The Church Scattered

In Part C, “Living with Purpose,” the theme was living our lives with the transcendent purpose of serving others. We considered the implications of being sent by Jesus into the world to serve him by serving and caring for others. We are people with a purpose far bigger than our own well-being and desires. We also considered what I reminded my congregation of each week as they prepared to transition from being the church gathered into becoming the church scattered, returning to their homes, schools, jobs, and daily routines. They went “nowhere by accident” and God went with them to empower and use them everywhere they went. They would discover the divine appointments God had arranged for them. Disciples have always been people with a mission, but that mission is accomplished as they go about their daily lives with a God-given purpose.

Now we will complete the tenth challenge of “Joyful Service.” Part C was “Living with Purpose,” and Part D takes it a step further by focusing on “Going on Purpose.” The prepositions with and on tweak the meaning of how disciples serve. More specifically, we will consider the significance of when God calls disciples to go to a distant location to serve and love others in his name and for his sake. Part D concentrates on missionaries serving in foreign countries that have different languages, customs, beliefs, and values. The role of missionaries has become controversial. Some readers may tense up even hearing the word “missionary” and question if there can be any benefit in discussing their service and contributions. If you feel this way, I ask you to suspend judgment until after you have finished reading all of Part D. 

Background Information

Most of the information that follows relies on an article published in the 2014 January/February issue of Christianity Today, written by Andrea Palpant Dilley (pp 34-41). This lengthy but fascinating article was titled “The World the Missionaries Made” and was based upon the exhaustive research done by Sociologist Robert Woodberry and his team of research assistants over a span of fourteen years. What follows is essentially my summary of that article with many relevant quotes. I found the article to be both surprising and profoundly important.

Woodberry was in a Ph.D. program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He had been searching for a topic for his Ph.D. dissertation when he heard a presentation by an expert on tracking and measuring the spread of global democracy. The speaker casually mentioned he had found a statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. He suggested that someone needed to explore the implications of what this meant. Woodberry decided on the spot his dissertation would research the significance of that link. Eventually understanding this link became his passion in life. The topic fascinated him, but he began with no expectations of what he would discover or where his research would lead him. The primary results of what turned out to be a massive research project were first published in a leading journal more than twelve years later.

The Post-Christian Narrative about Missionaries

The “Editors’ Note” (p 7) in that issue of Christianity Today by Katelyn Beaty, introduced the article through a statement which I believe accurately describes the popular view of missionaries.

The pith helmet on our cover says so much. It was worn in earlier centuries by Europeans manning the jungles and deserts of Asian and African colonies. It connotes privilege, paternalism, and unfettered power. It is Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart and The Poisonwood Bible. And, so the story goes, it was donned by Protestant missionaries with as much ignorant pride as colonial rulers.

The Poisonwood Bible is a novel written by Barbara Kingsolver in 1998. The main character is a missionary named Nathan Price. He sought to baptize new Congolese Christians in a river filled with crocodiles and exclaims, “Tata Jesus is bangala!” He believes his words mean, “Jesus is beloved” but they actually mean, “Jesus is poisonwood.” People correct him, but Price continues to repeat this phrase until his death. The phrase is “Kingsolver’s not-too-subtle metaphor for the culturally insensitive folly of modern mission.” 

I suspect that Christian missionaries are stereotypically viewed negatively by most people who do not share our faith. Missionaries are widely accused of being imperialists, imposing Christianity and the norms of western culture where they are not welcomed or wanted. Their motives and methods are suspect, and their presence is resented by secularized people. Missionaries are nothing more than modern conquistadors or religious terrorists undermining and destroying native cultures and religions. They contribute nothing of value.

Woodberry certainly understood this bias. The leader of his dissertation committee was impressed with his work but warned him that many of his peers would be upset if his research did not reflect this prejudiced view of missionaries. He told him, “For 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.” 

Woodberry’s Approach

Woodberry’s research began by searching for evidence that the Protestant religion was somehow linked with democracy. Palpant Dilley described his early efforts in these words:

Soon he found himself descending into the UNC-Chapel Hill archives in search of old data on religion. “I found an atlas [from 1925] of every missionary station in the world, with tons of data,” says Woodberry with glee. He found data on the “number of schools, teachers, printing presses, hospitals, and doctors, and it referred in turn to earlier atlases. I thought, ‘Wow, this is so huge. This is amazing. This is why God made me.’”

Woodberry set out to track down the evidence…. He studied yellowed maps, spending months charting the longitude and latitude of former missionary stations. He traveled to Thailand and India to consult with local scholars, dug through archives in London, Edinburgh, and Serampore, India, and talked with church historians all over Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.

