Let's Start Over

Colonialist Proselytizers

The Surprising Discovery About Those  Missionaries

Andrea Palpant Dilley
Christianity Today

For many of our contemporaries, no one sums up missionaries of an earlier era like Nathan Price. The patriarch in Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Price tries to baptize new Congolese Christians in a river filled with crocodiles. He proclaims Tata Jesus is bangala!, thinking he is saying, "Jesus is beloved." In fact, the phrase means, "Jesus is poisonwood." Despite being corrected many times, Price repeats the phrase until his death—Kingsolver's none-too-subtle metaphor for the culturally insensitive folly of modern missions.

For some reason, no one has written a best-selling book about the real-life 19th-century missionary John Mackenzie. When white settlers in South Africa threatened to take over the natives' land, Mackenzie helped his friend and political ally Khama III travel to Britain. There, Mackenzie and his colleagues held petition drives, translated for Khama and two other chiefs at political rallies, and even arranged a meeting with Queen Victoria. Ultimately their efforts convinced Britain to enact a land protection agreement. Without it, the nation of Botswana would likely not exist today.

The annals of Western Protestant missions include Nathan Prices, of course. But thanks to a quiet, persistent sociologist named Robert Woodberry, we now know for certain that they include many more John Mackenzies. In fact, the work of missionaries like Mackenzie turns out to be the single largest factor in ensuring the health of nations.

'This Is Why God Made Me'

Fourteen years ago, Woodberry was a graduate student in sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC). The son of J. Dudley Woodberry, a professor of Islamic studies and now a dean emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary, he started studying in UNC's respected PhD program with one of its most influential figures, Christian Smith (now at the University of Notre Dame). But as Woodberry cast about for a fruitful line of research of his own, he grew discontented.

"Most of the research I studied was about American religion," he says of early graduate school. "It wasn't [my] passion, and it didn't feel like a calling, something I could pour my life into."

One afternoon he attended a required lecture that brought his vocational drift to a sudden end. The lecture was by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.  Woodberry sat forward in his seat and thought, That's me. I'm the one.

Thy Kingdom Come . . .

Risky Road: China's Missionaries Follow Beijing West

BBC News

When so-called Islamic State announced on 8 June that it had killed a Chinese man and woman in their mid-twenties in Pakistan's most volatile province, many would have assumed they were two of the thousands of workers that Beijing has sent to the country in the last few years.

China is investing more than $55bn (£43bn) in Pakistan, a key beneficiary of its grand plan to connect Asia and Europe with a new Silk Road paid for by Beijing.  Such an ambitious project involves risk, and China is building major infrastructure projects in Balochistan, a Pakistani province home to a long-running separatist insurgency and an array of militant and jihadist groups.



But Meng Lisi and Li Xinheng were not there to work on Chinese-funded projects.  They were in the provincial capital, Quetta, on a clandestine mission: to spread the word of Christianity in the unlikeliest and most dangerous of places in conservative Muslim Pakistan.

Their story draws attention to an unintended and often overlooked by-product of China's aggressive drive to develop new trading routes and carve out influence across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Hundreds and possibly even thousands of the country's growing cadre of Christian missionaries are along for the ride too - even if Beijing doesn't want them there. . . .

A Good News (Gospel) Story

Hamilton Mother-of-Four on a Mission

Flying in one of the Remotest Places in the World

NZ Herald

It took the death of Glenys Watson's father to remind her just how short life was and prompted her and her husband to do something extreme to help others.  Five years on the Hamilton mother-of-four is moving her family to Papua New Guinea to fly into some of the remotest areas in the world under the toughest of circumstances to deliver goods and services to their small communities.

Glenys, 36, her husband Jonny and their four daughters will move to Goroka in September where she will take up a role with Christian organisation Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) to fly light aircraft in support of local communities.  She will be flying in extreme weather conditions and often be landing on handbuilt airstrips, sometimes perched on the sides of mountains or near rivers.
"It is challenging in that you are taking off on short airstrips and having to deal with different weather phenomenons and mountains," Watson said.

