Category: Living Like a Missionary in America Page 2 of 4

You can’t understand Tanzanians without understanding their view of the spirit world. It permeates every facet of life. Witchdoctors are often present at national soccer games, fending off the curses of the other team. Albino children have been known to have a limb cut off in the middle of the night, the appendage sold by a family member to a wealthy businessman who uses it in magic rituals. A herd of witchdoctor’s goats on our street ran free, tended by a spirit creature.

These beliefs were not just seen as superstitions or old wives tales. They were embedded in the worldview, part of the air the people breathed. Coming from our western, enlightened, scientific worldview, our heads would spin from these stories. But we learned, early on, that this was serious business. We needed to pay attention. 

If we had come in scoffing and mocking, critical and judgmental, how well do you think Tanzanians would have listened to us? They would have written us off. Though some stories were speculative, every Tanzanian has experienced situations with the spirit world that defy western imagination. They know what they have seen, or felt, or heard. Blowing it off was not an option. If we wanted to have a voice in Tanzania, we needed to first be learners. 

Steven Hawthorne* wrote, “If our impression of another culture is that it ‘makes no sense,’ then we can be sure that we are not making sense to them either. The solution is to become a learner.” 

My job these days is to help prepare new missionaries to move overseas. What I am discovering is that the same things they are learning can be just as easily applied to American Christians. 

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In May of 2016, I wrote an article called American Christians, You Might Need to Start Living Like Missionaries. I remember I wrote it pretty quickly, without a lot of editing, and I wasn’t expecting it to go very far. To my shock, it became one of my most-read pieces in all my years of blogging. It was shared hundreds of times and linked on a number of different websites. In fact, a magazine contacted me and asked to pay me to print it. 

If I had known it was going to be that popular, I would have chosen a less ridiculous picture to go with it. Good grief.

I think the reason it struck a nerve, though, was because that was the year everyone assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. American Christians were bracing themselves for an assault against their core values. So the idea of needing to live like a missionary resonated with a lot of people. In fact, 8 days before the election, that post received 13,000 hits–on one day. That’s astonishing for my dinky little blog.

As we all know, the story had an unexpected twist when Trump was elected on November 8th. And suddenly, Christians didn’t feel they were on the outside anymore. In fact, some of them felt that we had gained the upper hand. Guess what? Nobody was interested in that post anymore.

As I reflect on the last four years, I mourn the loss of that attraction to the missionary mindset among American Christians. Sure, one could arguably make the case that there were gains in religious liberty and conservative values in these last four years. But was there a cost? Being in power makes us feel like we can win battles without winning hearts. It can make us idolize strength, instead of glorying in weakness. It can make us forget that we are supposed to be living like missionaries.

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