Arguing In Missionary Quotes

She threw the stupid missionary book across the room. It was the first time they’d ever really disagreed, and since he wouldn’t stay and let her convince him she was right, she didn’t know what to do with herself except pace and argue with him in her head instead of in person.

They argue that the modern world was created by private capital. The subcontinent of India, for instance, was owned by the British East India Company, Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company, our neighbors by the British East Africa Company, and the Congo Free State by a one man corporation. Corporate capital was aided by missionary societies. What private capital did then it can do again; own and reshape the Third World in the image of the West without the slightest blot, blemish, or blotch. NGOs will do what the missionary charities did in the past. The world will no longer be composed of the outmoded twentieth-century divisions of East, West, and a directionless Third. The world will become one corporate globe divided into the incorporating and incorporated...to become the first voluntary corporate colony, the first in a new global order..with NGOs relieving us of social services, the country becomes your real estate.

It is hard to argue that the Ottomans or Chinese were too far away, or that they lacked the technological, economic or military wherewithal. The resources that sent Zheng He from China to East Africa in the 1420s should have been enough to reach America. The Chinese just weren’t interested. The first Chinese world map to show America was not issued until 1602 – and then by a European missionary!

Early on I realized the people I most mirrored in the Bible were those blasted Pharisees, the ones who tried so hard their entire lives to be good, to work hard, to correct the thinking of others. They too were probably grimly proud of the way they memorized passages of scripture, how they could out-argue anyone, how they kept their society neat and clean of any moral gray. And so when I was in Bible college, when I read and read and read the words of Jesus, when I saw how his life was a continuous announcement of some mysterious amorphous thing called the kingdom of God, I became very scared indeed— because I didn’t understand what the good news of the kingdom was, or how to bring it to earth, or how to be a Christian in a world that doesn’t value taking care of others.

55 The expansion of cultures can also be tracked by following the waft of alcohol. Commenting on the settling of the American frontier, Mark Twain famously characterized whiskey as the “earliest pioneer of civilization,” ahead of the railway, newspaper, and missionary.56 By far the most technologically advanced and valuable artifacts found in early European settlements in the New World were copper stills, imported at great cost and worth more than their weight in gold.57 As the writer Michael Pollan has argued, Johnny Appleseed, whom American mythology now portrays as intent on spreading the gift of wholesome, vitamin-filled apples to hungry settlers, was in fact “the American Dionysus,” bringing badly needed alcohol to the frontier. Johnny’s apples, so desperately sought out by American homesteaders, were not meant to be eaten at the table, but rather used to make cider and “applejack” liquor.58

Far distances and language barriers never stopped traders, he argued. Who could deny that? So the missionary must not be stopped either. Hunger would rarely be an obstacle, insisted William. The missionary could farm, fish and hunt. But nevertheless the missionary must be resolved to face poverty, poor housing and unrelenting hard work. And yes, he may also face hatred, intimidation, imprisonment, torture and even death. His

The night drags on and so do your struggles. You guard your faith, but so many want to argue it out of you. You want to live by the Truth, but laziness and fear fester within. You desire to be that missionary that speaks out about the importance of God’s Word to your neighbors, but then you keep silent so that you can keep the peace.

Imperialism and not patriarchy is the core foundation of modern militarism (even though it serves the interest of imperialism to link notions of masculinity with the struggle to conquer nations and peoples). Many societies in the world that are ruled by males are not imperialistic; many women in the United States have made political decisions to support imperialism and militarism. Historically, white women in the United States, working for women's rights, have felt no contradiction between this effort and their support of the Western imperialist attempt to conquer the planet. Often they argued that equal rights would better enable white women to help in the building of this "great nation," i.e. in the cause of imperialism. Many white women in the early part of the twentieth century, who were strong advocates of women's liberation, were pro-imperialist. Books like Helen Montgomery's Western Women in Eastern Lands, published in 1910, outlining fifty years of white women's work in foreign missions, document the link between the struggle for the emancipation of white women in the United States and the imperialist, hegemonic spread of Western values and Western domination of the globe. As missionaries, white women traveled to Eastern lands armed with psychological weapons that undermined the belief systems of Eastern women and replaced them with Western values. In the closing statement of her work, Helen Montgomery writes: "So many voices are calling us, so many goods demand our allegiance, that we are in danger of forgetting the best. To seek first to bring Christ's kingdom on the earth, to respond to the need that is sorest, to go out into the desert for that loved and bewildered sheep that the shepherd has missed from the fold, to share all of the privilege with the unprivileged and happiness with the unhappy, to see the possibility of one redeemed earth, undivided, unvexed, unperplexed resting in the light of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, this is the mission of the women's missionary movement.

This is not what the missionaries taught us. They told us just to do evangelism to save people’s souls. But you are saying that Jesus cares about all of creation and that He wants us to minister to people’s bodies and souls. I can’t argue with the Bible passages you cited. But now how am I supposed to feel about the missionaries?

During the reign of Domitian (81-96 A.D.), Christians in Asia Minor were severely oppressed. The book of Revelation was likely written at this time to encourage them not to apostatize and not even to compromise their faith. No doubt some believers felt that they could meet the demands of the state without denying their master. They could argue that calling Christ 'Lord' and calling Caesar 'Lord' were not in conflict, since the term Lord could mean Sir as well as God. And as far as the Roman government was concerned, what people believed in secret made no difference so long as they observed the outward ceremonies required by law.

