There's No Such Thing as a Missionary

"The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind." - G.K. Chesterton

Second post in and here I am undermining the whole concept of this blog.

When my wife and I applied with our organization to work overseas we went through a fairly long and rigorous process to be accepted. When that process was complete and we were ready to raise funds to go out into the world, we could start calling ourselves “missionaries”.

But we didn't feel any different. I was not suddenly more knowledgeable about spiritual things. I did not suddenly have a library of academic or religious literature memorized. I was no better a person than I had been the day before. I was, however, now presented to my church and to the world around me as something new, something I had not been before – a missionary.

I quickly realized that the pedestal I had placed other missionaries on was, from up close, a bit shaky. There was no way I could live up to my own expectations, let alone the expectation I saw in all the smiling faces who now put me on that same pedestal. Or was it a gallows? I had certainly been handed enough rope. This was my first hint that something was up.

This feeling was confirmed after settling into our assignment. Sure, you have to get used to all sorts of differences. You have to change your standards for safety, sanitation, and insect-to-food ratios, you have to adjust to a different culture, you have to figure out how things work and how to be okay when they don't. That's not so special, though, because billions of people in our world live in those conditions, and many expats who have nothing to do with missionary work make the same adjustments.

So if the endorsement of a mission organization doesn't make me a missionary, and living overseas doesn't make me a missionary, surely the work I do must be the secret ingredient that will transform me from a cynical, irreverent Westerner to a properly well-behaved agent of the Almighty deserving of the pedestal awaiting me on my next visit back to Canada!

Regrettably, that is no more the secret ingredient than is the copious amount of MSG I ingest whenever I step out for a meal. As I said in my previous post, I do what I do, where I do it, because I feel called to it – but that doesn't make me any different from the person who is called to something else.

The point I'm making is this: in the Western world, including but not limited to the Western church, we consider “missions” as something separate from normal life. By putting people who are called overseas onto the oft-mentioned and much-maligned pedestal, we create a gap between what they do and what we ourselves fear we may be asked to do. In so doing, we limit ourselves but also often ignore the powerful impact that people have who live their faith out in daily service to others within their own communities.

In the film, “First Blood” (based on the book of the same name) war hero John Rambo returns from Vietnam to find that in the processing of being turned into a soldier he is no longer able to function as a human being. Subsequent films place him in situations where this is not an issue, but the first film is a thoughtful and intelligent treatment of the problem of soldiers returning from war.

Missionaries – I continue to use that word, though I hope someday to abandon it – face a similar prospect upon return. In living overseas, in seeing the great poverty of our world, it is difficult to return to the West and look upon the excess in which we live. It is difficult to stand in front of a congregation and, smiling, congratulate them on the crumbs they sweep from their table for the betterment of mankind. In the face of this, it is no great surprise that many missionaries struggle to adapt back to life in the West. All this widens the perceived gap between regular people and the quixotic crusaders we send out into the world.

If that sounded harsh, I apologize. I do not mean to shame people in the West into giving more. That's not the point at all. What I desire is to get rid of the term “missionary” outright. You see, if there is a mission, and as a person of faith I take it as a given that there is, then either we are all missionaries or none of us are. We cannot simply appoint individuals out of our congregations to go out into the world and say that constitutes “missions”.

I say that the West lives in excess, and this is objectively true. What I have not mentioned, and which absolutely bears mentioning, is that the West also lives in misery. I have never seen such joy in my home country as I see traveling around Asia. For all our excess, we are no happier for it.

I have no desire to see Canadians' wealth taken from them and redistributed, despite the aforementioned excess. I want to see Canadians awakened to a sense of mission and calling of their own. I want them to experience the joy of being connected with the world around them, and of using their skills and resources to effect real change in that world.

This is not at all an original thought – I hear these sentiments echoed frequently throughout the “missions” community. There remains a disconnect, however, between missionaries and those at home. Missionaries often feel frustrated at not being able to communicate their experiences, which only strengthens the convictions of those in their home countries that missionaries are something different, something “other”.

It is my sincere desire to see a bringing together of these two perspectives, to see these barriers in communication and shared mission broken down. It is my dream to see my friends, family, supporters and church stirred by the same fire that I see in the eyes of those who feel truly called to live in service to others.

That is what it is to be a missionary, and by perpetuating the myth that we as missionaries are something different because we are overseas or living on support from donations, we too often deny others the joy of mission.

Theo