Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Missionary Graveyard
I've been in a room with the Southern Baptist International Missionary Board's Western European Contingent and my eyes have been opened and my perspective changed. Barcelona is beautiful, artistic, bustling with life and industry...you can get a starbucks and the conveniences are unprecedented. It's easy to imagine yourself being a 'missionary' in a place like this... I mean how hard can it be? Then after a few days you realize the people are Ghost's ..spiritually vacant. Lost in a profound way...to speak of God is like speaking of Santa Clause. Living in Western Europe as a missionary is like being a 8 track tape...you are odd and irrelevant w/seemingly nothing to offer...you are never even given a listen because you are so misunderstood. If you don't know what an 8 track tape is you are my point...if you do...you get my point. Hearing the hearts of these missionaries has kindled something in me...they are warriors. What if I were called to a field ensured of little or no results...rejoice in the Lord always again I say rejoice...what if my style or finesse, my passion or ethos would never earn me a hearing...and even if a strong relationship was built the message of Jesus was still rejected out of hand...year after year. What if I spoke to my American friends and they offered me solutions that were scissors to a tree trimmer. And then I heard the phrase.."you know they call this the Graveyard for missionaries". I have few heroes...fewer all the time it seems...but outside the halls of Richmond and the irrelevant politics in Nashville ...These men and women are the rock stars...if they were the face of Southern Baptist we would be loved and welcomed we would be revered and unified...they would know us by fruit rather than fights...This may be the missionary Graveyard but it is a Hebrews 11 hall of faith a mosoleum of Faithfulness to the Jesus who unifies us and not the pharisee politicos that divide
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2 comments:
Oh, my heart groans. If there were ever a mission field I would go to it would be Europe. Since my teens I have sensed just a dark coldness of a corpse crying out for rebirth across that continent.
A friend spent a year working in Swedent with GEM and repeatedly heard retorts to the Gospel like, "the state provides my housing, education, health, clothing and all I need to be cared for. What can God do beyond that?" Sad epitaph was that in Sweden elementary kids in public school do an annual field trip to local churches to see where "our ancestors used to go for guidance and direction before enlightenment."
What motivation Europe should be for us as Americans to fight casual faith, politically manipulated faith, secularized faith...which leads to death.
I fully agree - those missionaries are certainly to be encouraged for their work to "wake the dead" in such historically rich areas!
I would like you to simply understand that most of us Europeans are no longer interested in that religion of yours. We still may have beliefs, but as it is usually said in Spain when you're not an outright Atheist: "I believe in my god/force/wathever, but not in your clergy". That applies to any clergy -except those who are already into submission to the Catholic clergy, and they're pretty hard to change. Don't get me started about the idea that a certain book of a certain sect (no matter its size or name) can have the only and full word of god -that's simply an alien thought for your modern, average European.
Yes, it's about Enlightment, improvement of the people living conditions and personal freedom. Many of us feel rather more free once we have slipped out of the bonds of religion -any religion. If any, we create our "personal spirituality". Many of us simply don't.
And you know what? As you saw in Barcelona, it's not any kind of disaster. People is usually decent and nice, not worse than in any other place of the world. We take care of our children, be honest and try to behave with our co-citizens out of a secular ethic. Probably what religious adepts find more disturbing is that -it works. It's Europe.
Best regards.
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