When Missions Went Wrong

Today's Reading

The history of missions cannot be told honestly without acknowledging that it went badly wrong — not occasionally, but systematically. In too many places, the missionary enterprise was entangled with colonial conquest, cultural destruction, and racist assumptions about the superiority of Western civilization.

In Australia, missionary-run institutions separated Aboriginal children from their families — the "Stolen Generations." In North America, residential schools forcibly assimilated Indigenous children, stripped them of their languages and cultures, and subjected many to abuse. In parts of Africa and Asia, missionaries collaborated with colonial administrators, providing spiritual legitimacy for economic exploitation.

Desmond Tutu captured the bitter irony: "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" (attributed, widely cited).

This is not the whole story — but it is an essential part of it. A church that cannot acknowledge its own failures is a church that cannot repent, and a church that cannot repent cannot be reformed.

Biblical Connection

The book of Jonah is the Bible's most penetrating critique of a missionary who went wrong. Jonah was sent to Nineveh — the capital of Israel's most brutal enemy — to preach repentance. He obeyed (eventually), and Nineveh repented. And Jonah was furious.

"But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry... 'O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster'" (Jonah 4:1–2). Jonah's problem was not that he failed to preach. His problem was that he did not love the people he preached to. He wanted their destruction, not their salvation.

Paul modeled a radically different approach: "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews... I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:20, 22). The gospel does not require the destruction of culture. It requires entering it.

Going Deeper

Lesslie Newbigin, a missionary to India who returned to a secularized Britain, saw the danger clearly: "The greatest danger of missions is not that we will fail to spread the gospel but that we will spread a distorted version of it, wrapped in our own culture and served as God's" (The Open Secret, Chapter 10).

The missionary movement's failures were not primarily failures of courage. They were failures of humility — the inability to distinguish between the gospel of Christ and the culture of Christendom. When missionaries demanded that converts adopt Western dress, Western names, Western worship styles, and Western social structures, they confused the container with the contents.

The good news is that the gospel is more resilient than its messengers. In many of the places where missions was most deeply entangled with colonialism, the church not only survived but thrived — precisely because the translated Bible gave local communities the tools to critique the missionaries' own failures. The same book that was brought in the colonizer's hand became, in the hands of the colonized, a weapon of liberation and renewal.