Shadows of Doubt

by Mike Wakely

I would like to propose a few important considerations that I have found helpful for long-term survival, that every thinking missionary should make a priority.

I went to India thirty-five years ago with Operation Mobilization and spent my first three years in daily street evangelism together with a team of young Indian Christians. Our routine was to drive into town, open up the back of our four-ton delivery van and preach the gospel message from the tailgate. We would then mingle with the crowd and sell gospel packets and other evangelistic books. We were enthusiastic, full of faith and zeal, and convinced that the gospel was the answer to India’s problems. We expected people to respond and turn to Christ, though few actually did. They were heady and exciting years.

And yet, alongside that excess of zeal and fervor I have always had a mind that battled hard questions and doubts. Someone once said to me, “Mike, do you know what’s wrong with your faith?”

“No,” I said, “tell me.” I have always wanted to know.

“Your faith is too cerebral.”

I take that as a compliment. It means that, alongside my trust in God and my convictions that Christ is my Saviour and Lord, I have a mind that thinks, that tries to ask relevant and hard questions, that exercises discretion and understanding. I believe those are godly, necessary qualities. I also believe it is dangerous and foolish to jettison the mind, as many excitable Christians seem to have done in the interests of greater spirituality. But there is a price to be paid for thinking.

Even in those early years as an enthusiastic missionary, I faced constant questions and doubts about the task I had launched myself into. For every answer to prayer, my mind asked if it could be a coincidence. For every spiritual blessing, my mind wondered if this was an experience explainable by psychology. For every spiritual victory, I questioned why there was so much failure. All these years later, and presumably wiser and more experienced, I still battle many of the same questions. It is a struggle that knocks many people out of the race, unless they are equipped and prepared for it.

I well remember one Christmas, when I arrived with my team of young Indians at a small town in Uttar Pradesh, to the south of Varanasi. We were there for a week or two of evangelism and meetings in the local church, but we were not prepared for what we found. We visited the little church, standing gauntly in a bare patch of ground, some distance from the town. The building had been decorated for Christmas with faded colored streamers.

Tragedy had struck the little church two days before. The Christians had been feuding for some time over the mission property, and the congregation was deeply divided by greed and envy. Some members of one party had come to the church building and found a member of the opposing party hanging up paper decorations. They had picked a quarrel, argued and beaten the poor man to death. Just before we arrived, five of the church’s elders were in the local jail under arrest, awaiting trial on a charge of murder.

It caught me off guard with an extraordinary intensity. For days I battled doubt—questioning the church (for which Christ died), the authenticity of the Christian faith (which promised victory over the evil one) and the promises of God (that he would save to the uttermost). Was it all worthwhile, this sacrifice of my life for his cause? Or was the Christian gospel an empty sham? Were the Christians any better, any holier, than the non-Christian community around them? Serious questions.

As leader of my team I was obliged to say and do the right thing, to build up and not to tear down. Being honest with myself I had to face up to the fact that my beliefs were under severe strain. It forced me for a while into a double life—a public face of faith and an inner battle with doubt. It is the dilemma faced by many missionaries. Some come through it triumphantly, and some succumb to cynicism, bury their heads in the sand or retreat in disarray.

It was by no means the first time I had had questions and doubts. The first time I stood before a crowd of village Hindus and preached the gospel of salvation, I questioned the authenticity of my message. I could safely say that probably none in that crowd had, or would indeed ever be likely to have, a clear understanding of the gospel message. I faced an inner conflict over our traditional and often glibly stated doctrines of hell-fire and the exclusive claims of John 14:6—all of which I firmly believe to this day, but hopefully not glibly stated any more.

I do not need to labor the point. A faithful Christian must be a thinking person. A thinking person must ask the hard, as well as easy, questions. And many times there are no satisfactory answers.

A Hindu came up to me after an open-air meeting and asked, “Do you believe the Bible?”

“Yes, I do,” I replied.

“In Mark 16 it says you can drink any deadly thing and will recover. If I give you poison to drink, will you drink it?”

What convincing answer could I give? Many a missionary today is swept along on the tide of enthusiasm, quick to believe the glossy propaganda of mission statistics and strategies, but perhaps ill-equipped and unprepared to handle the cynicism, the taunts, the questions that the nature of his task will throw at him and the doubts that his thinking mind and its demonic prompter persist in asking. And many will run away or crumble under the strain, rather than face the intensity of the inner battle they provoke.

I would like to propose a few important considerations that I have found helpful for long-term survival, that every thinking missionary should make a priority.

1. Foundations of our faith. Everyone seriously committed to ministry, be it at home or in some foreign land, needs to keep a permanent eye on the foundations of his or her faith. If we are honest, most of us rest our faith in many things apart from Christ. We trust in our prayer partners and supporting churches. We trust in our mission boards and leaders for their wise directions, pastoral care and counsel. We trust in our pension plans and our security systems. All of these are significant and usually good. However it is what I like to call the “bottom line” that is of ultimate significance in our lives. That bottom line is the ultimate foundation that rules and governs our ambitions and decisions, and if it is any other than Christ and the truth of his Word, our faith will probably flounder or fail sooner or later.

