Meeting the modern-day missionaries

One of my earliest memories consists of my brother and my parents and me lying on the floor of our home one day, as gunfire rumbles nearby. We’re lying in an internal corridor just in case an explosive hits the outside of the house. I’m dressed in a homemade Superman outfit, red pants over blue trousers and T-shirt.

It was 1990 and I would have been about two-and-a-half. Our home was in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and the gunbattle raging somewhere near the house was a precursor to the country’s horrific genocide which broke out in April 1994. That was when we left.

The reason I have this specific early memory is due to my father being a missionary with the UK’s Church Mission Society (CMS) between 1986 and 1994. My dad, a great linguist, was leading a local team to translate the Bible from its source material (ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) into Kinyarwanda, the language spoken in Rwanda.

By the beginning of 1994, the translation team had nearly finished translating the Old Testament (the New Testament had been completed earlier). But once the fighting broke out, the project stopped. Even when peace returned, the entire project was left in limbo – several of the translators were from the Tutsi ethnic minority and had been murdered.

As a child, I, naturally enough, didn’t think there was anything particularly unusual about the fact my parents had been missionaries. But, as I got older, I came to realise it was in fact quite a unique path to take in life. To leave a safe, familiar home to move halfway around the world for a religious calling is rather uncommon.

We occasionally hear about missionaries in the media – most recently, the ill-advised adventures of John Allen Chau, an American who was killed by the arrows of hostile Andaman islanders in 2018. But I wanted to dig a little deeper, to find out who becomes a missionary today and why. And, given contemporary debates around the legacy of European empires, I also wanted to learn what effects missionaries have had over the centuries they’ve been spreading their religion.

The basic reason Christians do missionary work is to respond to the “great commission”. In the Bible, a resurrected Jesus tells his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”. Early Christians clearly took the command seriously and spread the faith through Europe and the Middle East, until the age of exploration in the 1500s, when Europeans began spreading the religion to the rest of the world.

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Missionary work didn’t end once Europe’s empires went into decline. In fact, according to Professor Brian Stanley at the University of Edinburgh, there are more of them today than ever before. He says there were around 62,000 missionaries in the world in 1900, but there are 435,000 today. What’s more, almost half (47 per cent) come from the “Global South”. While Europeans and North Americans still send most missionaries, Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines and China are also major emissaries, according to the Overseas Ministries Studies Centre in Princeton. A not insignificant portion of this total are Mormons. The Church of Latter-Day Saints say they support some 53,000 missionaries today.

So, who are the people heeding “the great commission” today? I contacted some contemporary missionaries to find out.

“In the early years, I totally thought I was going to die. One time I was driving along a road where 40 people were killed. I had death threats. I had a guy come to my house with grenade to blow me up.” says Simon Guillebaud, an Englishman who has been running a mission in Burundi since the late 1990s. The central African country was “the most dangerous place in the world” when he first arrived, Guillebaud says, but he stuck it out through a civil war and unrest, living by his faith.

In his time in the country, Guillebaud has set up a charity called Great Lakes Outreach, which performs various good works, such as running clinics, schools and orphanages. For Guillebaud, being a missionary “is a long-term commitment, in the context of journeying alongside, in humility, a bunch of people to seek to empower them... And that can involve to a greater or lesser extent, gospel proclamation”.

Being a missionary runs in Guillebaud’s blood; his grandfather was also a missionary in central Africa. But he says his decision to take this path was influenced by a series of spooky events that happened while he was working in a marketing job in London in his 20s. He says a man who he’d never met before tracked him down to tell him God wanted him to go to Burundi. That same day, Guillebaud prayed for a sign, and moments later a friend called him up about a job in the country. “Either I’m lying to you, or it was a coincidence, or it was God”.

There are many different flavours of missionary. Take Andrew Peart, another English missionary who works in Bolivia. After a career in the hospitality industry, he and his wife felt “called” to mission work and in 2016 moved to South America through CMS, the Church Mission Society. There they have used their knowledge of enterprise to run a microfinance scheme.

Banks in Bolivia rarely lend to poorer citizens Peart explains so many are forced to turn to loan sharks if they ever want to borrow money. But, through Peart’s scheme, the businesses get a three-year loan at 0 per cent interest, as well as coaching on how to run a company.

Peart explains how important it is for missionaries to understand the culture. Latin America has a long history of outsiders exploiting its resources, so building trust with local communities takes time. This is why he and his wife are focused on making the businesses they support self-sustaining and are hiring Bolivians to oversee the lending programme. “It’s definitely not about us, it’s about what God is doing in the community,” he says.

To qualify for the loan, the entrepreneurs need to be a member of a church and be recommended by a pastor, which seems a little exclusionary. But Peart argues this “takes away some of the risk [of money lending] because we know the people. If you just came in off the street and wanted to borrow money, I wouldn’t know who you were and would have no idea of your background”.

Dr Nimi Wariboko, a scholar at the University of Baltimore in the US, has researched the activities of missionaries in Africa, especially during the colonial period.