In essence, Woodberry was digging into one of the great enigmas of modern history: why some nations develop stable representative democracies—in which citizens enjoy the rights to vote, speak, and assemble freely—while neighboring countries suffer authoritarian rulers and internal conflict. Public health and economic growth can also differ dramatically from one country to another, even among countries that share similar geography, cultural background, and natural resources. 

Woodberry was trying to find links between why some countries seemed to prosper while neighboring countries floundered. For instance, in 2001 he visited Lomé, the capital Togo. At the University of Togo’s library Woodberry discovered the bookshelves were nearly bare. He owned more books than all the books in the university’s library. The campus bookstore sold pens and paper, not books. Investigating further, he learned that the professors read the required books to students in class while they took notes. 

But across the border in the neighboring country Ghana, he visited the national university whose bookstore shelves were overflowing with books. Many of those volumes were authored by local scholars and were printed by the university press. The contrast was dramatic. Woodberry sought to understand the cause of the difference. The reasons soon emerged. Ghana had been a British colony and the Protestant missionaries from Great Britain had established a nationwide system of schools and printing presses. But Togo, being a colony of France, did not receive missionaries. Instead, the French approach was to educate only the intellectual elites. More than a century later, education was available to all in Ghana and the country seemed to be flourishing, but education was still severely limited and poverty was widespread in Togo. 

Woodberry repeatedly discovered similar discrepancies repeatedly. There were two Congo’s. One was colonized by France and the other by Belgium. In both colonies the native peoples were forced to extract rubber from jungle trees. It was hot, dirty, and slave-like work. When the Congolese resisted, their European masters burned down villages, castrated men, and cut off children’s limbs. In the French Congo, these atrocities were largely ignored. However, in the Belgian Congo, the missionaries exposed the atrocities. In particular, two British missionaries (Baptist), took photographs of what was happening and smuggled the photos out of the country. The photos were circulated throughout the USA and Great Britain, exposing the atrocities and igniting public indignation and ultimately stopping the abuse. Woodberry charted mission stations across both colonies and discovered that Protestant missionaries were only allowed in the Belgian Congo.

Through his meticulous research, Woodberry was able to do what no other person had accomplished: he looked at the long-term impact of missionaries using “the wide-angle lens of statistical analysis.” Five years into his research, Woodberry created a statistical model which clarified the connection between prior missionary work and the current health of nations. After a few more years of coding data and refining his methodology, he and his research assistants were able to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, in every nation in the world. It was an amazing accomplishment and the results shocked Woodberry. After seven intense years of research, Woodberry described the results like a bomb exploding: “The impact of missions on global democracy was huge.”

There’s Still More

Woodberry had achieved his Ph.D. because of his exhaustive and in-depth research. His work established the link between missionaries and democracy:

…missionaries had educated women and the poor, promoted widespread printing, led nationalist movements that empowered ordinary citizens, and fueled other key elements of democracy. Now the statistics were backing it up: Missionaries weren’t just part of the picture. They were central to it.

The statistical results were strong, almost to the point of being overwhelming. They far exceeded Woodberry’s expectations. But that made Woodberry nervous. He knew he needed to proceed cautiously. Any mistake could discredit the entire project. So, Woodberry decided to be his own greatest skeptic. He knew it was easy to use statistics to make correlations, but making correlations is not the same as causation.

There is a link, for example, between eating oatmeal and getting cancer. But that doesn’t mean that if you eat too many Quaker Oats, you’re doomed. It turns out that elderly people, who have a higher risk of cancer as such, happen to eat oatmeal for breakfast more often. In other words, oatmeal doesn’t cause cancer.

Like a mechanic taking apart an engine only to rebuild it, he had to counter his own theory in order to strengthen it. That meant controlling a host of factors: climate, health, location, accessibility, natural resources, colonial power, disease prevalence, and a half dozen others. “My research assistants were entering all these variables and the missions variable was amazingly robust,” says Woodberry. The theory “kept on holding up. It was actually quite fun.”

Fun but hard to believe. Woodberry’s results essentially suggested that 50 years’ worth of research on the rise of democracy had overlooked the most important factor.

In 2005 the John Templeton Foundation awarded Woodberry a grant that enabled him to hire almost fifty additional research assistants and to set up a huge database project at the University of Texas. For the next several years the team amassed more and more statistical data, doing more historical analyses which consistently confirmed his emerging theory. With this mass of data and consistent analytical findings, along with his dissertation, Woodberry was able to make an astonishing claim: 

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 nongovernmental associations. 

And as Andrea Palpant Dilley wrote in her article: “In short: Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple—if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary.”