Many of us come from wonderful worshipping churches with loving supportive friends. What do we cling to when they are gone? When our mission structures and strategies fail, or, worse still, when our respected leaders let us down, to what do we turn to hold us up? When those we once looked up to as mentors and models prove to be made of clay, whom do we trust? When like Job, we face the unthinkable in personal tragedy and disaster, how do we respond?

Though experience and emotions are integral components of Christian commitment, they are clearly an inadequate defense against the fiery darts of the evil one who challenges and batters our faith. The only adequate foundation is a deep-seated conviction that the gospel as found in the Bible is not only unique but absolutely true, a message to live and die for. In a day in which even the nature and existence of truth is being challenged, this requires some clear and deep thinking.

2. No easy answers. Popular Christianity is replete with easy answers to unanswerable questions. Those easy answers will often not hold up under the ruthless scrutiny of a cynical world, and we urgently need to examine them if we are to survive in ministry. Take the problem of suffering, the dilemma of those who have never heard the name of Christ, the destiny of the lost and the love of God in a cruel world. One solution is to sweep the difficulties under the carpet and retreat into clichés and platitudes, but that is unlikely to be sufficient to carry us through the hard times.

Survival may well depend on learning to live without any answers to the deepest questions. Not every tough question has an answer. God has not given us a full revelation. He has given us enough to get us through, but not enough to answer every doubt. This is the tough solution to many difficulties—to learn to live in the faith that God is good and righteous and that he has answers that we can never comprehend. Our perspective is so limited that it should not be hard to admit that things are different when viewed from eternity. But to live with some of the greatest problems unresolved will never be easy.

3. Don’t compromise the truth. A danger to beware of is the temptation to adjust the truth to make it easier to believe. Sadly, many in Christian ministry have taken that course in order to resolve their difficulties and make the gospel more appealing to the popular pluralism of modern humanity. By this method God can be attractively viewed as broad-minded, soft-hearted and tolerant, and the church as a place that promises security, prosperity and the good life. It is a comfortable solution to the opposite extreme of popular fundamentalism with its cut-and-dried solutions to eternal mysteries.

But it is not a solution, nor will it last. The bubble will burst, the promises will fail and a deeper cynicism will set in. Survival is dependent on a relentless search for truth and spiritual authenticity. Humility requires submission to the superior wisdom of God, and a willingness sometimes to accept what may be unpalatable and even contrary to the popular wisdom of our age.

4. Sufficiency of Christ. May we never underestimate the sufficiency of Christ, the adequacy of his undeserved generosity and the mysterious working of his Holy Spirit in our lives. Survival in a cynical world mercifully does not depend on the strength or soundness of our faith, nor on our tactics for defending ourselves. Our best resource is always going to be our exhausted dependence on his powerful working within us and on our behalf. “When I am weak,” said Paul, “then I am strong.”

5. Look towards the light. For survival we need ever to learn to look towards the light and keep our eyes off the dark. Some people are emotionally more inclined that way than others—the sanguine and choleric optimists. Others always look into the dark corners where the light never penetrates—the melancholic pessimists. I admit that my temperament always finds the problems before the blessings. If I read through a page of print I always spot the mistakes.

For a grasp of reality, it is important for optimists to know there are dark questions that demand answers. On the one hand, it is inadequate to skate through life believing that all is well, gullibly swallowing all the exhilarating stories that are the heady stuff of popular missions. On the other hand, the down-to-earth pessimist needs to lift up his or her eyes to focus on the light, grasping firmly what is true and accessible, and trusting the rest into God’s capable hands.

When I found myself severely disillusioned about the state of the church south of Varanasi, I was devastated and my profession was in crisis. What pulled me out of that crisis—and it took several days to get back on an even keel—was the realization that I was placing a false faith in the church, in human goodness and holiness. I was disappointed in them all. They had let me down. Since then, and over the last thirty years, I have discovered over and over that nothing and no one can ultimately be trusted absolutely. Nor should I ever have expected otherwise.

What helped me back onto my spiritual feet again was the assurance that, when all else failed and deceived, there was one, and only one, who had never failed. I found I could never be disappointed in Christ. He alone was the faultless foundation to which I must cling. It’s the sort of foundation all believers need to be sure of, but missionaries perhaps more than anyone.

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Mike Wakely trusted Christ as a student and in 1967 joined Operation Mobilisation to serve for 21 years in India, Nepal and Pakistan. He now serves as assistant Area Director for OM South Asia. He is lives in London, is married and has two adult children.

EMQ, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 468-472. Copyright © 2003 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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