by Amy Peterson
But what if the first missionaries hadn’t been sent by an organization which patterned itself after the major commercial enterprises of the day? A less-corporatized alternative might have found more imaginative ways of getting overseas. Maybe Judson and the others could have worked their way overseas, finding “tentmaking” jobs like the apostle Paul, combining financial gifts with some paid employment. Perhaps they could have retained some freedom to determine policy, and been able to remain together even after shifting on a theological point such as method of baptism.
The truth is, the first missionary sent from America was not sent by an organization. The first missionary who went out from America to preach the gospel in a foreign land was not Adoniram Judson. He is remembered that way because he knew the right people—his white, wealthy, well-educated colleagues—the people who had the power to tell the stories, to write the history. But he wasn’t actually the first.
George Leile was born a slave in Virginia in 1750. His master freed him at the start of the Revolutionary War, and he became ordained, preaching all around South Carolina and Georgia. He won to faith some of the early patriarchs of black American Christianity, including Andrew Bryan, who led the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, and David George, who went on to found Baptist churches in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
Leile and his wife, Hannah, set their sights on Jamaica. Lacking networks of wealthy friends to fund their missionary endeavor, they indentured themselves to obtain passage on a ship to Kingston in 1782. There George worked for two years to pay off his debt, and then started a church. The Leiles had tasted oppression, and they were eager for slaves in Jamaica to experience the same liberation, both spiritual and physical, that they had known.
The Leiles labored in Jamaica for over twenty years. With few outside donors, George remained bi-vocational. Without any formal education, he taught himself to read and to preach, and became such an effective evangelist that after seven years, he had converted more than five hundred slaves to Christianity. Over the next five decades, that number grew to twenty thousand, and in 1838, when slavery was abolished in Jamaica, the change was due in large part to Leile’s influence in the country.
What if, all this time, American missions had been patterned after the Leiles’ example rather than after Judson’s?
Highly structured mission organizations have flourished at some points in our nation’s history, and they certainly have advantages. But the disadvantages are clear. The organizational overhead costs (for administrative support, communication with supporters, tech support, and member care, for example) can run as high as 14 percent of money raised for missions. And organizations that require missionaries to do their own fundraising end up sending mainly people who come out of wealthy communities, leaving less-affluent Christians (or those without generous and wealthy friends) unable to participate in the work of international missions. The missionary vocation becomes one available only to the privileged in society.
The way we evaluate our “success” as missionaries in the corporation model can be highly consumeristic. The gospel is a product we sell, and we chart our sales effectiveness and use it to ask donors for more support. But if we believe growth in numbers is the sole measure of our health, we have lost our way: humans were not created to be efficient organisms, and God has always been more interested in our proximity than in our production.
As the aftershocks of economic depression have rumbled through the American church in recent years, leaders have begun to realize that even for the middle class, our bulky, expensive models for mission are failing. In 2015, the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (founded in 1845) announced a deficit of $21 million. They had overspent by $210 million since 2009, draining their reserves, and would have to cut between 600 and 800 staff members.
The IMB is not alone. As many mission boards face these kinds of financial setbacks, they have a chance to embrace the example of George Leile, exercising a prophetic, missionary-minded imagination. What if we had more bi-vocational missionaries? What if our boards were more diverse, staffed by people who understood the local situation on the ground rather than by church leaders thousands of miles away? What if peripheral theological debates didn’t have to divide us? What if we functioned as a spiritual body rather than as a financial corporation? What if we could cut costs by creating more local partnerships? What if we could empower those on the margins to be missionaries by creating lighter, more flexible structures?
What if now is the time to lose the clunky armor and instead pick up five small, smooth stones, recognizing that God’s way has never been the way of the empire or the corporation, recognizing that God’s way has always been different from the ways the world says are best?
23
The Spirit of Christmas Past, and Other Ghosts
I asked him what all this fear meant. He said the Ainos’ ancestors’ spirits frequently go into a snake and the sight of a snake is like the sight of a ghost. This reminds me that one of the questions last Sunday evening was, did I believe in ghosts? Would I visit a ghost-stricken place? “Most gladly,” I replied, “at any time of day or night.”
W. Dening, “A Visit to the Ainos,” in The Church Missionary Intelligencer
One morning in class, my students were abuzz with news that one of their friends had been in a motorbike accident the night before. She’d crashed because she hadn’t had her motorbike headlights on. “Why not?” I asked.
“Spirits are drawn to light,” one girl explained. “At night, if you drive with your headlights on, you’ll attract the attention of evil spirits.”
Every part of the Khmer life was spiritual. I’d read that Cambodia was a Buddhist country, but it wasn’t Buddhist in the way that Americans who do yoga and eat vegan are Buddhist. It wasn’t about Enlightenment and Nirvana, and it wasn’t atheistic. This Buddhism was ancient folk religion, belief in local spirits who must be appeased, with even a little Hinduism thrown in for good measure.
