“When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
―Jomo Kenyatta
I was a teenager the first time I realized that the contemporary Church idea of missions is unsustainable (read: fucked beyond repair). It happened in church, when a lily-white family we’d supported for more than a decade came home from Tanzania on furlong, and did their bi-annual “check in” with the congregation. “Again?” I thought. “More money?”
You’ve undoubtedly been there, too, sitting in church when the pastor announces a special treat, a missionary family or dude from [insert your favourite locale featuring dark-skinned locals] is visiting. Next, you sit through a slideshow of smiling, grateful, dark faces salted by the occasional white one, a sermon that includes nice testimonies and success stories, and at the end, the requisite request for financial support.
And make no mistake, it’s always about the money, because sending people to live in other countries is expensive, whether short- or long-term. Really fucking expensive. There’s never enough money, is there?
Recently, an evangelically-oriented student of mine asked me to donate to a short-term mission trip. I said no, and explained about colonialism, white-saviourism, eco/econo-sustainability, missio-tourism, and most importantly what "go into all the world" and “every nation” actually mean from a biblical perspective. They were, to say the least, stunned: they’d never heard about these issues before; missions had always been sacrosanct and above questioning.
We learned from our colonially-minded forebears that “missions” is something that chosen people do, called to places where people don’t look like we do (and that are conveniently warm year-round). This is an actual quote from a young mother in my former church, heard over coffee in the basement: “My goodness, their babies are so cute! But look how dirty everything is—if only they were smart enough to sort themselves out.”
Yes, she was racist as hell, but the spirit of her words still represent the mindset of Church mission work. We lean towards more gentle language with tons of euphemisms and encouraging language, of course, but we assume that those third-world denizens need us because, well, we’re western and wealthy, and let’s face it, they’re all a little backwards aren’t they? And we use carefully selected biblical passages to justify our efforts in other places, as we educate the “savage devils,” as it were.
We pass these lessons on to our children, too. We send them on short-term missions trips which are incredibly wasteful, token efforts to spread the gospel. Fact: most short term missions trips are more harmful than good, often draining time, expertise, resources, and money from the locals as they babysit our kids for a few days. Really, those trips are more designed to make more missionaries than actually help or meet people where they are. Our kids are merely privileged tourists pretending to do missions.
Or, to put a finer point on it, they’re anti-Christian, especially if you believe in and act towards the dignity and value of all people (like that Christ-dude did) not because of need but because they’re made in the image of God. This goes for long-term missions, too.
Am I saying we should ignore the needy? Fuck, no. Do they need Christ? Hell, yes. But no more than we do. If we really wanted to help folks from other countries, we should simply send them money and encourage them to use it how they see fit. We don’t know better than they do, so why not let those in place determine where the need really is? How many botched school walls will need to be rebuilt after the rich white kids flee back to their Nintendo Switches and shopping malls?
I know, I know, I can hear the howls now. How do we avoid corruption? How to we establish accountability? How can we ensure the money gets to where it’s needed most? Church Breakers, we can’t. Nor should we try. They’re gifts, after all. We don’t put conditions on the gifts we give friends and family, so nor should we do so for the gifts we’re privileged to give others.
It’s a very Church thing to put conditions on the things we say we do in Christ’s name, isn’t it? And it’s a very, very Church thing to assume that people of colour need nothing more than for soft-handed Westerners to drop in and deliver salvation, no matter the cost, no matter that no one’s salvation depends on us at all.
Keywords: Thesis 23: We, the Savage Devils; Faith; Deconstruction; Religion; Christian; Christianity; Church; Sin; Corruption; Scandal; Bible; Abuse; God; Jesus; Stewardship