I will leave the destiny of the kingdom in God’s hands alone. Perhaps he is finished with me. Perhaps I have sinned too greatly and am no longer worthy to lead. Only God knows if that is true, and it seems he will not tell.

 Gene Edwards, The Gene Edwards Signature Collection: A Tale of Three Kings / the Prisoner in the Third Cell / the Divine Romance (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2016).

WHAT MISSIONARIES DID WRONG

1. The missionaries had a superiority complex. Almost without exception they considered Western civilization superior to any other. Worse still, they unashamedly equated civilization with Christianity. They referred to the people as “natives,” and in their letters home depicted them as lazy, dirty, dishonest, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. 
2. The missionaries took a dim view of the “pagan” religions. They were unnecessarily negative in their attitude towards these religions and often preached against idolatry in terms that were quite offensive to the listeners. The same truths could have been expressed in less abrasive terms. Without sufficiently investigating the indigenous religions they assumed that they were wholly false and rejected them out of hand. Later on they discovered that such tactics were self-defeating and abandoned them. In the meantime the deed was done, and the reputation lingers.
3. They failed to differentiate between Christianity and Western culture. They took along with them a large amount of excess luggage: moral and social taboos, personal prejudices and predilections, ethical and legal codes, economic and political institutions—everything from the Magna Carta to Robert's Rules of Order. In so doing they placed on the necks of their converts a yoke that was more than they could bear. Christianity as it developed in the Third World ended up with a “Made in the U.S.A.” stamp on it. Little wonder that it came to be known as a “foreign religion” in Asia and the “white man’s religion” in Africa. Certainly it bore all the earmarks of a Western institution.

5. The missionaries failed to encourage the indigenization of Christianity. It never entered their minds that Christianity could retain its essential core while at the same time being expressed in Oriental forms. They seemed to think that the form was essential to the substance and must remain forever Western in motif. They erected church buildings replete with spire, bell, and cross. They introduced hymns with Western words and Western tunes. Drums and dances, so dear to the African soul, were taboo. Instead they used musical instruments imported from the West.

6. The missionaries were guilty of paternalism. It is easy to make a case against the missionaries on this score. The unhappy details are well known to everyone remotely interested in Christian missions. It should be remembered, however, that paternalism is not always bad. In the beginning it was natural, necessary, and inevitable, given the circumstances of the nineteenth century. This was especially true in Africa, where most of the early converts were fugitive slaves and miscreants from tribal society. The missionaries took them into their “residential” stations, after which they became virtual wards of the mission. The missionary in charge provided them with food, clothing, shelter, and security; taught them to read and write; gave them land, seed, and tools to make a garden; and taught them a trade. All they asked in return was obedience. If they did not accept the discipline of the community they were chastised. In rare cases they were even flogged. The greatest punishment was expulsion from the community.

7. The missionaries were unwise in their use of Western funds. Too often they allowed their hearts to run away with their heads. Western funds were used all too freely and over too long a period of time, to the detriment of the developing churches; This situation, however, was not as simple as it might appear on the surface. To begin with, charity is a Christian virtue. Our Lord told us that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Again He said, “Freely ye have received, freely give.” So if the missionary was generous with his money, he can hardly be faulted for being unchristian in his conduct. Secondly, the Christians were usually very poor, at least by Western standards; and often their profession of Christianity barred them from getting or holding jobs. Beverley Nichols in his book, Verdict on India, says that the people of India are so poor that they can live on the smell of an oil rag. This obviously is an overstatement, but it does dramatize the grinding poverty of rural India. Thirdly, the missionaries, though woefully underpaid by stateside standards, were regarded as fabulously well off on the mission field. In some instances the missionary’s tithe, if all of it had gone into the local church, would have taken care of the total budget. In these circumstances the temptation to solve problems by handing out money was exceedingly great. Most of us would have done the same thing.

Later* on, when the churches began to grow in size and strength and the missionaries tried to curb their generosity, they were given little encouragement by the church leaders. They had been on the dole so long that they verily believed they could not survive without it. It was here that the missionaries ran into opposition. The national churches have been notoriously slow to accept and implement the principle of self-support. When the Communists came to power in China in 1949 most of the large denominations, some of them almost a hundred years old, were still dependent on funds from the “mother” churches in the West. To this day there are large churches in India that find themselves in the same fix. If the government were to cut off foreign funds they would be in a bad way.

 J. Herbert Kane, Understanding Christian Missions

Many of the missions that will be studied in the following chapters rejected the importance of the historic pattern of the church. This enabled them to adapt themselves much more freely to the local situation, but at the cost of overlooking other vital elements of the Gospel which the church tradition tried to express. A comparison with the missions which are now to be described must also include some mention of the practical outworking of the differences in doctrinal emphasis. It would be unfair to say that the Presbyterians in Peru and Chile did not preach a personal committal to Christ, but the writer does believe that their emphasis on the sovereignty of God influenced them against making the appeals which characterized the evangelistic preaching of those with an Arminian Evangelical background. The Presbyterians were by no means the only ones who avoided asking that those who wished to accept Christ signify this by raising a hand or by coming forward during the meeting. Juan de Dios Guerrero, the veteran I.E.P. preacher is convinced as a result of his long experience that there is more likelihood of avoiding spurious results if those who are interested are asked to stay behind for prayer after the meeting.