In October, we celebrated Pchum Ben, an annual festival of remembrance. School was canceled, and students traveled to their hometowns to pay respect to their ancestors. In some places, students took gifts of food to the local wats, and the monks accepted the gifts on behalf of those ancestors. In other places, families threw balls of rice into the fields for their ancestors’ spirits to find.
In Cambodia, the past was never really past: whether you believed your ancestors had been reincarnated or were in hell, purgatory, or heaven (and people believed all of those things), at Pchum Ben they were present again, and able to torment or to bless.
Kelly, Patrick, Davuth and I visited a wat on Pchum Ben to observe the traditions that our students practiced. We saw families arriving by bus or car, crammed into the open back of a truck or seated four people to a motorbike, carrying elaborate baskets of food. As I watched them light incense, kneeling in long rows on woven mats on the temple floor and praying that their ancestors would be appeased, I didn’t feel the darkness that many Christians have said they felt in such places. The holiday didn’t feel spiritual to me. It seemed cultural, the way it feels to go to a church on Easter Sunday and see people who haven’t been there all year, dressed in their finest, sitting awkwardly in the pews. It felt like a tradition, a ritual, a fun family outing, a holiday.
I didn’t sense an oppressive darkness there, but I’d just had a student who wrecked her motorbike because she feared the spirits. I’d watched farmers who struggled to feed their families make food offerings to spirits. I wanted to learn more, and I started reading.
As I read up on the spiritual beliefs of the Khmer people, it occurred to me that Cambodians would love Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with the way that its spirits appeared to Ebenezer Scrooge. I decided to rewrite it for a Cambodian context, and stage a production at the university.
We had forty days from auditions to performance. I was director, wearing l
ong, swishy skirts and carrying stacks of books around campus like Anne of Avonlea. In truth, I felt more like an actor than a director: I loved playing the role of “Director,” pretending I had some clue what I was doing. I had no clue—I was bluffing. I just assumed we could make it up as we went along and everything would work out.
I enlisted help from my teammates. Davuth evaluated auditions with me. Patrick helped with rehearsals, and started training a small choir to sing Christmas carols during the play’s intermission. Amanda took over the set design and makeup.
After auditions, the cast came over to watch the old, black-and-white version of the movie. We borrowed a projector from the school and watched the film on the wall of the guys’ house.
Students came in shyly at first, then started joking.
“Hello, Mr. Cratchit!” I said to the dark-skinned, skinny one with glasses.
“Hello, Director!” he answered. “Where are my wife and children?”
I loved watching them watch the movie. When one of their characters entered for the first time, everyone giggled and the actor would blush with pleasure. When young Scrooge kissed Belle on screen, our Belle, Vansok, a sophomore with crimped hair and a shy, sweet smile, closed her eyes and shook her head.
One freshman who had auditioned couldn’t speak or read more than two words of English. Tall and gangly, with pimply skin and a mouth too big for his face, he was smiley and nervous during auditions, but he let the teasing from older students roll right off his back. He was perfect for a role of great mystery and doom—as the Ghost of Christmas Future, he had no lines and a black hood. And it worked! He was great in the part, and the rest of the cast accepted him. He joked along with them, finally gaining confidence.
Two weeks before opening night, I began to get nervous. I started waking myself up in the middle of the night, grinding my teeth. The students didn’t have their lines as well-memorized as I would have liked; even when they did, their pronunciation often made the words difficult to understand. Then I realized that our audience—if people even came—might be composed mainly of people who didn’t speak English at all!
Davuth and the key actors suggested we make some changes. Most dramas and television shows produced in Southeast Asia were highly interactive. Shows had announcers, hosts who would come on between scenes to recap or explain what had happened.
We chose two of our most popular and beautiful students to host the production. They’d explain the play in Khmer between acts, tell jokes, and award prizes to audience members. We also had them introduce each actor and explain their roles before the play began, so the audience could follow along even if they didn’t know English.
I wondered if they would juggle balls, too.
In the week before the performance, tickets sold out. We printed another hundred, and sold them, too. Four hundred people were coming to our show. There were rumors of TV cameras. The students still didn’t really know their lines. I grew lightheaded.
But what could I do, five days before the show? I did what I could, and then surrendered control.
* * *
For grad school, I was reading a book about the Holy Spirit. Churches I’d grown up in taught that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit—healing, prophecy, tongues—were poured out only for a time, but had ceased. This book, though, told story after story of miracles on the mission front. Now that I’d met believers from places where the gospel was new, I too believed that miracles still happened—that people had been healed and had spoken in languages not their own, by the power of the Spirit.