Watson qualified as a commercial pilot in Hawke's Bay in 2001 and spent five years working for Air Hawke's Bay as a commercial pilot, flight instructor and air ambulance pilot before moving to Hamilton and taking up a role with CTC Aviation.

For the past nine years she has been a stay-at-home mum raising her four daughters and has maintained her pilot's licence by doing recreational flying.

Daily Devotional

Possible with God

“I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” (John 10:16)

John Piper

God has a people in every people group. He will call them with Creator power. And they will believe! What power is in these words for overcoming discouragement in the hard places of the frontiers!

The story of Peter Cameron Scott is a good illustration. Born in Glasgow in 1867, Scott became the founder of the Africa Inland Mission. But his beginnings in Africa were anything but auspicious.  His first trip to Africa ended in a severe attack of malaria that sent him home. He resolved to return after he recuperated.

This return was especially gratifying to him because this time his brother John joined him. But before long, John was struck down by fever.  All alone, Peter buried his brother and in the agony of those days recommitted himself to preach the gospel in Africa. Yet his health gave way again, and he had to return to England.

How would he ever pull out of the desolation and depression of those days?

Letter From America (About Ground Zero in Liberia)

"We Rest on Thee and In Thy Name We Go"

He’s Risking His Own Well-Being to Battle Ebola: Humanitarian Leader Reveals Why He’s on the Ground in Liberia

TheBlaze

Oct. 16, 2014 12:37pm

Billy Hallowell

With the dire Ebola outbreak continuing to rage, countless missionaries and humanitarian aid workers are risking their lives abroad in an effort to try and stop the virus in its tracks.  Among those humanitarian leaders is David Darg, the vice-president of international operations for Operation Blessing, a Christian charity known for taking aid and resources to dangerous areas across the globe.

Darg, who recently told TheBlaze about his organization’s work to train Liberian churches and distribute liquid chlorine, said in a follow-up interview Wednesday that the situation in Monrovia, Liberia, where he is stationed is “really intense.”

“It’s one of the most intense missions I’ve been on in years, because you’re constantly on guard,” he said.

The Irresistible Power of God

Lights In Dark Places

As Shia, Sunni, and ISIS forces have swept over the landscape in Syria and Iraq Christians have been driven out, fleeing in the face of torture and death.  Some Christian enclaves have been there for more than a millennium.  It seemed as though this region would become Christian-less.  But, recent news would indicate something different. This, from Breaking Christian News: 

(Iraq)—Working in northern Iraq's Kurdish region day and night to help meet the needs of people displaced by the threats and violence of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul and other areas, members of an Iraqi ministry team recently came into contact with a colonel from the Kurdish forces battling ISIS.  

The colonel was serving as a division commander of the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Regional Government's armed forces, which have helped to slow the incursion of ISIS in its brutal push to establish a caliphate imposing a strict version of Sunni Islam. With the aid of U.S. airstrikes, the Peshmerga have also slowly retaken some territory. They are helping to secure the Kurdish capital of Erbil, where the ministry team assisted by Christian Aid Mission is supplying displaced people with food, clothing, beds and medicine.

Letter From America (About Those Dastadly Missionaries)

Showing Up the Home Team

One of the complaints made by Emperor Julian the Apostate against Christians is that they were so much better and committed to taking care of the poor, the sick, and the indigent than his fellow pagans were.  Echoes of resentment against Christians for their "doing good to all men" are found in several classical Roman authors and writers.  Now it is appearing once again.

Pagans and Christians

Ross Douthat

New York Times

October 3, 2014

Occasionally in the debates about Christianity’s weakened position in American culture, you’ll hear traditionalists and conservatives analogize the Christian situation, now or soon, to the environment the faith faced in its earliest centuries, as an embattled minority in a hostile pagan empire. I’m not a particular fan of this analogy, for various reasons: Not only because lions-and-catacombs imagery risks trivializing the concept of persecution at a time when Christians outside the United States face actual Diocletian-style consequences for their beliefs (and don’t always receive the charity they deserve from their American co-believers), but also because describing contemporary American culture as pagan in the style of the ancient world strikes me as a category error, which underplays the extent to which middlebrow American spirituality is still infused with Christian-ish sentiments and assumptions and ideas, and underplays, as well, just how radically different a thoroughly repaganized society would be from the one we (happily) inhabit today.