What the Presbyterians seem to have overlooked is that in a country such as Peru, where the Indian’s fatalistic attitude to life has had such an influence on the general thinking, the hearers need to be given some active and immediate way of demonstrating their faith. If one is critical of the methods of others then one must provide an alternative, because an inadequate attempt to meet a need is always better than no attempt. That the Presbyterians did not provide such an opportunity was another reason why they did not reap the rewards that their faithful efforts deserved, either in Peru or in Chile. On a more general level it needs to be noted that the practical meaning of Christian truth depends on the circumstances. It is quite possible that the F.C.S. missionaries interpreted the doctrine of the sovereignty of God rightly as far as their homeland was concerned but wrongly in the Peruvian context.

 Kessler, Conflict in Missions

The most serious impediment to a vigorous missionary enterprise, however, was an ever-increasing drift toward materialism among the missionaries. Several missionaries were charged with land grabbing and were too involved in business ventures to give themselves wholly to the work. Many of the missionary children remained in Hawaii, holding political offices and becoming wealthy landowners. All this brought Hawaii into a close political relationship with the United States, but at the same time it adversely affected the church. By the turn of the century the once-vibrant Protestant church that had numbered well over twenty thousand had dropped to less than five thousand. The missionaries had succeeded in their commission to bring “civilization” to Hawaii but were less successful as missionaries.

 Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 219.

the Christian life is continually receiving and responding to the gospel.

Jesus Christ is the embodiment and fulfillment of all the promises of God.

As we’ve just seen, from the beginning God has been a God of promise. His heart as the Father-Creator is full of blessing. From that point onwards, we see the continual purpose of God is to bring blessing, even in the face of human sin and evil. Our mistake is we don’t know what we need. Too readily we decide for ourselves or others what “blessing” should look like, and too readily assume that suffering and adversity are signs of God’s curse. But, if we’ve been blessed by our heavenly Father “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph 1:3), we ought not assume that adversity is necessarily a sign of God’s disfavor. In fact, God graciously brings and allows much that seems to be against us with the purpose of hemming us in more closely to the full dimensions of his blessing (cf. Joel 2:25).

In reality, God might not want us to do anything with a blessing except to enjoy it, to love it, to be stunned by the beauty of it, to be overwhelmed by the grace of it, to share the blessing with others.

 

What’s the purpose of the law? The answer, ultimately, is that the law shows us that being right with God has always occurred by promise, never by obedience to the law. How misguided we are, thinking we’re going to earn God’s favor by attempting to keep the law, which itself condemns us in order to drive us to the promise of grace!

 Daniel Bush and Noel S. Due, Embracing God as Father: Christian Identity in the Family of God (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014).

If this happens to you, realize this is normal. It doesn’t make you a forgiveness failure. We aren’t robots. We are tenderhearted humans who feel deeply, so we can easily get hurt deeply. The sign of progress isn’t the ability never to get hurt or offended or knocked off balance emotionally. The sign of progress is to let the pain work for you instead of against you.

 
Use it as an opportunity to let the pain drive you to the new healing habits and perspectives we’ve been discovering together in this book.

•Have one better thought.

•Have one better reaction.

•Have one better way to process.

•Have one better conversation.

•Have one boundary you lovingly communicate and consistently keep.

•Have one better choice not to reach for that substance to numb out.

•Have one better heart pivot toward forgiveness instead of resentment.

•Have one less day when you stay mad.

•Have one less hour when you refuse grace.

 
Just make some part of this time better than last time. And then take another part of this message and apply it . . . and then another. Even the most imperfect, messy forgiveness filled with hesitation and resistance is better than letting bitterness have its way with your heart. The sum total of even the smallest inklings and considerations of forgiveness is always better than one moment of full-on bitterness. You don’t have to cooperate with forgiveness perfectly—just progressively—for it to be good.

 Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That's Beautiful Again (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 207–208.

•I have a hard time believing the best in some people when our history begs me to keep expecting their worst.

•I sometimes doubt that truly healthy relationships are possible.

•I can get overwhelmed and exhausted by having to work so hard on my relationships.

•I find I’m more likely to tolerate some people rather than truly enjoy them.

•I want to prove my side of things sometimes more than I want to improve a relationship.

•I am skeptical of trusting some people, not because of what they’ve done but what’s been done to me by others.

 Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That's Beautiful Again (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 210.

Feeling angry is different from living angry.

Feeling offended is different from living offended.

Feeling skeptical is different from living skeptical.

Feeling wronged is different from living wronged.

Feeling resentment is different from living resentful.

 Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That's Beautiful Again (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 211.

The sum total of your one incredible life must not be reduced to the limitations of living hurt. The completely delightful, beautiful, fun, and brilliant way GOD MADE YOU must not be tainted by someone who lost their way. The lies they wrongly believed and tried to put on you must not become a burden you carry or a script you repeat. You’ve got much too much going for you to be stunted by anger, haunted by resentment, or held back by fear. Grow into GOD’S GRACE by giving it kindly and accepting it freely.

Throw your arms up in victory and declare, “I’m FREE TO FORGIVE so that I can live!”

 Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That's Beautiful Again (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2020), 221–223.