He summarizes these two impulses as "missions as translation" and "missions as cultural diffusion." The former is the missionary impulse that learns the local languages and seeks the successful indigenization of the gospel. The latter is the impulse that imposes a foreign language and merely replicates Western cultural religious forms. Sanneh argues that while both have been present, missions as translation has been the "dominant mode of operation."13

God is blessing the church in China with extraordinary growth. However, when Chinese churches and ministers who had experienced God’s blessing in their rural ministries entered the mushrooming cities of China and tried to minister and communicate the gospel in the same ways that had been blessed in the countryside, they saw less fruitfulness. Over a decade ago, several Dutch denominations approached us. While they were thriving outside of urban areas, they had not been able to start new, vital churches in Amsterdam in years — and most of the existing ones had died out. These leaders knew the gospel; they had financial resources; they had the desire for Christian mission. But they couldn’t get anything off the ground in the biggest city of their country.2 In both cases, ministry that was thriving in the heartland of the country was unable to make much of a dent in the city. It would have been easy to say, “The people of the city are too spiritually proud and hardened.” But the church leaders we met chose to respond humbly and took responsibility for the problem. They concluded that the gospel ministry that had fit nonurban areas well would need to be adapted to the culture of urban life. And they were right. This necessary adaptation to the culture is an example of what we call “contextualization.”3 SOUND CONTEXTUALIZATION Contextualization is not — as is often argued — “giving people what they want to hear.”4 Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them. Sound contextualization means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture without compromising the essence and particulars of the gospel itself. The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth. A contextualized gospel is marked by clarity and attractiveness, and yet it still challenges sinners’ self-sufficiency and calls them to repentance. It adapts and connects to the culture, yet at the same time challenges and confronts it. If we fail to adapt to the culture or if we fail to challenge the culture — if we under- or overcontextualize — our ministry will be unfruitful because we have failed to contextualize well.

What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed “from the root up.” Thousands of acres of orchards were “all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them.” The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spaniards saw was S. geminata—“an infinite number of ants,” Las

For some researchers and animal protection organisations, the connection between animal cruelty and human violence has become a moral crusade pursued with missionary zeal. Some researchers, however, have come to question simplistic Link thinking. They worry that Link advocates and the media are perpetuating an irrational moral panic among the public. Link skeptics don't argue that we should ignore animal abuse. Rather, they believe that we should treat animal abuse as a serious problem in its own right, not because it turns children into adult psychopaths.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw Protestant evangelicalism enter India. And while Christian missions did much good – in education, uplifting the marginalized and exposing failures even of the Company – as far as Indian elites were concerned, they were a thorn in the side. In Travancore, for example, converts from low castes, empowered by their new identity, now aspired to equality with their ex-superiors. As a Dewan argued, by ‘violating the existing social distinctions’, the new Christians were bound to ‘annoy the high castes’, who demanded retribution. For generations, battles would be fought on dress, access to roads, temples, and even government buildings, and much of the reform Travancore grew famous for owed to this tension with missionaries, and the confidence they gave disempowered segments. Missionaries, however, also tended to magnify the evils they saw, to gain financial sympathy at home, for example. In 1848, thus, it was alleged that Travancore had a ‘professed torturer’, an expert in ‘twenty-three modes’ of abuse, on its payroll. In 1855 the state was described as ‘a perfect pandemonium of torture and misgovernment’. But the core problem was a clash of moralities, causing even the maharajah ‘great uneasiness’.77 As a Hindu king his duty lay in preserving the way things were; or as he said: ‘As my kingdom was in my predecessors’ time, so let it remain, and so let it descend to my heir.’78 His critics, however, wished to smash that caste-based order with a new conception of justice. Which side prevailed at any given moment depended also on higher-ups – Resident Cullen was sympathetic to the maharajah, while the infamous governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, showed personally an evangelical bent.

It’s too bad,” said Thomas. “An examination of those bones could document precisely what the Indians have argued, that they were badly mistreated by the missionaries during that period.

loudly they—particularly priests of certain gods—might argue otherwise. In the end, to a preacher’s ultimate sorrow, the choice of a god is a personal one, and the alignment to a being is in accord with one’s internal code of principles. A missionary might coerce and trick would-be disciples, but no rational being can truly follow the determined orders of any god-figure if those orders run contrary to his own tenets.

Faced with what looked to them like traces of their own most ancient traditions, nineteenth-century Europeans concluded that Polynesian and European mythologies had sprung from the same roots and that the ancestors of the Polynesians and their own forebears must therefore be related. It was not immediately obvious just where in history—or geography—this connection was to be found. Some argued that Polynesian origins could be traced to the ancient Greeks, others that they were to be found somewhere in Egypt, among the pharaohs and their tombs. An idea popular among the early missionaries was that the inhabitants of Polynesia were descended from a lost tribe of Jews.

The skeptics who argue for Washington the Deist must explain his lifelong and heartfelt commitment to Christian missionary work.

As the American Aryan’s desire to expand across the Pacific grew, Christian ministers observed that heathen Japan needed salvation and that Japan’s seclusion policy was not God’s way. The missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote, “I have a full conviction that the seclusion policy of the nations of Eastern Asia is not according to God’s plan of mercy to these peoples, and their government must change them through fear or force, that his people may be free.”13 In 1852, the secretary of the Navy, John Kennedy, wrote that Japan must recognize “its Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom.”14 Echoing similar arguments made earlier about Native American gold mines, the secretary of state, Daniel Webster, argued that Japan had “no right” to refuse the U.S. Navy’s “reasonable” request to commandeer Japanese sovereign soil for its coaling stations because the coal at issue was “but a gift of Providence, deposited, by the Creator of all things, in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family.

You never hear white people vouching for our spiritual experiences. It’s like we don’t get to have these anymore. The missionaries took those away and told us they were evil. Instead they told us stories like a Virgin had a baby and people are walking on water… well, ok. But here is a Public Defender arguing that what we believe in is just as valid as any other religion. Whether or not she’s actually that open-minded or just calculating, I don’t know. But this is just a hint of what’s to come with the Iñukuns and the Alaskan justice system.