But I worried what would happen if I believed it enough to ask for it. What if I asked for the Spirit to fill me? What if I surrendered control? What if I was willing to be used in ways I used to believe weren’t possible?
* * *
That week, I posted a picture online, with a caption that referenced one of my favorite Billy Collins poems. An “anonymous” user left a comment quoting a different Billy Collins poem in response. I knew exactly who he was.
Angrily, I e-mailed Charley one line: I know you commented on my fotolog; please leave me alone.
It was amazing how his one comment had thrown me into doubt, bringing emotions to the surface that I hadn’t even known existed. With a line, he’d made me feel seen and known like no one else could. He understood my references; he understood me. His comment made me realize how much I missed that intimacy. It made me wonder if I’d thrown away my only chance for it.
I thought about something Jesus said:
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation” (Matthew 12:43–45).
Charley wasn’t an evil spirit, but he was someone I had tried to clean out of my heart. The problem was, no one had taken his place. There were empty rooms in my heart that no one knew like he did; when he tried to come back, there was always space for him. Without knocking, he could walk in uninvited, sit down in my wicker chair, take off his shoes, and drink my coffee.
I tried to reach out to other people, those who knew me best, like he did—but they were all in faraway America, living their own lives and not quite able to connect with my experiences.
I needed to fill the empty spaces of my heart by deepening the friendships I had around me, and I tried. I watched romantic comedies with Amanda, started speed-walking around the National Monument for exercise with the ladies on the team. I went out for coffee with Patrick and planned a boat trip with my students.
I wondered if the Holy Spirit could fill emotional spaces left empty by a broken love. I wondered if the Holy Spirit could heal the parts damaged when I’d been ripped away from Veronica, Sarah, and Cecilia, so that I wouldn’t be afraid to talk to students about Jesus again. I wondered if I was brave enough to ask for it.
And I wondered about my students, about all the people I’d seen making offerings to their ancestors on Pchum Ben, and the way it had seemed more like empty ritual than bondage to evil spirits.
Could it be their hearts were cleaned out, too, and ready for a different Spirit to take up residence?
* * *
The play was a chaotic, beautiful mess. Some microphones stopped working. Some cues were missed. Some scenes had long moments of silence that weren’t supposed to be there.
But the students looked amazing—Amanda’s costume and makeup work were great—and some of them gave truly astounding performances. I ran around backstage for two hours trying to keep the actors and singers and crew members and live chickens and chains and ghosts in the right places at the right times.
The audience hooted and hollered, the hosts entertained with charisma, and everybody felt proud.
Their English had improved, relationships had been strengthened, and we’d had good conversations about the cultural meaning of Christmas and the real meaning of Christmas. And at some point in the midst of it, I started to feel like Cambodia could be home.
24
The Killing Fields
Now let me burn out for God.
Henry Martyn, missionary to India 1806–12
Here’s the thing about grief: you think you get past it, like you’ve turned a corner and reached a plateau, and then out of nowhere it blindsides you again.
This is not a new observation, I know. But I’ve learned there are things that can make grief even more difficult. Like when you feel guilty for grieving, because it seems like it’s been long enough that you shouldn’t still be “hung up” on that thing that happened. Or when the loss seems like something too small to warrant such grief. Or when you’re a missionary and peo
ple think you should be spiritual enough to overcome it. Or when you’re a missionary and the other missionaries around you have experienced the same kind of thing, but they speak of it with smiles and unshakable faith, using confident terms like “God’s will” and “his sovereignty,” affirming “all things working together for good.”
Some mornings when I woke up, grief pinned me to the bed, sadness pressing my chest to the mattress, dread for the day weighing me down. What had God done to Veronica, and why?
I woke up sad, I went to bed sad. I cried nearly every day, without understanding why. I waited for the day to end so that I could go to bed. I tried to read my Bible and pray, but couldn’t focus and heard little from God. My happiest moments came in the classroom, but even there I felt haunted. I hadn’t learned all the students’ names yet, and when I saw them I saw the faces I’d left behind: Sopheavy had the eyes of Darcy, Chenda’s round face reminded me of my colleague Mrs. Chin, Vola’s expressions were just like Minnie’s.
We went to the Killing Fields one Saturday. Here, Pol Pot and his soldiers had murdered those they feared—ethnic minorities, Vietnamese and Thai, educated Cambodians, Christians, Buddhist monks, intellectuals, politicians—throwing their bodies into mass graves. Their skulls were piled up behind glass for us to see. Their photographs hung on the walls of the memorial, each person with dark eyes and identical black clothes, identical haircuts. The excavated graves, empty holes cut into the ground, were marked off by ropes.
I compared my grief to the grief of the Cambodian people, like Savun, our colleague who’d lost all his family at once during the genocide. How did these people even manage to go on living after loss like that? Did I have any right to grieve when my experience was so much less traumatic than theirs had been?