All of that said, I wouldn’t want to say that there are never echoes of the ancient world in contemporary religious debates.

Letter From America (After Surviving Ebola)

Calling Time On Ebola

The media have carried the news of the full recovery from Ebola by two US missionaries to Liberia, West Africa.  After contracting the disease, they were flown home and treated at Emory University Hospital.  Not without controversy.  A virtual, viral flash mob rapidly formed driven by the irrational fear of a bubonic plague about to kill everyone in the United States.  One conservative commentator, Ann Coulter complained that it did not make any sense for US missionaries to go abroad.  Weren't there enough problems to face in the United States?  Poor Ann overlooked a slight problem with her argument: when God calls, no man can successfully gainsay.  A reluctant prophet by the name of Jonah springs to mind.  Apparently, Ann had neglected to read Matthew 28: 18-20 recently.

In any event, Dr Kent Brantly has released a public statement  which he read after being released from Emory University Hospital.  It bears testimony to the Spirit of Christ, Himself.  

A Much Needed Corrective, Part IV

Final Notes and Unfinished Business

We strongly recommend to our New Zealand readers in particular that they read Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  It is part of our heritage with which all New Zealand Christians ought be familiar. 

In this final post, we want to call attention to three aspects of Newman's book which are worth considering. 

The first is the deleterious role of the New Zealand Company ("NZC")--a company largely associated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield formed to promote and profit from British colonial settlement in New Zealand.  In order to trade, NZC needed to secure supply of land.  Settlers from Great Britain were offered land upon which to settle in New Zealand.  NZC actively went around trying to secure that land in order to on-sell it.  They bought it from Maori. 

The Company was not at all scrupulous in patiently working through the complex issues of buying land from Maori, where title was a nebulous concept and contentious historical reality.

A Much Needed Corrective, Part III

Disinterring The Good From the Bones

As we have often recounted, Voltaire astutely observed that the writing of history is a trick the living play upon the dead.  He would have known.  He lived amidst and participated in one of the great acts of historical revisionism.  The "historians" of the Enlightenment deliberately rewrote and recast Western history to become of narrative of classical (pagan) glories, followed by a millennium of Christian ignorance, superstition, and darkness.  The classic of the genre (but by no means an isolated case) is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Voltaire's sneer is apropos.

Early New Zealand history has been similarly recast.  The trick played upon the dead in this instance--both Maori and pakeha--is that Christianity in general and the missionaries in particular were a perfidious influence.  The myth of the noble savage has emerged once again.  Rousseau would have been very pleased. 

Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010) is a much needed corrective to this tsunami of scurrilous revisionism.  In the conclusion, he summarises by means of ironic understatement some aspects of the "great trick":

A Much Needed Corrective, Part II

God Moving in Mysterious Ways

We plan to write a couple of supplementary pieces on  Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  These will not strictly be in the category of reviews, but reflections upon just some of what is contained in this valuable book. 

The first is the persistence, patience, and courage of the earliest missionaries.  They were a mixed lot and for ten years laboured in New Zealand under extremely tenuous circumstances, ending up with little to show for their efforts.  Often times they were in danger of losing their lives. 

The missionaries were relatively safe under Hongi's protection, but it was a peace fraught with tension.  Marsden had traversed much of the upper North Island, built relationships with many chiefs and promised missionaries would soon come and live among them.  However, those sent to bring the "good news" remained landlocked at Rangihoua, often fearing for their lives.  After a decade in New Zealand, the missionaries had little to show.  (Op cit., p. 60). 

From a mere human perspective, one would wonder how it could be that any good would ever come of their efforts.  They were a  messy bunch, those early missionaries.

A Much Needed Corrective

Credible Messiness

We have just completed reading Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  The title suggests a post-modernist tome.  If that is the reader's expectation, however, he will end up disappointed.  In fact, Newman's work is only a new perspective to our post-modernist ears which have been filled with repeated extrusions of revisionist wax to where we fear our society can no longer hear the true story of our past.