There are some general criticisms people make of missionaries, Wariboko tells me. First is the notion that spreading Christianity was a means to “soften the natives up for colonial rule”; the idea of religion as an opium of the people, allowing colonists to plunder resources from compliant locals. Missionaries also undermined notions of personhood in many parts of Africa, Wariboko believes. Mission schools, for better or worse, train pupils up to engage in the capitalist world economy, making them think and behave in an individualistic manner. This, Wariboko reckons, has had long-lasting repercussions on people’s sense of self in many parts of Africa – torn between traditional, communal ways of living, and the global capitalist economy.

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Wariboko also notes that missionary work inculcated a sense of shame about traditional African religion and culture among many. Even today “there is a good number of Nigerians who see anything African as devilish or evil,” he tells me.

The missionaries I spoke to are clearly involved in economic development work. Jonathan D Smith, a researcher at the University of Leeds’s Centre for Religion and Public Life, tells me that secular development professionals tend to view missionaries negatively due to their association with colonialism. “There also tends to be a bias in development circles about religious groups doing development work. They often assume that religious groups will promote their own faith or discriminate against people of other faiths or beliefs.”

I put to Guillebaud the argument that missionary work is seen in some quarters as a form of neo-colonialism. “I think you have to put your hands up and say that there’s always going to be some people that will misrepresent what you would want to align yourself with,” he says, and acknowledges that some missionaries during the colonial era were far from perfect. He adds that even today, some missionaries can be rather “paternalistic”.

To be fair, Smith’s research into missionaries and development does also show that “missionaries wrestled with the same issues as development workers about imposing their beliefs and values. They expressed concerns about taking advantage of vulnerable people, and they worried that people might change their religion only to receive aid.” He also points out that some people in the global South characterise secular development agencies as the “new missionaries” since they, too, impose Western values and ideologies.

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Whatever you think of missionary work, there’s no denying they’ve been successful in their aims; almost a third of the world’s population currently professes some form of Christianity. According to Prof Stanley, some of the first missionaries during Europe’s early expansion would learn a smattering of the local language and preach in local marketplaces. “Generally, this was pretty ineffective,” he says. However, “I think the change came once missionaries began to devote themselves to translating parts of the Bible into vernacular language and then started investing in programmes of literacy for indigenous people”. In many places, the language was purely oral, and so inventing a script and creating a written language was immensely powerful.

Missionaries went out from various European countries, professing variants of Christianity over the course of several hundred years, so the full picture of how they worked is very complex. In the Catholic case, missionaries tended to be sent by the “great religious orders, particularly the Jesuits”. While they often had a “very difficult relationship with the papacy”, they also tended to work fairly closely with the Spanish or Portuguese crowns.

Missionaries from Protestant countries also collaborated quite closely with colonial authorities. However, from the end of the 18th century, Stanley says there was a “real explosion of Protestant, independent voluntary missionary societies”. While almost all of these missionaries basically thought the empires were a good thing, they were much more independent of the authorities, and often came into conflict with them. It was missionaries in the Belgian Congo, for instance, who revealed to their compatriots back home just how brutal their empire was.

“Imperial administrators generally wanted to keep missions under very tight control, and sometimes didn’t want them there at all” Stanley explains, “because ultimately, missions were about conversion, about dramatic religious change. And if you’re trying to run an empire on a shoestring budget, the last thing you want is religious and social revolution”.

Prof Robert Woodberry is a sociologist at Baylor University in the US (which is an explicitly Christian institution). He has conducted statistical analysis to compare long-term outcomes of colonial-era missionary work. Globally speaking, his data suggests that “where you had more Protestant missionaries per capita … [you today] have more educational enrolment, greater literacy, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, more hospital beds per capita,” among other outcomes. By comparison, where colonial authorities or local leaders barred mission work, those regions appear to do less well today by the same measures.

This is all very well, but doesn’t missionary work undermine traditional cultures, imposing a specific way of doing things on the world? For example, as The Independent has previously reported, missionaries trying to reach “uncontacted” people in the Brazilian Amazon have had calamitous effects on local culture, religion and society, even spreading disease.

Ola Gunhildrud Berta is a Norwegian anthropologist who has studied the effects of missionaries on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. I asked him what he thought of the issue.

Berta’s research shows that Marshall Islanders were far from passive recipients of the new faith. He finds that “lower caste people, or people without a hereditary claim to status, were among the first to convert. And that was part of an internal power play, because [Christianity] gave them access to the kind of secret knowledge that the chiefs did not have access to. And knowledge is very much power”.

This example shows they were active agents in deciding to accept the new religion. Besides the promise of eternal life, many embraced Christianity for the opportunities it provided in the here and now – and perhaps as a means to gain more power and opportunities in their society.

Nimi Wariboko adds that not enough credit is given to African missionaries who helped the Europeans communicate in indigenous languages, or find ways to explain the tenets of the faith in a way that made sense to local people. The same point stands for missionaries elsewhere.

After our family left Rwanda for good, my father returned for a couple more visits in the late 1990s, coordinating with what remained of the translation team to finish the work. By 2005, the project was finally complete, and the full Bible was printed in Kinyarwanda. It was another chapter closed on a centuries-old tradition.