Missionary

From boyhood, Davy Lloyd dreamed of nothing else but dedicating his life to the orphanage his parents had operated in Haiti since 2000.

He had grown up in Haiti, spoke Creole before English and had helped his parents run their mission, which had grown into a bustling operation that educated 450 children, with 50 living on the compound in Lizon just north of Port-au-Prince.

“He had said from the time he was little that someday he was going to be a missionary in Haiti,” his father, David Lloyd Jr., recounted in a phone interview from Oklahoma. “He just knew that that’s where he was supposed to be his whole life, trying to make a difference in some people’s lives who needed a lot of help.”

So, when Davy and Natalie Lloyd, then Natalie Baker, married in June 2022, they decided to make a life together in Haiti—even as the country of 11 million was descending further into political dysfunction and gang violence. … That notion was shattered in May of 2024, when two gangs breached the compound in succession, killing the young couple, along with the Haitian director of the group, Jude Montis.

Davy Lloyd’s father said, “We felt that in our hearts that’s where we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to be doing with our lives. I just kind of felt that with us being there it gave the community some hope because we hadn’t cut and run.”

When George Liele set sail for Jamaica in 1782, he didn’t know he was about to become America’s first overseas missionary. And when Rebecca Protten shared the gospel with slaves in the 1730s, she had no idea some scholars would someday call her the mother of modern missions.

These two people of color were too busy surviving—and avoiding jail—to worry about making history. But today they are revising it. Their stories are helping people rethink a missionary color line. As National African American Missions Council (NAAMC) president Adrian Reeves said at a Missio Nexus conference in 2021, challenging the idea that “missions is for other people and not for us.” African Americans today account for less than one percent of missionaries sent overseas from the US. But they were there at the beginning.

British missionary William Carey is often called the father of modern missions. Adoniram Judson has been titled the first American missionary to travel overseas. But both Liele and Protten predated them.

Former missionary Brent Burdick now believes African Americans are a “sleeping giant” with an important part to play in the proclamation of the gospel. “They have a lot to offer to the world.”

An often-overlooked effect of missionary influence has been the preservation of languages. Language is the breath of a culture, and so the death of a language almost always results in the loss of a way of life. MIT linguist Norvin Richards expressed the importance of the preservation of languages and cultures well: “There are jokes that are only funny in Maliseet and there are songs that are only beautiful in Wôpanâak …. If we lose those languages, we lose little pieces of the beauty and richness of the world.”

In 2019, the United Nations warned, “Almost half the world’s estimated 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing.” Many minority languages are lost when younger generations are educated in national languages. Written languages have a much better chance of survival than exclusively oral ones and many small, unique languages have been preserved by Bible translation.

In one remarkable case, the Wôpanâak language was brought back to life a hundred years after its last speakers died. The linguistic revival was based on the translation work of missionary John Eliot. The first Bible published in colonial America was in the Wôpanâak language in 1663. As a result of Eliot’s literacy efforts, the Wampanoag tribe left behind a collection of written documents when disease ravaged their population.

In the 1990s, Jessie Little Doe Baird, a descendant of the tribe Eliot sought to reach, used those records to revive the Wôpanâak language as part of a linguistics program at MIT. Her daughter is the first native Wôpanâak speaker in seven generations and six other Wampanoags have become fluent in the language. Interestingly, one of Baird’s Wampanoag ancestors publicly opposed missionary work in the eighteenth century.

Sociologist Robert Woodberry has identified a robust statistical correlation between “conversionary Protestant” missionary activity and the democratization of a country. His conclusion: Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in non-governmental associations.

This was not a popular finding. Even the head of Woodberry’s dissertation committee warned him of the inevitable backlash: “To suggest that the missionary movement had this strong, positive influence on liberal democratization, you couldn’t think of a more unbelievable and offensive story to tell a lot of secular academics.”

But after years of extensive research, Woodberry nevertheless concluded, “Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple—if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

While Jesus didn’t tell us to go into all the world and make people literate, rich, and democratic, Woodberry’s findings illustrate the overwhelmingly positive influence of missionaries.

When Aaron Köhler tries to talk to people in Cottbus, Germany, about Jesus, church, and faith, he can’t assume they know what he’s talking about. Many in the city near the Polish border don’t know anything about Christianity. Köhler has had people ask him whether Christmas and Easter are Christian holidays, and if so, what they’re about. One time, he talked to someone at a local market who wasn’t familiar with the name Jesus. The person had never even heard it, that they could recall.

“That was crazy for me. In the ‘land of the Reformation,’ in a supposedly ‘Christian country,’ these people don’t even know the basic basics,” said Köhler, who co-pastors a church plant.

