The message you carry as you renew the world

This is an interesting article by John Piper, but not a terribly surprising one.

In it Piper discusses an article published last year in Christianity Today, in which sociologist Robert Woodberry is surprised to discover that Christian missionaries accomplish a lot of good for the societies where they labor, helping to improve public health, establish schools, and engage in a number of other civic projects that build support productive and stable societies.

As I said, not terribly surprising, if you’re familiar with actual missions work. The notion of a Christian missionary beating the bushes for converts and wrecking local culture in the process isn’t one that matches reality in most cases. Most missionaries I’ve known are engaged in important humanitarian work that lays the foundations for successful societies: health care, education, job skills, empowering women, agricultural skills, literacy, and so on. Come with me to Haiti some time, and if I can only show you a fraction of the legacy Wallace Turnbull has left in Kenscoff, it’ll leave you humbled and awed.

Still, if I am understanding him correctly, Piper seems to be making a tremendous leap in logic here. Woodbury compares the difference between state-sponsored missionaries and Protestant missionaries, and if I understand the argument correctly, Piper believes that the latter produce greater social results from their commitment to preaching a gospel of substitutionary atonement.

I’d half-agree with him on this point. I think it’s likely that missionaries proceeding from a point of religious faith and commitment to God are probably more likely to stay the course for many years than those who are engaged in their work because of a job. It’s hard to tell, exactly, because I’m also unclear on how he and Woodbury are using the term “missionary,” and whether a “state-sponsored missionary” would mean primarily secular workers like Peace Corps volunteers, or if the term means something different.

In any event, missionaries only begin to have a lasting effect on their host communities after they’ve been there about seven years, from studies I recall. It takes time to learn the language, time to learn the culture, time to build street cred with the nationals, and time to be humbled into realizing they aren’t the towering giants they think they are.

The other part which I have to disagree with — and again, I may be misconstruing his argument — is that it follows from Woodberry’s study that the focus of a missionary should be on preaching a gospel of substitutionary atonement, a la the Bridge, the Four Spiritual Laws, or other such popular summations.

Law-sin-atonement-redemption clearly is a biblical doctrine, but it’s worth noting that this is never a message that Jesus preached in any of the gospels, at any point. Nor is it a message that Paul appears to have preached anywhere in the book of Acts. Jesus’ message instead was that the Kingdom of God had arrived, in himself; Paul’s message is that the Kingdom of God had arrived, as was evidenced by the Resurrection. Both men demonstrated the presence of the Kingdom of God by tearing down the social barriers that kept people separate from one another, by healing the sick and even raising the dead. In short, they confronted social ills as a matter of course, which is the sort of thing Protestant missionaries do with health clinics and schools.

That message of law-sin-atonement-redemption is, of course, a major theme of the book of Romans, but the primary audience for Romans was the church in Rome — not a group of non-Christians whom Paul was trying to convert. It seems rather silly, not to mention counter to the examples of both Christ and Paul, to say that the best missionaries are those who teach theology to non-Christians in an attempt to convince them to follow Jesus.

Obviously that approach does have its results, but I’d argue those results stem more from God’s desire to reconcile all people to himself, than to the efficacy of the approach itself.