[NOTE to my Readers: First off, THANK YOU! And I know that I wrote less than a week ago that I was giving up blogging for good . . . or just for now . . . but any faithful reader of my blogs knows that I’ve done that before, and like a bad penny . . . well sorry to disappoint you . . . or, rather . . . I’m happy if you’re not disappointed.]
A blogger friend of mine posted recently about the historical origins of the so-called "Student Mission Movement" here in these United States of America. He was reviewing a book entitled, Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith, written by Elesha J. Coffman. One chapter in the book surveyed the motivations for America’s college students at around the turn of the twentieth century to forego secular careers and head overseas to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to lands not reached by Christian missionaries who were bold enough and brave enough to kiss their loved ones goodbye and go risk their lives to tell others about Jesus Christ. One of the motivations for these young people was an idea of a “muscular Christianity,” a willingness to spend one’s youth and vigor for a higher calling in a truly great pursuit.
The example of "muscular Christianity" that many my age remember was a Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, in the movie "Chariots of Fire" that played in theatres in the early 1980s about the life of the Olympic Gold Medalist from the 1920 Paris Olympics who went on to become a missionary in China and who later died in his forties in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War.
Back when the movie came out, my young bride and I were attending an Evangelical Free Church in Arizona that was pastored by a man who had been the eldest son of missionaries to South Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s, and we were working there on a very active "Missions Committee" in our church that was led by our pastor's kid brother, who I'll call "Aragorn," who was married to a woman who I'll call "Arwen" who had been the eldest daughter of missionaries to India.
Our little church sent out many students and even older people "onto the mission field," and even Aragorn and Arwen went to Turkey to live there and raise their three daughters, and Arwen is still in Turkey thirty years after Aragorn died so young from leukemia. The "work" that Aragorn and Arwen started in Turkey is still thriving, strengthening the tiny minority of Christians in their community and even seeing "new births" of new believers in Jesus Christ from people of every faith and no faith.
Our former pastor and my mentor who I call "Gandalf" is now in his seventies and for the last twenty or so years has recruited, trained, and led young people and young couples or families to live in countries that are closed to Christian "missionaries" who, nonetheless, live in their communities doing so-called secular work overseas and are also loving witnesses for Jesus Christ in the places where they live.
I had once aspired to go to seminary like my mentor and even to take the Gospel overseas to the now only nominal "Christian" countries in Europe, specifically Austria. I had been inspired by the work of Francis and Edith Schaeffer who did that after World War Two and founded a still thriving faith community in Switzerland called "L'Abri" My then young bride would have followed me anywhere back then, but in my heart I knew that she didn't really want to leave family and friends and the warmth of our desert home where she'd lived all her life for cold climates like the seminary in Chicago, Illinois, that I had wanted to attend, the same one that Gandalf had once attended, and then move even farther away from home to even possibly colder places like Salzburg, Austria. Why Salzburg, Austria, you ask? Because the real-life Maria von Trapp from the movie "The Sound Of Music" had been instrumental in my becoming a "born again" believer in Jesus Christ when I was twenty years old is the reason why I picked that place.
I'm sixty-seven years old now and my beautiful bride is sixty-nine, and we never did go overseas. In fact, we never left our home state of Arizona. As things turned out, I went to law school instead of seminary and have been a lawyer for almost forty years now, and we have raised our children and grandchildren in several other churches after moving from the city in which were married. The zeal for missions and missionaries has subsided both in our breasts and, even, in the churches we’ve attended during the course of our lives. Our current struggling, little Baptist church supports some unknown and unnamed missionaries sent out by our denomination, but it has no local "Missions Committee," nor any "missionaries" sent out by our local church.
However just this spring, our family hosted the twenty-something eldest son of some lifelong friends we made here in the town where we live who is a graduate of Moody Bible College and has been to Japan as a child, and a decade later as a "short term" missionary, and who is now "raising support" to go and live in Japan for the rest of his life like Aragorn and Arwen did in Turkey. I'll call our young friend . . . who is really like a grandson to us . . . "Frodo."
Frodo's father is a highly decorated full bird colonel in the United States Marine Corps and is the godliest man that I know. Frodo loves and admires his father and once vacillated for a time between becoming a missionary or a United States Marine. But Frodo feels called by a burden that he can't shake to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a land too long neglected by Christians. Before he left here last month, I told Frodo that as great a man as my friend his father is, and as great a service as has been done by his father for our country, greater by far is the calling to which Frodo is now responding.
Our young friend looked me in the eyes to see if I was sincere in what I was saying to him. I was.
The church's approach to mission and missionaries has certainly changed in our lifetime, Mark; the world has changed. We must continue to pray for us to listen and to be obedient to whatever comes next.
Good one. Well said.