According to the most recent data, more than 60 percent of Germans identify as Christian. A little more than a quarter say they have no religion. Zoom in a little closer, though, and stark regional differences emerge. In the western part of the country—which includes Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt—three-quarters of the population identify as Christian. But in the east, the region that was a Soviet Union satellite state from 1949 to 1990, only a quarter of Germans are Christian, with nearly 70 percent identifying themselves as “nonbelievers.”

Christianity is declining in much of formerly Protestant Europe. But eastern Germany stands out, even compared with other rapidly secularizing nations. Here, large swaths of the population have had no serious contact with Christianity for three generations. Köhler said, “For decades, there was no prayer, no Bible at home, no church attendance. After all these years, people don’t know what they don’t know.”

The regional differences are easily traced to the division of the country after its defeat in World War II. The French, British, and American-controlled sectors in the west merged into the German Federal Republic in 1949. The Soviet-controlled East formed the German Democratic Republic, a socialist state with totalitarian leaders who suppressed religion. The Christian population in East Germany fell from about 90 percent in 1949 to only 30 percent in 1990.

Evangelicalism is now the largest religious demographic in Central America, according to a poll of about 4,000 people in five countries. More than a third of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica told researchers that they are evangelical, while another 29 percent said they are “nondenominational believers.”

Only about a third of people in the region said they were Catholic—down from about 60 percent in the 1970s. Some scholars have attributed the shift to internal Catholic conflict and the long fallout from the church’s political affiliations on the extreme right and left, along with the disruptions of urbanization.

Evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar, noting the trend in an interview in 2006, said Catholics who moved to Central American cities found empowerment in their evangelical conversion. He said, “Their decision to accept Christ meant a change in patterns of behavior which helped people to reorient their lives.”

In an article in Vice, Brian Merchant argues that the first structure that humans will probably build on the Moon after they have completed building a base there will be a church. Indeed, Christian missionaries and clergymen have built churches in the harshest of climates, whether they be the tropical jungles of Africa or the sun-drenched deserts of Australia.

When the Ross Sea Party of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 landed in Antarctica, among the men was an Anglican priest named Arnold Spencer-Smith. Spencer-Smith set up a small chapel in a dark room in Scott's Hut at Cape Evans. He built an altar with a cross and candlesticks and an aumbry where he reserved the Blessed Sacrament.

Today, there are eight churches in Antarctica. One is an Eastern Orthodox church built of wood in the Russian style. Another is The Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows which is a Catholic church located in a cave in the ice. It is the most southern place of worship of any religion in the world.

Churches have been erected in Antarctica since the 1950s. Extended stays in the region can be an extremely stressful experience for the researchers who often stay separated from their families for months at a time, which is one of the reasons why churches exist in this remote continent.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Living anywhere in the world (or space) is a stressful experience for believers. We need the church to give support, care, connectivity to others, and to center ourselves in worship of Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth.

The 150th anniversary of Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay’s arrival in Taiwan was celebrated in 2022. Perhaps the country’s most beloved 19th-century Westerner, churches have reenacted his arrival, and several books are being published about the missionary. The Taiwan government even has a bio of him on their website. So, what made this foreigner worthy of this level of affection more than 100 years after his death?

In 1872, the Canadian Presbyterian missionary arrived in northern Taiwan (then called Formosa). Over the next 29 years, Mackay planted more than 60 churches and baptized more than 3,000 people. He started a college and a graduate school of theology. Mackay Memorial Hospital, named in his honor, is now a large downtown hospital in Taipei.

He also provided medical treatment. He and his students would sing a hymn to patients, extract their teeth, and then preach the gospel to them. Over the years, Mackay became known for having pulled thousands of teeth.

He insisted on identifying with Taiwan and the Taiwanese. Mackay spent more than half of the 57 years of his life on the island. Upon his arrival in Taiwan, he immediately began learning the language from the local boys herding water buffalo. Unlike most Western missionaries, he married a local woman, and they had three children. Embracing Taiwan as his adopted homeland, he touched the hearts of many Taiwanese and contributed to the conversion of many to Christianity.

Before he passed, Mackay captured his love for the country by writing a still widely beloved poem: “How dear is Formosa to my heart! On that island the best of my years have been spent. A lifetime of joy is centered here … My heart’s ties to Taiwan cannot be severed! To that island I devote my life.”

Dr. Eric McLaughlin is a missionary doctor in Burundi, one of the poorest nations on the planet. After years of watching one out of seven of his patients die, it is hard for him to hold onto hope. He tells the story of Odette, a young woman who was hospitalized with terrible kidney failure. Odette’s family pooled their money to send her to a kidney specialist in the city. Long-term dialysis was not an option, so Dr. McLaughlin wondered if the expense of such a trip would change anything for her.

Dr. McLaughlin writes, “I fear to hope sometimes. My recent weeks had been filled with tragedies like Odette’s. More than that, there had been several times when it seemed like someone was going to recover but then suddenly died. ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick,’ says Proverbs 13:12. Exactly; my heart was sick.”

