Thank You Pat Robertson

A couple of years ago I spent some time in the back country prairie of Venezuela in a village of the Panare people. A couple of missionaries had spent their entire adult lives in that village helping the people with medicine, education, community development projects and their primary mission to translate the Bible into the difficult Panare language, share the Gospel of Christ and help them start a church. All this was accomplished at great personal cost to this family quietly laboring in obscurity in this forgotten corner of the world. Another family working in that village lost their teenage son in a plane crash not long before and yet they pressed on with the work.

I was sent there with one of my students to document the festivities surrounding the dedication of their finally completed Bible translation. (The video is available from New Tribes Mission) This was a huge event for these people. I could go on about it as I kept a journal with lots of the details. While there I also met another missionary couple who were living in this particular Panare village. They had been doing similar work with the Pume tribe. The Pume live near the border with Columbia and increasing guerilla activity was making it increasingly dangerous for the Americans to stay there. They eventually had to pull out to safer territory and were doing their translation work in the Panare village, living in a borrowed house, and regularly paying the way for Pume church leaders to come to visit with them for ongoing training, fellowship and co-labor on the Pume Bible translation. I regularly receive their email updates.

These dear, selfless, dedicated, sacrificing people you never heard of have been the real influence of Christianity on indigenous people in Venezuela. Fast forward a couple of years to Pat Robertson's ill-thought out suggestion to assassinate Venezuelan president Chavez. Is the guy a creep? Probably. Should we stand against him? Probably. But Robertson’s careless use of his TV bully pulpit has caused Chavez to announce yesterday what New Tribes Mission members have been fearing for some time: New Tribes Mission is being expelled from Venezuela. Sorry Pat, your subsequent apology is worth crap. Chavez is accusing the missionaries of being agents of the CIA and of exploiting indigenous people. The CIA accusation is completely absurd which even Chavez probably knows. As for exploiting his people, Chavez is by this very act exploiting them for his own political gain. Kicking out people who actually care enough for his poor back-country Indians to give their lives to live among them to help improve their lives here and now and give them hope for eternity is going to rip out the best thing that ever happened to these villages. Would this have happened without Robertson's comment? It very possibly might have anyway. But why help it along by suggesting something diametrically opposed to the teaching of Jesus?

I could rant on, but what we have here is yet another example of the media painting Christians as idiots. Only this time, it’s that sliver of media actually controlled by Christians. And not the big hair, wild-eyed folks, but the supposedly thinking flavor of Christian TV. Well, Pat, thank you so much for exerting your influence to get the Gospel of Jesus to people who need to hear it. Here’s a great idea for you: why don’t you have on your TV show these missionaries who’s life’s work you have caused to be yanked out from under them? Put their stories on the air for us all to consider. They will have plenty of time to appear now.