The New Missionary Movement of Today

Dear Dr. Táíwò,

I am writing to you about your book, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. It was a challenging read. I found it to be dense, packed with all the details I wanted to know; it was thorough, every facet of your subject was covered; it was fair, you presented both sides of an topic and clearly demonstrated with level-headed argument your point. As ripe with controversial issues as your book is, I would like to discuss with you what I found to be the most personally challenging aspect of your book, and I’d like to open with an anecdote.

The year is 1999. I’m nine years old. I have been on my feet for most of the day and I’m sweating through my cotton dress; the small cinderblock church keeps most of the heat at bay so the afternoon sun isn’t too oppressive. I’m watching a young girl about my age named Julita have her hand wrapped in bandages by a nurse. She had made to flip the light switch on in her home, and a current of electricity had shot through her, burning her fingers. There was nothing her family could do for her injury, so she had gone on with her day. It was now a few weeks later and one of the nurses had spotted her playing with the other children and, horrified, told her to fetch her parents and come back to the clinic. I watch as the tiny, yellowed bones that protrude from her fingertips where she’d touched the switch disappear under gauze. Gangrene gnaws at her hand and she has no idea. It will kill her if left untreated. An untreated electrocution wound infected with gangrene is unheard of in the United States. But Julita lives in the Dominican Republic, and my family was there with the Christian and Missionary Alliance to run temporary medical clinics in slums and rural areas.

In your book you discuss the role of missionaries in the spread of the philosophy of colonialism in Africa. You separate these missionaries into two groups: those who participate in the autonomy model, and those who support the aid model. This is the topic I found myself wrestling with. As a missionary myself, your words not only put me immediately on the defensive, but I began to question if I had done more harm than good on my missionary ventures. In 2008 my dad and I took a trip with the Christian Medical Society to Nicaragua to administer medical aid to a poor area. While my year in the Dominican Republic was formative – it hugely shaped my character, my outlook on the world, and my hopes and dreams – the Nicaragua trip was a result of this formation. I have an urgent desire to help those in need, but I have never deeply considered the concept of agency or the themes in your book when dreaming about a future as a missionary doctor. I don’t think as a nine-year-old I had any concept of treating Dominicans as any less than human. Humans were humans to me at that age, color didn’t matter. But today I found myself faced with the image of Schweitzer from Le Gran Blanc and, though I dreaded it, I had to ask myself if I was looking at a reflection of myself, or if I was only imagining I saw myself in him.

After all, Schweitzer ran a medical hospital in a rural area of Africa that had no other access to healthcare. He spent his life in service treating many people who probably would have died without his attention. Since the Dominican Republic I have been chasing a dream to become a medical doctor in order to serve those who need it most. I have often thought about moving to the third world full-time after becoming a doctor. The film on Schweitzer, the subsequent discussions of it, then your book, reminded me that it’s easy for missionaries today to export more than just their faith. They might also transmit sociocryonics, be guilty of Schweitzer’s paternalism, or adhere unconsciously to the aid model, all whilst ministering to their flock with the best of intentions. If I join a missionary organization will I just be a pawn in a larger movement to discount, discourage, and destroy native agency?

You thoroughly explore the consequences of the missionary aid model in your book, so I don’t feel it’s necessary to repeat your arguments as my own, but I would like to examine the state of missions in the world today to determine whether or not the aid model still dominates the mission field. Although “…the aid model has so inured itself in the African imagination that even so-called progressives cannot wean themselves from it (Taiwo, 2010),” I believe the age of aid missionaries is coming to an end as missions that follow the autonomy model become more prevalent. Today, the most ambitious projects, the missions and aid organizations that are truly changing the world, are the ones that encourage native agency. I argue that a third wave of missionaries is sweeping the globe in a new movement that is empowering native missionaries, and spreading a renewed philosophy that’s cracking the tough exterior of sociocryonics left and right.

Recently the numbers of native missionaries have been climbing. Europeans and Americans once had the market cornered on sending missionaries from a home country to a foreign one, but no longer. Forty years ago the some 3,500 cross-cultural native missionaries were a small group compared to the massive export of missionaries by the United States, but that number has shot up to an estimated 103,000 native missionaries today (Moll, 2006).This means that Christian converts are not only leading their own churches, but are sending members of their own congregations to plant churches and inspire other native missionaries in foreign countries; the students are becoming leaders to teach other students to lead. There may be no better example of a missionary autonomy model than this recent explosion of native missions.