Amid his lament and doubt, his phone chimed. Dr. McLaughlin saw that the messages were from a friend named Onesphore, a former student and coworker. Now he works at a hospital in the city.

“Good morning doctor. I wanted to let you know that we have been caring for Odette. We have not been able to do much. But some fluids and careful observation have resulted in her kidneys returning almost to normal! We’re sending her home today. I just thought you would want to know. Praise God!”

Not only was Odette healed, but I heard the news from someone I had helped train for his current job. The good news arrived precisely when I was sitting there thinking about how afraid I was to hope. The idea that God was present was no longer theoretical; it was real and sudden. In a moment, the revealing of this whole story filled me with tearful joy, not a small amount of fear, and a renewed hope.

Tim Keller said he would never forget the story about one of his mentors, a college professor named Dr. Addison Leach.

Two young women at the college were both bright and their respective parents wanted them to get Master’s Degrees and go on to careers. But, instead, they both became Christians. Both decided that they were going to become missionaries. Their parents had a fit. One of the mothers called Dr. Leach, thinking that Dr. Leach was one of the reasons that the girls had become (in the mother’s words) “religious fanatics, rather than pursuing the course they had hoped, getting a career and having security. Instead, they were going to go wildly off into the blue.”

This mother said, “We wanted our daughter to get a master’s degree, start a career, and get something in the bank, so she could have some security. Dr. Leach responded:

Please just let me remind you of something. We’re all on a little ball of rock called earth, and we’re spinning along through space at zillions of miles per hour. Even if we don’t run in to anything, eventually we’re all going to die. Which means that under every single one of us there’s a trap door that’s going to open one day and we’re all going to fall off this ball of rock. And underneath will either be the everlasting arms of God or absolutely nothing. So maybe we can get a master’s degree to get some security.

But the biggest savings account in the world cannot stop cancer. It can’t stop traffic accidents. It cannot stop broken hearts. It can’t give you anything … any of the things that only God can give you. He’s the only significance you can have. He’s the only love that you can get and can’t lose.

Braulia Ribeiro shares how God taught a first-time missionary group to depend on him:

In 1983, I was part of a first-time team of Brazilian young people going to plant a mission station among the Paumarí. I was chosen because I had some training in the Paumari language with the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

We traveled on a small boat to reach Lábrea. From there to a small river where the Paumarí were, there were no transport boats available. We would have to hire a private boat to take us there. We would be the first missionaries to reach this particular village.

The only money our little team had left was a few hundred dollars we put aside to buy supplies and food to stay in the jungle for three months. “What do we do, Lord? Should we just stay here waiting?” I felt that I had received Matthew 13:46 from God. It said, “he went away and sold everything he had.” Is God saying that we have to use all our money to pay for the boat ride?

And that was exactly how things went. We hired the owner of the smallest boat we could find. The price he charged amounted to the exact figure we’d saved. We set out with food for only the short trip, no kerosene, or other supplies. After five-day trip we found a man with a large canoe that was available to take us the rest of the way to Maniçoã Lake.

We got out of the canoe in front of the first hut. I shouted from the land in my broken Paumarí, “Ivaniti?” – “Is that you?” An old woman answered me from the top, “Ha’ã hovani!” – “Yes, it’s me!” She did not seem to find it strange to hear me speaking her language.

We all climbed up to the hut and sat ceremoniously on the floor. After a good hour of conversation about the trip, she asked what we were there to do. I said, “We are missionaries. We want to help you to know Jesus, the Son of God.” The lady looked at me with a puzzled expression and started shouting for her grandson, Danilo. “Come over, Danilo. The missionaries have arrived. Take them to their home.”

“Our home?” I asked. She pointed to an empty tall hut nearby. “Danilo and I built this hut two summers ago, preparing for your arrival. We heard in the radio about the Creator God, and how his Son, Jesus, wants to help us. I said, ‘If that is true, he will send us his people.’ So we built the hut for you.”

We were placed in our “home,” and from that day on, we were fed with abundant fish, manioc flour, and jungle fruits. For the whole six months we stayed with the Paumarí we were well taken care of, never needing a cent of the money we applied to renting the boat. We had nothing to offer them except ourselves, and that was all they needed.

The 2010s were a tipping point for global Christianity. Now, in 2020, more than half the world’s Christians live in Africa and Latin America, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. The portion of Christians in Europe has also fallen below 25% for the first time since the Middle Ages.

The change was predicted by historian Philip Jenkins, among others. Jenkins wrote in 2007, “We are living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide, as the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably . . . southward.” The demographic trends are expected to continue into this decade.

