Itsara

By permission, I submit this viewpoint of my friend Paul on the previous post on missionary woes. I think Paul makes a very good point, and I find it particularly interesting because he’s not a Christian himself.

PS About your post concerning a home church’s view of missionaries:

A tenet in psychology is that often a person’s outlook is expressed through their institutions and their statements about other people. While I understand some of the concerns (redirecting limited resources to other regions, worries about injuring local culture), I simply don’t understand the rest. Would a dollar spent in the West help more people than a dollar in a 3rd world country? Isn’t there an implicit selfishness in keeping money at the home church - for what? a new gym? And doesn’t this resistance imply that the people at the home church believe that the missionaries are somehow living frivolously? By extension, doesn’t that then imply that the people making this complaint would use funds frivolously given the chance (such as a person who always thinks people are stealing is probably a thief)?

Really, if someone wants to dedicate their life to something that I think is a good cause then I’m not going to try and stop them. And I’m certainly not going to claim that resources are better spent on myself than on them.

I agree. Why try to stop someone from doing what you believe is good? And this is an opinion from outside the church. From within the church, we have the added reasoning that God’s resources are unlimited and His provision promised.

He did add this disclaimer:

Is this situation more complex than I am giving it credit for? I am not in a position where I have to be forgiving of institutionalized behavior that annoys me, so I think that I may have misjudged something.

Certainly there are other issues. The churches that do these things do them in an effort to control missionaries and keep them from acting inappropriately. In some cases this is a good thing, but in most cases I think it reveals a lack of trust - both in the missionaries themselves and in God. It reminds me of a story Sean once told us. He was working with some missionaries in a hill tribe village and talking with one of them about how he came to be in Thailand and everything. He said (as we often do) that we weren’t exactly sent by a church. They’re our family and our friends, yes, but not an organization to which we must submit. We would have come out here whether Coast helped or not. The missionary asked Sean, “So who are you accountable to then?”

“To God,” Sean said.

“Well, yeah, sure, but who are you really accountable to?”

The way Sean told it, the guy treated his answer like it was a Sunday school answer - fine for kids, but impractical in the real world. To be fair I wasn’t there and I don’t know. But whether or not this was his opinion, it is often how the larger church and missions organizations tend to work. As I said before, there are good reasons for this sometimes, but most missionaries feel a special call by God to do His work. How many obstacles must we put in their way before God decides He needs to handle us so that His people can do their work?