What do missionaries do for these people?
Missionaries are helping. Missionaries are achieving their goal, to spread God’s Word. Missionaries are doing what they believe is right. Missionaries are choosing to risk everything to relay the message of Jesus Christ to others around the world. To me, missionaries are brave, strong, and determined. They risk their lives, their jobs, their homes, their family member’s lives, they risk a lot. As Christians, we are able to recognize that missionaries are good and doing right, but non-Christians, may view missionaries as “destroyers of culture”. A missionary’s goal is to spread the good news and express, to the greatest amount possible, that there is a God who loves. I don’t believe that missionaries go to a third world country, or anywhere else for that matter, to destroy the culture that is currently there. I believe that they are trying to get through to largest number of people. If a culture, the Sawi for instance, voluntarily is able to understand and experience having a relationship with Jesus, then they will begin to 1) grow in that relationship and spread what they know to others, and 2) begin to change and live their life for God. Once they have started to live for God, they won’t have the desires of their previous culture, like cannibalism or head hunting… they will want to honor God with their lives…they will more voluntarily stop their ways this way than if government police came is with brute force and commanded them to stop. I absolutely agree when Don Richardson says that someone will eventually come…no matter what, and now it is just, who do we want to get there first. This is why Christian missionaries risk their lives to get to those hurting first, because they believe they are more sympathetic agents of change than profit-hungry commercialists (Don Richardson). Commercialists like farmers, lumbermen, miners, hunters, military leaders, and drug peddlers...who would come and probably arrive with unexpected force, and harshness. Missionaries are trying to radically transform the hearts of the people, not the culture.
1 comment:
Good post. I think that the issue many non-Christians are having with this book is that if you do not believe in eternity, then you have to believe that the world is all there is, therefore making culture a very highly esteemed part of life and something that must be preserved at all costs. If you do believe in eternity, then you think that although some culture will be lost, it does not matter because ultimately the converts will have life for eternity.
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