The Missionary Position

The statistics keep changing-- depending on who is doing the counting-- but there can be little doubt that there are now more Christians in Africa, Asia, and China, than there are in Europe or the United States. So why does the United States and Canada keep sending missionaries to the "Third World"?

The answer is, probably, because we can.

I remember reading a fairly detailed story about a large charity organization that raised funds for research into a certain childhood illness. It might have been polio or something. Anyway, the disease was finally virtually eradicated.

So what happened to the charitable organization? They had a big party, right? They laid off all their staff, sold off their buildings, shredded their internal memos, and disappeared, right?

Wrong. The organization simply adopted a new cause and began raising money for it. The tools were all in place. Jobs were at stake. The decision of what to do was made by the people whose jobs depended on the continued existence of the organization.

Well, obviously, we haven't found a cure for apostasy yet, so, in that sense, missionary organizations should continue their work. The trouble is, they are doing all this work over-seas, not here.

The real reason we don't send missionaries to New York and Chicago and Paris and Toronto is that we haven't yet found a way to present the gospel message in a compelling way to a literate, educated, and somewhat cynical population. Why not? Because the church chose certain battlefields many years ago, and they were the wrong battlefields. We chose to fight the doctrine of evolution, and we lost. We chose to fight the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and we lost. We chose to fight the scientific conclusions about the age of the earth, and we lost. Now we are fighting a battle for the morals and cultural values of our society, and we pretend that we never lost any of those earlier battles. We tell people, "take our word for it: we're right". But we haven't earned the right to invite anyone to take our word for anything. We haven't explained yet why we fought the idea of dinosaurs so energetically, and now we try to explain that Noah actually took dinosaurs with him on the ark. We haven't explained how Noah could have saved two of every creature in his ark when it wasn't even big enough to carry two of every single species of fly.

I am told that no other world religion, Buddhism, Islam, or Confusionism, for example, entertains a conflict between the evidence of our senses and the evidence of sacred scripture or tradition. And that is why, the educated, professional classes of Buddhist and Islamic societies are full participants in the religious life of their nations.

But here in North America, and in Europe, religion--Christianity--has virtually proclaimed: forget everything you learned about truth and science and knowledge, and accept these doctrines without question...

June 8, 1998