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Missionaries

What is the role of missionary work? Much to be written; page just started with one thing, and before it there should be much else.

Daniel Everitt's Experience

Daniel Everitt was a missionary from USA to the P. people in Amazon, trying to understand their language and produce the New Testament in it for them. His book Don't sleep, there are snakes, records how his experience with them destroyed his faith. I comment on this. But this is an interim comment, because I have a number of things to check out.

Here are some of the things that made him abandon Jesus Christ:

The purpose of being a missionary. He went to bring Christ to them, on the grounds that the P. people were lost and needed saving. But he found them (to his thinking) happy and content, well integrated with the land. He could not convince them they were 'lost'.
Their moral status. Their way of life seemed (to him) much better than American way of life.
Their beliefs. The P. had no creation story, and no concept of the distant past or future. So DE found it difficult to explain Christian doctrines to them.
Their attitude to life. The P. lived only for today, and were very matter-of-fact. For example, if someone is mortally ill, they just get on with their daily lives, and show little special care for that person; death seems just a part of life. They killed a baby whose mother had died (and who was being looked after by Dan's wife) because they believed from its face that it was suffering. One of his friends said "We like you and want you to stay. But I want to be able to drink [alcohol] and I want to take more than one woman, so don't tell us any more about Jesus."

The first seems to have been the main point. He became a closet atheist and eventually openly so. His book, written from his new atheist point of view seems rather unsympathetic to his previous faith, so we might question whether what comes through is tinted with his new lenses. Also, he was from USA, with a narrowed-down unbiblical set of beliefs. Some of these may be seen differently from our 'New View' point of view.

He thought the purpose of being a missionary was only to tell lost people how to get saved. It is much more than that. It is to be bring help to people to be better shepherds of Creation as God's representatives. Christ's message cast in these terms, perhaps especially Reality Rejoicing and Romand 8 Revisited, would more likely resonate with them. Wiser missionaries have recognised some of this, and accepted the creational angle.

He thought that only Christians could be moral, and was disturbed to find it not so. But New View accepts that any can be moral.

He found no beliefs to latch on to. But New View would accept whatever beliefs they had, and wait for the other to recognise slowly that there might be more, and at their own pace. Unlike Everitt's earlier limited beliefs, New View provides the basis to engage with the other's beliefs whatever they are, rather than trying to force on them some theory of what they ought to believe.

He was initially disturbed, then attracted, by the P's attitude to life. But I would ask: it's maybe OK for the men in charge, but what about the others? What about the baby? What about women? When the system is that a man can take several women, then usually men are held superior to women, who are merely there to be 'taken'. New View takes a broader view, and does not take the USA presupposition that the individual is sovereign.

These pages present 'New View' theology. Comments, queries welcome.

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Created: 23 November 2008. Last updated: