Affluence: The Achilles’ Heel of Missions

by Jon Bonk

Since the industrial revolution less than two centuries ago, the material and economic gulf separating the industrialized North from the agrarian South has grown to astonishing proportions, and most evidence suggests that the chasm will continue to widen.

Since the industrial revolution less than two centuries ago, the material and economic gulf separating the industrialized North from the agrarian South has grown to astonishing proportions, and most evidence suggests that the chasm will continue to widen.

This is neither the time nor the place to speculate on the reasons for this growing disparity between the haves and the have nots. What is of interest is the historical anomaly which has appeared. For the greater part of the modern missionary movement, most Christian missionary endeavor has been undertaken by the "rich" to the "poor." This is historically anomalous, since there is little, if any, precedent for it in the first 1700 years of Christian history, and certainly none in the earlier record of church missionary activity as recorded in the New Testament and patristic sources.

The earliest Christian missionaries operated in a world that was not so sharply polarized economically and materially as is true of its modem counterpart. The first missionary force was almost entirely constituted of natives of an obscure, impoverished, foreign-dominated and occupied country that was little more than a backwater of the vast imperialist Roman empire. In this century, in terms of mission from the political, military, and economic power centers to those dominated. Our institutional structures so reflect this model of operation that the sending by missionaries to the poorer churches to the rich North is implicitly assumed to be logistically impossible. The money is simply not there.

Western missionaries sent to Third World countries are usually very wealthy by local standards. A missionary family of four proceeding to Ethiopia is required to raise approximately $32,000 in annual support, while a similar family commissioned to serve in Zaire may expect to be supported by about the same amount.

Consider the social dynamics likely to occur when these families are put next to an Ethiopian family of four with an annual income of $480, or a Zairian family whose annual income totals $840. What genre of relationships is the missionary family likely to develop with the Ethiopian or with the Zairian family?

Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to turn the tables on ourselves: What sort of relationship would North American church members be expected to develop with a pastor with an annual income 30 to 70 times the congregational average? Whatever one might imagine, it would be exceedingly difficult for genuinely fraternal relationships to develop in such circumstances. Similarly, it is – humanly speaking – nearly impossible for the rich western missionary family to associate with the poor Ethiopian or Zairian family in any genuinely fraternal and understanding way.

To the missionary family belongs the privilege, power, and position that go with wealth. Conversely, it is hard for the poor family to understand or appreciate the motives of the missionary family, in his eyes privileged beyond imagination as evidenced by clothing, transportation, holidays, special schools, technology, and other amenities that are the lot of the rich.

Rich missionaries are not a uniquely 20th century phenomenon. The first London Missionary Society missionaries to central Africa must have presented a mind-boggling spectacle to native observers. Financed initially by a 5,000-pound sterling gift from millionaire Robert Arthington, the first party of six missionaries set out on July 25, 1877, to transport 28,500 pounds of supplies 830 miles from the Zanzibar coast to Lake Tanganyika. It took them almost a year to reach their destination. By 1882 the enterprise had cost the mission a staggering 22,000 pounds sterling. By 1885 over 40,000 pounds sterling had been expended.

Missionary lifestyles were very modest, even heroically austere, by European standards. Nevertheless, to Africans they represented spectacular, scarcely believable ostentation and affluence. David Picton Jones, a key missionary during this period, began to suspect that missionary affluence might be the primary obstruction to making the gospel comprehensible to the people. He discovered that while London Missionary Society efforts remained barren, his Muslim employees from Zanzibar were winning converts. Writing to the foreign secretary, Jones observed:

… it is a remarkable fact that the Zanzibar men have had far more influence over the natives than we have, ever had – in many little things they imitate them, they follow their customs, adopt their ideas, imitate their dress, sing their songs, and…speak their…language. I can only account for this by the fact that the (Muslims) live amongst them, in a simple manner like themselves, intermarry with them, and to some extent partake of their notions. Our life, on the other hand … is far above them, and we are surrounded by things entirely beyond their reach. The consequence is, that they despair of trying to follow us, – indeed they cannot follow us….I have found by experience that they are exceedingly ready to imitate anything within their power, especially the young, and I feel sure in my own mind, if we were to bring ourselves nearer their own level – as near to it as our health and character as Christians would allow – we would gradually raise them up to a higher standard, and to a more civilized life. As it is, they have nothing to lay hold of, they despair of ever becoming like us, they regard us as being of another (if not a higher) order, and they believe that our religion, however well adapted to us, is to them altogether unsuitable. When I talk to them of…(God…and tell them that He is good and merciful, that we always endeavor to do His will, and that we are His children, they will answer cooly, pointing to the wonderful things in and about our house – You are His children indeed…

Even in cases where missionary labor was rewarded with fruit, relationships between missionaries and national Christians all too often were not what they should have been. This was due in part to the social and economic disparity between them. V. S. Azariah of India, addressing delegates to the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, spoke of the problem of cooperation between foreign and native workers. Whereas, he said, missionaries were well known for their condescending love, kind feelings, hard work, and self-denial in their relationships with non-Western Christians, in only a few exceptional cases were they known for their close, intimate, friendships with their native brethren: "… missionaries, except for a few of the very best seem…to fail very largely in getting rid of an air of patronage and condescension and in establishing a genuinely brotherly…relation as between equals…"3 Azariah concluded his address with the now famous challenge: "You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us friends."

The human experience everywhere shows that economic disparity and social distance breed envy and suspicion. People tend to establish friendships with their "own kind" economically and socially. This rule is by no means abrograted when a missionary travels from North America to Africa or elsewhere. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Western missionaries tend to develop their closest friendships and fraternal social ties with fellow missionaries, or with other members of the foreign community. Holidays are spent in the company of fellow Westerners; recreation and leisure time likewise find many missionaries seeking out the company of their own peers; missionary children are educated in exclusive schools.

Of course, there are practical, common-sense reasons for all of this – but that such social behavior is both evidence of and gives rise to alienation cannot be gainsayed. Even the use of complicated expensive technology in "getting the job done" heightens the social and material differences between missionary and non-missionary, tending not only to keep western missionaries at a distance from those whom they seek to influence, but often obliterating or at least obscuring the spiritual nature of the Western missionary’s concerns.

THE INCARNATION
Since the church is Christ’s body-here on earth to carry out the wishes of its Head-it is both instructive and necessary for missionaries from the West to reflect on some of the implications of the incarnation. In the first place, the incarnation teaches us that the medium is the message, to a large degree. This immediately suggests that some means are necessarily inappropriate in missionary endeavor even if they "work."

The "war-time lifestyle" advocated by Ralph Winter and practiced by many Western missionaries is to some degree disturbing in its tactic insinuation that the end and the means, the message and medium, can be separated. The temptation of Christ teaches that in accomplishing kingdom objectives, even those readily available means which would have made his work easier, which would have accomplished the task faster, and which would have made his message more palatable, were not permissible. The whole life and ministry of Christ teach us that God’s messenger does not have the right to utilize all the means potentially available to him in accomplishing God’s purposes on earth.

When the Word was made flesh, genuine identification occurred, not the empty posturing of a salesman or a politician out to make a quick sale or get a vote. The Word was made flesh in the scandalous guise of an illegitimate child, with no social distinction whatsoever. The Word grew up poor, lived surrounded by the poor, and died poor. Yet all means were at his disposal. He was the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, yet he willingly became a helpless, dependent infant, needing to learn obedience and grow in wisdom, with humble beginnings which saw him occupying only a few square feet in the bottom of a manger.

The sustainer of the universe, the owner of the cattle on a thousand hills, had nowhere to lay his head; the Everlasting Father was dead at 33; the Holy God was executed for not being religious enough. The medium was the message. Now we know that God really cares, really understands, really knows our predicament (Heb. 4:15, 16). Surely the incarnation teaches us something about God’s mission strategy. This is the model all Christians—especially missionaries—are to adopt (Phil. 2:3-8).

In this day when Western mission agendas seem largely preoccupied with talk of techniques and technology, and when mission theory appears frequently to regard man as more sociological than theological, we need men like Paul, like Roberto de Nobili, like Hudson Taylor, like James Gilmour, and like Brace Olson who, divesting themselves of their natural affluences, security, and position, attempt to become more truly "all things to all men." Were this to be done today, the financial cost of mission would be considerably less. Of course, the human and personal cost would be much more. But the lives of Western missionaries would be more in harmony with the Christ they preach, for where a man’s treasure is, there is his heart also. One of the most hard-to-scale barriers to human communication and fraternity would be breached. Not domination, but true service, would be more possible and more likely.

Eleven years ago, Mission-Focus carried an article entitled "The Shape of Mission Strategy" by David A. Shank. It suggested that the term "strategy", as a military term, carried with it built-in notions of conquest, imposition, imperialism, planning, structuring, and all that goes along with an army fighting a war. Shank proposed then that it was time for Western missions to think, instead, in terms of "cross strategy." The strategy of the cross involves self-denial, servanthood, and identification. This strategy renounces privilege and embraces servanthood. Accordingly, the missionary adopting the cross strategy wouldn’t call others up to his material-social level; he would step down to theirs; he wouldn’t have others serving Mm, but as a servant he would allow others to dispose of him. He would be more vulnerable, and his agenda for action would be determined by the one he serves. He would be at risk. He would not only seem to want to identify, he really would identify.

Docetism was a heresy which argued that Jesus only appeared to be a man, but that he was really only God all the time. Can it be that as modern missionaries, doing mission out of affluence, much of what we have called missionary sacrifice has been at heart Docetic-with missionaries merely playing at identification? Perhaps it is not possible for missionaries from the West to do more than they are doing. Perhaps we are so enmeshed in and dependent upon the expensive clutter of our material technologies and sociological strategies that we can’t propagate our faith apart from it. I hope not.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
There is obviously no simple solution to the Pandora’s box of Western missionary affluence. Lifestyle habits and expectations are not only deeply rooted culturally and psychologically, but institutionalized in the sending agencies and in on-the-field structures of modus operandi. Nevertheless, a start—however modest and inadequate—must be made somewhere by someone.

Perhaps the best place to begin is at home—in our training institutions and in the lives of those of us who are involved in the preparation of missionaries. Teachers of missionaries would do well themselves to model simplicity and contentedness in their personal life styles and ambitions. Physical facilities likewise should, ideally, be kept from ostentation. Better to err on the side of frugality. There is something slightly incongruous in the spectacle of soldiers preparing "to endure hardness" in a soft and luxurious milieu, in the midst of bounty and ease.

Furthermore, mission studies curricula should devote more attention to the communications, interpersonal, and cultural problems attendant upon a situation where the rich function as apostles. Here at Winnipeg Bible College and Theological Seminary we have begun modestly with two courses. The first, "Rich Man, Poor Man – And the Bible: An Agenda for Rich Missionaries in an Age of Hunger," surveys and applies scriptural teaching regarding the stewardship of money and possessions, with special reference to the historically unprecedented material disparity that distinguishes people of the "North" and "South," and the concomitant ramifications for Christian missionaries from the "North."

The second, entitled "Missionary Identification," discusses the practical significance and logical consequences of an incarnational model of missionary service. Mission strategy courses likewise, while not dealing specifically with the issue, at least take cognizance of the implications such disparity might have in implementing a strategy.

Third, one can read. The Bible itself is the most radical textbook in this regard, but books, such as those by Miriam Adeny (God’s Foreign Policy), Ron Sider (Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger), John White (The Golden Cow), Richard Foster (Freedom of Simplicity), and Jim Wallis (The Call to Conversion) can jog the conscience and spur us to practical obedience in this matter.

Reading the biographies of missionaries such as Roberto De Nobili, Hudson Taylor, James Gilmour, and Bruce Olson can inspire us in the knowledge that others have trod this path before us, and while the path today may be largely overgrown with weeds, it is still faintly visible and can—though with great difficulty—be followed.

Even more academic books can help. Daniel Johnson Fleming, late professor of missions at Union Theological Seminary (New York) produced a series of books that grapple realistically and sympathetically with the problem. The most helpful of these, in my opinion, are his Ventures in Simpler Living (IMC, 1933) and Living as Comrades: A Study of Factors Making for Community (Agricultural Missions, 1950).

Finally, this issue should be confronted head—on at student conferences such as Urbana, as well as at congresses and consultations on evangelism and missions. Perhaps consultations should be arranged dealing specifically with the issue and all of its complex subsidiary challenges.

What will come of all of this? Will the affluent Western church divest itself of its vast wealth and properties? Will mission societies incorporate a vow of voluntary poverty into their candidating procedures? One can hardly imagine it. Discipleship in the area of material goods has never been widely popular, but there have always been some disciples who cling lightly to their possessions, and who not only appear to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, but obviously do so. As colleagues-fellow disciples in the great task assigned to the church—we can at least follow the advice of the writer of the letter to the Hebrews: "…Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds…" (Heb. 10:23-27).

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