Native missions have been particularly strong in recent years. In fact, “South Korea alone sends out as many new missionaries each year as all of the countries of the West combined (Moll, 2006).” This Korean movement that’s now disseminating native agency philosophy worldwide is exceptional. In 1980 the church there had 80 missionaries in other countries; ten years later there were 1,200 missionaries abroad, and today nearly 13,000 missionaries from South Korea are serving in other countries (Moll, 2006). These South Korean missionaries are running their own churches, and deploying missionaries to teach other native Christians to do the same. The autonomy model is alive and well in South Korea, and they’re spreading it around the world.

Advancing Native Missions (ANM) is an organization that partners with native missionaries. Its mission statement proposes that natives are in a unique position to minister because they already know the culture, the language, the geography, the political scene, etc. This particular example of the autonomy model is extraordinary in that it elevates native missions above Western missions. It doesn’t discount or discredit Western missions, but ANM recognizes that an Indian reaching out to India, and Iranians reaching out to Iran can be more effective than a white missionary in an area foreign to him. According to ANM 80% of world evangelization today is now done by native missionaries, a flabbergasting statistic (ANM, 2002). In your book you mention that around the turn of the twentieth century African native agency was being overthrown by missionaries and administrators who had “convinced themselves that Africans could not be trusted to run their own affairs (Taiwo, 2010),” and while I agree that this second wave of missionaries helped rob Africans of their subjectivity, I also think that it was soon supplanted by a third wave that was interested in restoring agency.

In 1953, a missionary doctor named Helen Roseveare traveled to Congo to spread the gospel and administer medical care to the area. She was a single white woman, a graduate of Cambridge, and she was a rare gem, who fought for an autonomy model, despite the opposition of other missionaries in Congo. She began to build a hospital by hand, making and firing the bricks herself to construct the buildings, and “within eleven years, a 14-acre plot of land had been turned into a 100 bed hospital and maternity complex with all the necessary buildings and services (Voelkel, 2010).” Roseveare didn’t run an entire hospital on her own; she trained natives as medical assistants and midwives, and they established 48 clinics in the area (Voelkel, 2010). When civil war broke out in 1964, rebel forces took her captive, destroyed her hospital, and beat and raped her. She was released and she went home to England, but returned a year later to build an even larger hospital and medical school for the newly independent country. No missionary is perfect, but Roseveare’s commitment to the autonomy model is noteworthy, especially as she was serving in a field primarily dominated by men who adhered to the aid model, and her work inspired many others to do the same.

Today perhaps the greatest example of the autonomy model in modern medical care is Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health (PIH). While PIH is not a Christian organization, it eviscerates the aid model while building on the autonomy model. Farmer has a love for Haiti, and that’s where he chose to start PIH. Angered by the quality of care usually afforded to the sick by “aid” organizations, Farmer set a new standard. He not only focused on treating disease, he tackled disease prevention with education programs and community partnerships. PIH declares that “by whatever means necessary” any person who comes to a PIH clinic will receive the best care available at the facility (PIH, 2010). Indeed, “by whatever means necessary” includes Farmer stealing a microscope from Harvard to stock his Haitian hospital’s lab (Kidder, 2003). Farmer’s concept of treating the poor with the best medical care available was not just unheard of, it turned out to be revolutionary. The World Health Organization was put to shame when tiny PIH proved drug-resistant tuberculosis could be cured affordably and effectively in poor and rural areas. PIH has shown the world that the lives of everyone, no matter how poor, are of equal worth and should be treated accordingly.

Today I stand on the brink of graduating from my first year of college, and my life choices seem immensely pivotal. My dream of being a doctor, and possibly a missionary doctor, remain intact not despite, but because of, your book. The world needs more Paul Farmers, it needs more native missionaries, it needs the philosophy of native subjectivity to spread like wildfire, and I intend to drop matches everywhere possible in hopes the forest of hate, and prejudice, and stolen agency will go up in an orange blaze and be swept away. Thank you for writing a call to action.

Sincerely,

Katy Granath