When Missions Went Wrong

Today's Scripture

Jonah 4:1-2 — "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the LORD and said, 'O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country?... for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.'"

Mark 10:42-43 — "You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you."

Micah 6:8 — "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

The Big Idea

The missionary movement carried the gospel — and it sometimes carried conquest, racism, and control in the same luggage. Today we tell that part of the truth without flinching, because the Bible itself teaches us how. A church that cannot confess cannot be healed. And the good news is that the gospel's power never depended on the goodness of its messengers.

Reflection

Telling the whole truth

Every family has stories it tells at dinner and stories it keeps in a drawer. The church is a family too, and today we open the drawer.

Colonialism is the word for one nation seizing and ruling another, taking its land and wealth. In too many places, missions and colonialism arrived on the same boats. In Australia, mission-run institutions helped remove Aboriginal children from their parents — the Stolen Generations. In North America, church-run residential schools stripped Indigenous children of their languages, and many suffered terrible abuse. In parts of Africa and Asia, missionaries gave spiritual cover to empires that were there for gold, rubber, and power. Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop, used to tell the story with a bitter smile:

"When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land." — Desmond Tutu

It would be easier to skip this day. But Scripture will not let us. 1 John 1:8 — "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." That sentence applies to churches and movements, not just individuals. And Micah 6:8 sets the standard the movement too often failed: "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Walk humbly. Much of what went wrong was, at root, a failure of that one word.

Here is a strange comfort, though. The Bible is the only sacred history that records its own heroes' worst moments — Abraham lying, David murdering, Peter denying. God does not need an airbrushed family album, so neither do we. Telling the truth about the missionaries is not an attack on the faith. It is an exercise of it.

Jonah, the missionary who didn't love

Here is the remarkable thing: the Bible saw all this coming. God put a book in the Old Testament about a missionary who obeyed the call and still got the heart completely wrong.

Jonah was sent to Nineveh, capital of Assyria — the empire that terrorized his people. He preached. The city repented. And Jonah 4:1 records the most shocking reaction in the prophets: "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry." Angry at mercy. He even tells God it is why he ran away in the first place: "for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful" (Jonah 4:2). Jonah wanted Nineveh's destruction, not its salvation. He loved his nation's enemies list more than he loved his nation's God.

Tim Keller has a test that exposes Jonah's disease in any heart, including ours:

"If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself." — Tim Keller, The Reason for God

A missionary whose god conveniently endorses his own empire, his own race, his own customs has stopped worshiping God and started worshiping a mirror. Jesus warned how destructive that combination becomes. Matthew 23:15 — "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte" — a proselyte is a convert — "and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." Crossing the ocean is not the hard part. Crossing out of your own self-importance is.

The book of Jonah ends with God's unanswered question: "Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left?" (Jonah 4:11). God pities the people we merely target. That is the line the missionary movement kept forgetting.

The oldest argument in the church

The second failure had a subtler shape. Many missionaries sincerely loved the people they served — and still demanded that converts take European names, wear European clothes, sing European tunes, and accept European supervision indefinitely. There is a word for treating capable adults as permanent children: paternalism.

This, too, is an argument the New Testament already had — and settled. The first church council met because some insisted that Gentile converts must essentially become Jewish to follow Jesus. Peter's verdict: "why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples...? But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will" (Acts 15:10-11). Grace, not cultural conversion. Yet even Peter wobbled later, and Paul confronted him publicly: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Galatians 2:14). Whenever the gospel gets welded to one culture, somebody has to say that out loud.

C.S. Lewis, writing in the voice of a senior demon coaching a junior one, identified the mechanism with frightening precision:

"What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call 'Christianity And.' You know — Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order..." — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Christianity-and-Empire. Christianity-and-Civilization. Christianity-and-Being-Like-Us. Every "and" quietly becomes the real religion. Against all of it stands Jesus: "those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... But it shall not be so among you... For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve" (Mark 10:42-45). And Paul shows what serving looks like in mission: "I have made myself a servant to all... I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:19, 22). Paul did not demand that Greeks become Jews. He became Greek-ish for the Greeks. The messenger bends; the message doesn't.

Perhaps no one exposed the cost of paternalism more graciously than V.S. Azariah, an Indian bishop, addressing the great missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910. He thanked the missionaries for their heroic sacrifices — and then named what was missing:

"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!" — V.S. Azariah, Edinburgh, 1910

Give us friends. Not supervisors, not benefactors, not bosses. Friends. A century later, the sentence still lands.

Grace strong enough for the truth

So what do we do with all this? Two cheap options tempt us. One is denial: minimize the harm, change the subject, protect the heroes. The other is despair: conclude the whole enterprise was rotten and the gospel with it. The cross offers a third way, and it is harder and better than both.

Lesslie Newbigin — himself a missionary to India for almost forty years — argued that the world reads the gospel through the church's life:

"The only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it." — Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

A hermeneutic is a lens, a way of interpreting something. When the church's life is honest and repentant, people can finally read the message clearly. When the church covers up, the message blurs. Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a name to forgiveness that skips repentance:

"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Real grace is not cheap, but it is real. 1 John 1:9 — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Notice the order: confession first, then cleansing. Like an apology that actually says "I was wrong" instead of "mistakes were made," confession hurts before it heals.

And here is the gospel turn this hard day has been waiting for. The same Bible the colonizers carried contained the ammunition for their own correction — Jonah, Galatians, Micah — and the people they wronged picked it up and used it. Enslaved and colonized believers read Exodus and heard a God who frees captives. They read Galatians and learned that no nation owns him. The message judged its own messengers. It always does, because its hero is not the missionary. It is the Lord who came "not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).

Think about what that means. Every other empire's religion flattered the empire. This message kept biting the hand that carried it — which is one of the strongest signs that it never belonged to the carriers at all.

Tim Keller's summary of that gospel is the only place a day like this can safely end:

"We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

That is true of the missionary movement. It is true of you. We do not need to whitewash the past to keep our faith, because our faith was never in the past's heroes. It is in the One who died for proud missionaries, angry prophets, wounded peoples — and us.

Going Deeper

Practice the difference between a real confession and a fake one today. Find one thing — small is fine — where you wronged someone, and say it without a single softener: no "but," no "if you felt," no explanation of your good intentions. Just "I did this. I was wrong. Will you forgive me?" Notice how hard it is, and how clean the air feels afterward. That is the muscle the church needs for its bigger reckonings — and it is built one honest sentence at a time.