The Truth is in the Details

Woodberry’s research does not imply that there were not selfish, power-seeking, and racist Protestant missionaries. He stated, “We don’t have to deny there were and are missionaries who do self-centered things. But if that were the average effect, we would expect the places where missionaries had influence to be worse than places where missionaries weren’t allowed or were restricted in action. We find exactly the opposite on all kinds of outcomes. Even in places where few people converted, [missionaries] had a profound economic and political impact.”

Andrea Palpant Dilley added one important finding to her article: “The positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to ‘conversionary Protestants.’ Protestant clergy financed by the state as well Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960’s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked.”

Perhaps most strident critics of missionaries associated them with being representatives of and funded by the nations they came from. However, Protestant missionaries were not funded by the state and were typically very critical of colonialism. They represented Christ, not their homeland. 

Woodberry clarified that the missionaries who shaped history in such a positive way were Protestant, conversionary, and non-state church missionaries. “Conversionary” meant their primary purpose was to convert people to the Christian faith—to make disciples. “Non-state church” means they were funded by donations, not governments, nor were they representing the country in which they came from. First and foremost, they represented Jesus and were motivated by their love for him and a desire to serve him by serving others. They did not view those they served as inferior, but as people cherished by and important to God. Thus, they sought to serve and love them as Jesus did. Few were political or social activists, but when they realized the people they loved and served were being treated unjustly, they naturally sought justice. They also refrained from associating themselves with the colonists because to do so would make it more difficult to evangelize those they served. They were considered radical because they educated women and other marginalized groups. And many of the nationalists who led their nations to independence graduated from Protestant mission schools. 

Palpant Dilley added this wisdom and warning at the end of her article. “Woodberry would temper our triumphalism, to be sure, reminding us that all these positive outcomes were somewhat unintended, a sign of God’s greater purposes being worked out through the lives of devoted but imperfect people.”

Kingdom Concerns

We are disciples, apprentices of Jesus learning how to live in his Kingdom. We seek to obey his teaching, to emulate his example, and in doing so to learn how to live as citizens of the realm that Jesus rules over as King. Those conversionary Protestant missionaries Woodberry studied changed the world in life enhancing ways they had not anticipated or intended. They simply sought to love and convert people, but in doing so the people they served began to flourish in countless ways. God uses broken and imperfect people, but nevertheless faithful people, to establish his Kingdom. God’s ways are mysterious, but if we faithfully seek to follow the Jesus Way, God will bring the fruit. This is what biblical covenants are all about. If we faithfully, although imperfectly, follow the Jesus Way, he will do all that he promises. This is true whether we go about our lives with purpose (Part C) while living in our increasingly lost society or focus on a particular mission on purpose (Part D). Either way, we are being sent by Jesus to continue his mission. As disciples of Jesus, we are people with a purpose that is far greater than our personal desires and self-gratification. We are servants and our Master has charged us to continue his mission until he returns.

THINKING IT THROUGH

I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is good for you and leads you along the paths you should follow. Isaiah 48:18

THE TRUTH: Jesus humbly and joyfully served others. This was an essential part of his mission and an expression of his holiness.

YOUR CHALLENGE: Jesus sends his disciples to represent him by humbly and joyfully serving others. This reflects Christlike character and is an essential part of our mission. 

The Scriptures, questions, and notes are for group discussion and personal reflection. Our goal in Tier III is character transformation which requires sustained effort and growing faith. Thinking through the questions can help you understand this challenge at a deeper level. We encourage you to focus on those questions that you find most interesting or helpful. This is not a test, but a tool to help you respond to the challenges.

Related Scriptures

1 Corinthians 12:5 ⁵ There are different kinds of service, but we serve the same Lord.

John 4:35 ³⁵ “My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.”

Romans 2:8 ⁸ But he [God] will pour his anger and wrath on those who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness.

Jeremiah 30:10 ¹⁰ “So do not be afraid, Jacob my servant; do not be dismayed, Israel,” says the LORD. “For I will bring you home again from distant lands, and your children will return from their exile. Israel will return to a life of peace and quiet, and no one will terrorize them.

2 Timothy 2:24 ²⁴ A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people.

Leviticus 25:55 ⁵⁵ For the people of Israel belong to me. They are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Joshua 1:1 ¹ After the death of Moses the Lord’s servant, the Lord spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ assistant. 

Joshua 14:7 ⁷ I was forty years old when Moses, the servant of the LORD, sent me from Kadesh-Barnea to explore the land of Canaan. I returned and gave an honest report,

1 Chronicles 17:7 ⁷ “Now go and say to my servant David, ‘This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies has declared: I took you from tending sheep in the pasture and selected you to be the leader of my people Israel.