In that sense, then, Newman's Bible and Treaty is a must read for every Christian in New Zealand.  It is not the definitive word (few things ever are), but at the least it is a healthy corrective to the revising of our history by pagans (both Maori and Pakeha) who have very big axes to grind.

The preface provides an effective apologia for yet another book on early New Zealand history.  Firstly, Newman writes to correct the recent demonising of missionaries:

True Witness

A Clear, Pure Sound

Daily we are confronted with man's inhumanity to man--whether it be the image of a baby flushed alive down the toilet in China, or killing late term aborted babies who survived the horror of the "doctor's" ministrations, or the sectarian violence amongst Muslims in the Middle East, or a thousand other manifestations large and small.  It was the same in the Roman Empire. 

Against this tide of ethical degradation stood the Christian Church.  In the middle of the third century yet another plague struck, decimating cities.  The way Roman society treated the sufferers was deplorable, but expected.  Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, writing around 250AD, described how the populace responded to the plague in that city:

Watering Down the Bible

Shame is a Given: All its Permutations Are Not

In recent days we have been invited to sign an (electronic) petition protesting against biblical translation organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators.  Apparently these well-meaning folk have been busy preparing a translation of the Bible into Arabic, especially for the Muslim world. 

There has been an overt, deliberate attempt  to remove references to the "Father" and the "Son" from the text of this translations of the Bible.  Why?  Well, apparently we all want to celebrate what we have in common with Islamic believers and not offend them from the "real" message of the Bible (whatever that might be). 

Reportedly a significant number of Wycliffe missionary and support staff  have resigned.

Subterranean Paganism

How Did It Come to This?

Just how Christianised was Western Europe in the first place?  Rodney Stark (One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001]) provokes readers with this question.  His answer: not very.

In the past two centuries we have seen a move away from the Christian faith--and a rapid collapse of the First Christendom--in the West.  What took centuries to build was gone by lunch time, so to speak. Why?  Naturally, in all such "big" questions, the causes are always complex and multifarious. However, some factors will inevitably be more influential and affective than others. 

Here is a summary of Stark's argument:  he draws a fundamental distinction between the quality and timbre of missionary effort of the Church before and after Constantine.

Working Amidst the "Decline and Fall"

Diaspora and Mission

Much debate over procedural issues concerning the global Christian mission to convert the world remains superficial and trite.  By "procedural issues" we mean, how do we (the Church visible) actually get the task of discipling all of the nations done?

Whenever this question comes up, sooner rather than later the discussion shifts to the book of Acts.  This is not unreasonable.  Yet, the outcome is not that helpful, more often than not.  One reason for this is that reading the book of Acts as if it were an operational missions manual--a "how to" book for dummies--necessarily strips that wonderful book of Scripture out of its redemptive and historical context.  Whenever you do that with the Bible little good will come. 

Let's throw down a particular precept as an example.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Unintended Mission Consequences

Church Government - Theses on Missions
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, August 24, 2011

C.S. Lewis famously says somewhere that when Jesus tells us to feed the poor, He does not give us lessons in cooking. There are certain craft competence issues that we have to figure out ourselves, relying on industry standards and our own sanctified wits. Of course, industry standards of craft competence and our own sanctified wits do not outrank the Scriptures, but we will discover, if we reflect on this carefully, that craft incompetence and folly have attributed to Scripture things it never said.

For example, we have not a word in Scripture that instructs us how missionaries from a first-world nation should interact with a third world nation.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The King of Missions

Church Government - Theses on Missions
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, August 08, 2011

Missionaries should know the gospel, and be trained in the great doctrinal themes of the Bible. They should also be good-hearted people, but the good-heartedness does not supplant the need for craft competence. This is also true of the other areas that surround mission activity. Missionary pilots should be really good pilots. It is not enough that they "love Jesus."

Wanted: More Like Fr Zakaria

The Power of the Gospel in Arabic Lands

We republish below an account of a very effective coptic Christian who has become Public Enemy No 1 in the Arabic Islamic world.