Percentage of the world’s Christians 2010 compared to 2020:

USA & Canada: Down from 12% to 9%

Europe: Down from 25% to 23%

Asia: Up from 15% to 16%

Latin America: Up from 24% to 25%

Africa: Up from 22% to 26%

More than 5,000 people groups are without an indigenous Christian church, according to recent data from Joshua Project. Nearly 2 billion people—more than a quarter of the world’s population—live in a group without a “self-sustaining gospel movement.” The ten largest unreached people groups are located in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Algeria.

Missiologists say cross-cultural missions are more effective than near-neighbor evangelism to share the gospel with people who have never heard it, but only about 4 percent of global missionaries are going to places where there are no existing churches.

Max Lucado tells the story of a missionary in Brazil who discovered a tribe of Indians in a remote part of the jungle. They lived near a large river. The tribe was in need of medical attention because a contagious disease was ravaging the population. People were dying daily.

A hospital was not too terribly far away—across the river, but the Indians would not cross it because they believed it was inhabited by evil spirits. They believe that to enter the water would mean certain death. The missionary explained how he had crossed the river and was unharmed. They were not impressed.

He then took them to the bank and placed his hand in the water. They still wouldn’t go in. He walked into the water up to his waist and splashed water on his face. It didn’t matter. They were still afraid to enter the river.

Finally, he dove into the river, swam beneath the surface until he emerged on the other side. He punched a triumphant fist into the air. He had entered the water and escaped. It was then that the Indians broke out into a cheer and followed him across.

That’s exactly what Jesus did! He entered the river of death and came out on the other side. No wonder we celebrate the Resurrection!

Gregory and Heidi Whitaker, missionaries to Cambodia, tell about the spiritual journey of a man named Yang:

Yang’s son, Mabt, belongs to the Bunong people, a tribal group in Cambodia. Mabt met the Lord when he moved to a city to continue his education and stayed with Christian dorm parents. For years, he was the only believer in his family.

During one of his visits to his home village, Mabt prayed in his home, welcoming the Holy Spirit and breaking the curses of the mountain gods. He then began playing the guitar and worshipping Jesus. As he sang, the high shelf holding the family idol crashed to the floor, and the idol shattered. His father, Yang, rushed in, saying, “My son, what have you done? Now I will not believe in anything. Not in the mountain gods, and not in your God.”

Yang held to that statement for years, before his heart softened toward the truth and he slowly turned to the Lord. During that time, his vision deteriorated. Yang had lost an eye to trauma decades earlier, and now his remaining eye was becoming cloudy. Mabt approached us to ask for advice, and we referred Yang to Mercy Medical Center for evaluation. He made the daylong trip by bus from the province and underwent successful cataract surgery.

After Yang returned home with restored vision, he was able to read the beautiful words of the Gospel in his own language for the first time. Yang has become a follower of Christ, and freely shares his story with other villagers. “I received my sight back, and then I could read God’s words for myself, and now I believe Jesus.”

It took a team effort of the Body of Christ to touch Yang’s life--from dorm parents to Bible translators to medical personnel.

In the film Of Gods and Men, director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of a small group of mostly French monks living in Algeria during a time of civil unrest. These monks live a life of quiet fidelity dedicated to prayer and work in the rural part of the country near a small village. As part of their work, the monks run a small health clinic and also provide necessary physical supplies like clothing and shoes to the people in the village.

Early in the film, word reaches the monks that a group of Muslim radicals is on the move and will soon be in the town adjacent to the monastery. The monks will be in danger as soon as the radicals take the town. However, they are given a choice. Because the radicals have not yet arrived, there is time for the monks to leave the monastery and move to a more secure place.

In a pivotal scene, the monks speak with the members of the village, most of whom are Muslim, about the decision. One monk says that they are all like birds on the branch of a tree, uncertain whether or not to fly away or stay. A woman from the village corrects him. “You are the tree. We are the birds. If you leave, we will lose our footing.”

The monks make the brave decision to stay. The monks were later kidnapped and beheaded; their bodies were never found.

Anil’s life took a sudden turn after his mother was miraculously healed following a woman’s simple prayer to Jesus. In this episode of God Pops Up, follow Anil’s journey to learn more about the man who he is convinced saved his mother.

After watching this episode of God Pops Up, read more about Apilang Apum’s call to Christ in a remote corner of India.

This strategic work in Southeast Asia faces continued pressure from the government, yet it continues to spread. Drawing on new technologies, the leaders have equipped hundreds of “hubs” across their region. In some places, they have brought the gospel to tribes who have never heard it. They’ve translated the Bible, for the first time, into the language of some of these people. Their video ministry is even reaching untold numbers of deaf people, helping them learn sign language, and the language of God’s love. For security reasons, we don’t divulge the identity of these brothers and sisters.

After watching this episode of God Pops Up, read the story in Christianity Today of missionaries in the mountains of Papua, who face life and death in “The Land of the Clouds.”