Psalm 18:1 A psalm of David, the servant of the LORD. He sang this song to the Lord on the day the Lord rescued him from all his enemies and from Saul. He sang:

¹ “I love you, LORD,
You are my strength.

Isaiah 50:10 ¹⁰ Who among you fears the LORD and obeys his servant? If you are walking in darkness, without a ray of light, trust in the LORD and rely on your God.

Jeremiah 43:10 ¹⁰ Then say to the people of Judah, ‘This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: I will certainly bring my servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, here to Egypt. I will set his throne over these stones that I have hidden. He will spread his royal canopy over them.

Galatians 1:10 ¹⁰ Obviously, I’m not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant.

2 Timothy 2:24 ²⁴ A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but must be kind to everyone, be able to teach, and be patient with difficult people.

Questions

You are encouraged to use these questions for group discussion or personal reflection. Respond to the questions that are most relevant or interesting to you (I urge you to write your responses in a journal or notebook).

1. Near the beginning of Part D (“Going on Purpose), you were asked to suspend judgment on what missionaries do until after you had read the entire narrative. Now, having read it, how do you respond? Please describe any change in your thinking about missionaries or any part of what you read that impressed you in either a positive or negative way. 

2. Challenge 10, Parts C and D both speak about purpose. Part C spoke of going about your life WITH a God-given, overarching purpose and Part D spoke of dedicating your life to a particular mission ON purpose. There is a subtle distinction between “with” purpose and “on” purpose. Explain the distinction.

3. Many of the leaders in the original thirteen colonies believed that the United States expressed their conviction that democracy (or a republic) could not survive and thrive unless its citizens were religious. Perhaps Woodberry’s research can be used to support this view. Respond to this suggestion in any way you wish.

4. Share your thoughts on why the “Protestant” missionaries had such a strong influence in colonies in which they served as opposed to missionaries from state churches or Catholic missionaries.

5. Perhaps an even more surprising result of Woodberry’s research was that only Protestant “conversional” missionaries (ones who sought to make disciples by converting people) had this lasting impact. Why do you think “conversional” was such a significant factor?

6. Going a little deeper, explain why missionaries whose priority was to convert people ended up starting schools, teaching people to read, improving the status of women and other marginalized people, importing printing presses, improving the economy, reducing poverty and corruption, bringing health care, lowering the infant mortality rate, and making democracy possible. 

7. I believe the increasing secularization of the USA and the growing number of nones (people with no religious affiliation), indicate our nation is increasingly becoming a mission field. If you agree, what strategy is best for reaching the USA with the gospel? Should we, like conversional missionaries, focus primarily on making disciples or on current issues?

Completing the Challenge

1. UNDERSTAND.

Prayerfully process (think, read, discuss, question, write) until you understand the most important truth Jesus is teaching you in Challenge 10. 

Reread “THE TRUTH” and “THE CHALLENGE” statements that are printed below the “THINKING IT THROUGH” section header. It may also be helpful to read the related scriptures, and what you have already written in your journal when reading and processing parts A through C of this challenge. As always, you may consult a mentor, other disciples or a study partner, or use other resources. But do not move on to #2 (BELIEVE) until you have articulated the chief truth revealed to you in this challenge by completing this sentence, 

“The chief truth revealed in this challenge is ….”

2. BELIEVE.

Embracing the truth requires you to “change your mind” by ceasing to believe one thing (a lie) in order to believe the truth. To follow Jesus means you must continually repent (literally: “change your mind”—your mental map of reality) to personally embrace the truth he embodied and taught. The goal is to internalize the truth in your heart until it becomes like your DNA—what makes you, you.

Write the thing you no longer believe (the lie) by completing this sentence,
“I no longer believe ....”

Rewrite the new truth you now believe (from “1. UNDERSTAND.” above) by completing this sentence, 
“I now believe ….”

3. DO.

Jesus expects the truth you now believe to change the way you live. What you believe determines what you do and how you live. Commit to do something differently (be specific) because of your new and/or deepening faith. Write it by finishing this sentence,
“I believe Jesus is leading me to ....”  

Then pray, asking the Lord to help you do whatever you have determined he is asking you to do.

4. SHARE.

Finally, tell a mentor or study partner the specifics of how you have worked this challenge (the sentences you have written) and ask for their feedback.

It is best to write your statements at the end of each challenge in your journal/notebook. If you get stuck on this last exercise, skip it for the time being, and complete it at a later date. As you make progress on the Jesus Way, you may want to modify and improve these concluding statements. Feel free to do so at any time. Whenever you receive new insights, it may change what you have previously written. Your journal/notebook is intended to document your growing faith; it will become a useful tool to help you, and also to mentor others.

Copyright © 2024 Don Waite

All rights reserved.

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