preacher?,” are as urgently relevant today as the latest callup of troops for Viet Nam. All other methods must ever remain secondary to that of one person touched by God’s love telling another person face to face what this love has done for him.
In 1960, soon after I joined the faculty of the Baptist Seminary in Torreon, Mexico, an experience demonstrated to me God’s predilection for person-to-person communication of the Gospel.
One Sunday morning as I drove down the highway on my way to a preaching engagement, I passed the village of Albia. Albia was no different from hundreds of other pueblos in northern Mexico—a few dozen adobe huts perched forlornly on the blowing sands of the desert. But I felt strangely attracted to the little village.
Thereafter, every time I drove by Albia the same thing happened—a subtle quickening of the conscience. “Why this place?” I asked myself. Within a fifty-mile radius of Torreon there were hundreds of other villages without an evangelical witness. Was there something special here?
At last I concluded that, for some reason, God wanted me to enter the village of Albia. Christmas week my family and I played Santa Claus to the village. We learned from the mayor that 167 families lived in Albia, and we prepared for each one a bag which contained fruit, cookies, candy, and a copy of the Gospel of Luke.
Christmas morning my oldest son and I went from door to door, leaving the simple present “in the name of the Lord.” At each house we asked permission to enter and read the Bible. But by sundown we felt like the disciples who had fished all night and caught nothing; not a single person had invited us in.
We returned to the car and started home, our spirits low. Had it all been an illusion? Had I deceived myself into thinking that God had led me to Albia?
Then, at the edge of the village, we met two young men. We should return the following Sunday, they told us, and visit Mr. Roman. Mr. Roman and his family were with friends in another village today, but they’d be home next Sunday. And Mr. Roman was the only man in the village who owned a Bible, the young men said.
The following Sunday, I returned to Albia. Domingo Roman and his wife were seated in the dirt before their little house, shelling corn. As I entered the adobe-enclosed yard, he jumped to his feet, smiled, and said, “You must be Sr. Carter. They told me about you!” Hurrying into the house, he returned with a Bible. “At last God has sent someone to interpret this book for me,” he said.
I spent the rest of the afternoon explaining the Bible to an avid congregation of two. They invited me to return the following Sunday, and the next. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Roman accepted Christ, and with them their three oldest children. In the months that followed, nephews, nieces, and cousins were converted. Today there is a strong congregation of believers in the village of Albia.
Could God have worked his miracle of redemption in Albia without the intervention of a missionary? Of course—but he chose to use a missionary.
Just before Christmas, 1965, my family and I arrived in the United States for a furlough, after spending the final years of our first term of service in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The day after Christmas, a letter arrived from Pedro Herrera. Pedro, a bright-faced young man with only two years of Bible-school training, was pastor of a mission in a good-sized city. We had helped him initiate the mission and had worked closely with him during the first months of its existence. We had also helped him pay a hospital bill after his wife’s serious illness.
The purpose of Pedro’s letter was to wish us a “Merry Christmas” and to say the following: “I want you to know that my wife and children and I love you and your family with all our hearts. We love you, not just because of what you did for us, but because we saw the love of God in your lives.”
Missionary come home? Impossible, when the missionary knows for a certainty that God has called him to leave his home and make a new home in a foreign land. Missionary come home? Indeed not—not as long as the missionary is conscious that, despite his inadequacies, God still manages to reveal his love through the missionary’s life.
