After hearing 8
speakers in three days of special mission conference, the thing that struck me the most was a statement made by a veteran missionary. He confessed, “I came to a bitter realization
that I no longer loved the people I went to save, and I was in love with myself”. This was I think one of the honest confessions
I have ever heard from a missionary. This
person had spent many years in the mission field and has achieved a fair amount
of popularity and credibility; his statement had a blanketing effect on 100+
ministers there.
When he uttered those
words, my memory flashed back and remembered an incident that took place nearly
15 years ago. My wife and I were in conversation
with a missionary couple. Having built
some kind of trust between us; the missionary wife blurted out the words “I
hate Nepalese”, and my wife, also not being a Nepali by birth, with sincere
simplicity, replied; “then why are you in Nepal?” Although the missionary couple overcame their
bitterness against the Nepalese and left Nepal only after witnessing God’s work
through their humble efforts, there have been many other missionaries who still
remain in Nepal with their bitter hatred toward the Nepalese. In fact, unlike the missionary friends who
left Nepal only after making peace in their hearts, some of the existing missionaries in Nepal don’t
even mask their hatred. For them, this
hatred is rather a matter of pride in which they boast and claim, “I hate
Nepalese, but because of God’s call, I must stay in Nepal; if I had a choice I
would never come to Nepal”; they sound very spiritual in hating the people they
were supposed to give their lives for.
The veteran missionary
who publicly confessed his failings in loving the people he went to save provided a
few reasons as why such hate develops in the hearts of the missionaries. Two of them stand out.
1) My culture is superior to other cultures: Such an attitude immediately puts the
missionary in direct conflict with the existing culture. But because the missionary has money-power and
an air of superiority, the natives willingly surrender their way of life and
living in order to appease the missionary for possible temporary benefits. The missionary, specially the Asian missionary,
takes this appeasement to be his/her true success as s/he fills the laptop with
pictures and videos. While in his/her
own land, the missionary may have had never tasted the respect from the public,
but the natives begin to call “Sir”, “Madam” “Father”, “Guru” and so on,
inflating missionary’s hungry ego.
2)
Absolute monopoly over the mission funds:
The missionary’s report is accepted as the infallible document by the
sending church/organization (some are freelance missionaries having no
accountability at all) while the natives have no clue about how the missionary
makes money. When such unfettered access
to large amount of money begins to fall into missionary’s hands; temptation becomes
a sanctified word and is replaced with “God’s work”; even if the missionary spends
a two weeks holiday in a luxury Riviera, it is credited to “God’s work”. The missionary may pay handsome salary to his
cooks, guards, and drivers, but it will be columned into the "Pastor's salary". If the missionary buys a luxury
car, it will be credited to the vehicle fund for the mission field. No one can question the missionary’s
report.
The biblical warning, “love
of money is the root of all evil” did not come without reason and soon,
missionary falls in love with the self and begins to use the natives as
products instead of persons deserving love and respect. When the natives resent the missionary’s marketing
strategy, hate is the first child to be born.
I have earned the wrath of a good
many missionary friends and their native collaborators who would rather not
talk to me for saying what I have been saying about the corruption in the mission
fields. A particular denomination in my
nation (one of many examples) has been establishing churches and constructing church
buildings on the foundation of bribery, deception and embezzlement of the money
sent by genuine Christians in other nations; all done by the approval of the missionaries
who channel the money from their nations to their collaborators. They have quarrels and lawsuits among
themselves; often settled by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars sent by the
faithful Christians from the missionary’s nations who think that the money was used
for God’s work; of course the missionary knows how to report to his nation!
When a missionary begins
to hate the very people s/he went to save; it opens the door for the wave of
evil, crippling the Christian witness for generations to come. The native church becomes the innocent victim
and loses all credibility in the eyes of the non-Christian neighbors.
But on the other hands,
when a missionary comes to a foreign land with the love of God in his heart,
the foundations of the evil begin to crumble; sooner or later the kingdom of
God prevails in those lands. Carey,
Judson, Taylor, Robert Thomas (to Korea, few people know about him) and
countless others who laid their lives for the natives with utmost love and
respect left their mark for eternity in those lands and their love and respect
to lay down their lives have not gone in vain.
So, my suggestion to
our modern missionary friends who cannot love the people they are supposed to
save (they think they went to save the natives), it is better that they return
to their own lands and save their own soul first.
