A Tale of Two Missionaries

Back in 1981 I made a trip to Taiwan and China to shoot a couple of films. The guys I was working with and the client we were working for were Christians and arrangements had been made for a couple of missionaries to help us with some of the logistics. One I will name and one I will not.

In Taipei, David Harrison helped us with numerous details and spent a couple of days driving us around in his van. David was there with an evangelical agency. He and his family lived in what was considered there a middle-class apartment building. We would consider it much lower in class by the look and feel of the place. This family had become extremely acculturated. They ate Chinese, they lived Chinese. Their teenage children spoke the language so well they worked as professional translators making scads of contacts for their parents. One of the daughters got us into the film studio there where we shot a crew making a movie. This was made possible by the fact that the kids had made friends with a guy who was a camera operator. The Harrison apartment was a place where Chinese friends came and went constantly. After a day of driving us around in his van, pointing out landmarks and telling us tidbits of history, politics, and culture, Nan Yang “David” Lee, our Taiwan born and raised, USA educated host and guide provided by the Government Information Office, told us that David Harrison knew more about his hometown than he did. I came away thinking that this family was the epitome of what missionaries should be like.

In order to get from Taiwan into China we had to spend a couple of days in Hong Kong. A missionary with a Fundamentalist agency had been asked to get train tickets for the short trip up to Shanghai. We stayed in his apartment for a night or two there. The contrast between what we observed there and the Harrison family could hardly have been more dramatic. The Hong Kong apartment was very nice. From inside it, one could easily have felt like one was back home in the states in a very nice residence. At some point we were left alone in the apartment and I happened to notice a typed piece of paper under a clear covering of the desk. It was a list of dates and events in the future. It laid out the plan of the rest of this man’s life; such things as the dates his various children would enter and subsequently graduate from Bob Jones University, and the date years in the future when he would leave Hong Kong and retire. There were also a few issues of the family prayer letter report to their donors. I read them to get a feel for what they were about. They were a good sell painting them all in glowing prose.

We kept finding out things from these folks that had our eyes opening wider and wider. We learned that they never had any Chinese people in their home. In fact, they had virtually no Chinese friends. This missionary had a small church that met on the top floor of a tall apartment building. He had been there for a number of years at this point. We attended a Sunday morning service. The congregation consisted of less than ten people. We inquired as to why the sermon was presented in English and then translated. The missionary’s answer was that he found Chinese to be too hard and had given up on learning it years earlier.

We needed to get around Hong Kong to accomplish various tasks and our host was to be our guide. Every time we set out he would get lost and it soon became apparent that he could not find his way around this city he had lived in for years. The fellow hadn’t gotten the train tickets he had agreed to get for us and by the time we got there it was too late, they were sold out. We ended up getting airplane tickets up to Guilin which proved to be much better for our purposes, but I came away with the sense that this guy was basically incompetent at most things except maintaining a really nice apartment and writing prayer letters.

I’ve often wondered why on one of the first of many international trips I would meet and spend time with one of the finest missionaries I would ever run into and the absolute worst. I suppose one could read this and say my experience was just chance. Since that trip I have had opportunity to travel to over thirty countries. I’ve met many missionaries and observed things about what they were doing and how they related to each other and the people they were reaching out to. I also ran into a few Fundamentalist missionaries or would hear about them on the occasion that the fact I was a graduate of Bob Jones University would come up in conversation.

In just about any area you go in the world and run into evangelical missionaries, you will find that they usually consider other missionaries in the area as colleagues and dear friends. More often than not you can observe them to be working as a team and the agency they happen to be there under is a footnote. The disturbing thing I heard on more than one occasion was that if there was a Fundamentalist missionary in the area, their primary task seemed to be to attack what the evangelicals were doing. One missionary family very close to my own spent many years in Finland, a difficult, post-Christian culture. After they had been there many years one of these Fundamentalist folks I speak of came over and proceeded to expend all efforts to discredit and tear down the efforts of the other missionaries in the area. After one term and no converts they left never to return declaring Finland to be “an unfruitful field.” This seems to be a Fundamentalist strategy for approaching the Great Commission: one term, shake the dust off your sandals, and be free of the guilt of the blood of that people group.

So, there you go. That’s what I’ve observed in a couple of decades of traveling. Maybe you’ve observed something different. If so, you are welcome to comment here.