Revolution in World Missions

Chapter Four I Walked in a Daze As I changed planes for Dallas at JFK International in New York, I was overcome at the sights and sounds around me. Those of us who grow up in Europe and Asia hear stories about the affluence and prosperity of the United States, but until you see it with your own eyes, the stories seem like fairy tales. Americans are more than just unaware of their affluence, they almost seem to despise it at times. Finding a lounge chair, I stared in amazement at how they treated their beautiful clothes and shoes. The richness of the fabrics and colors was beyond anything I had ever seen. As I would discover again and again, this nation routinely takes its astonishing wealth for granted. As I would do many times, almost daily in the weeks ahead, I compared their clothing to that of the native missionary evangelist whom I had left only a few weeks before. Many of them walk barefoot between villages or work in flimsy sandals. Their threadbare cotton garments would not be acceptable as cleaning rags in the United States. Then I discovered most Americans have closets full of clothing they wear only occasionally, and I remember the years I traveled and worked with only the clothes on my back, and I had lived the normal lifestyle of most village evangelists. Economist Robert Heilbrunner describes the luxuries a typical American family would have to surrender if they lived among the one billion hungry people in the two-thirds world. We begin by invading the house of our imaginary American family to strip it of its furniture. Everything goes, beds, chairs, tables, television sets, lamps. We will leave the family with a few old blankets, a kitchen table, a wooden chair. Along with the bureaus go the clothes. Each member of the family may keep in his wardrobe his oldest suit or dress, a shirt or blouse. We will permit a pair of shoes for the head of the family, but none for the wife or children. We move to the kitchen. The appliances have already been taken out, so we turn to the cupboards. The box of matches may stay, a small bag of flour, some sugar and salt. A few moldy potatoes already in the garbage can must be rescued, for they will provide much of tonight's meal. We will leave a handful of onions and a dish of dried beans. All the rest we take away. The meat, the fresh vegetables, the canned goods, the crackers, the candy. Now we have stripped the house. The bathroom has been dismantled, the running water shut off, the electric wires taken out. Next, we take away the house. The family can move to the tool shed. Communications must go next. No more newspapers, magazines, books. Not that they're missed, since we must take away our family's literacy as well. Instead, in our shantytown, we will allow only one radio. Now government services must go next. No more postmen, no more firemen. There is a school, but it is three miles away and consists of two classrooms. There are, of course, no hospitals or doctors nearby. The nearest clinic is 10 miles away and is tended by a midwife. It can be reached by bicycle, provided the family has a bicycle, which is unlikely. Finally, money. We will allow our family a cash hoard of five dollars. This will prevent our breadwinner from experiencing the tragedy of an Iranian peasant who went blind because he could not raise the $3.94, which he mistakenly thought he needed to receive admission to a hospital where he could have been cured. This is an accurate description of the lifestyle and world from which I came. From the moment I touched foot on American soil, I walked in an unbelieving daze. How can two so different economies coexist simultaneously on the earth? Everything was so overpowering and confusing to me at first. Not only did I have to learn the simplest procedures, like using the pay telephones or making change, but as a sensitive Christian, I found myself constantly making spiritual evaluations of everything I saw. As the days passed into weeks, I began with alarm to understand how misplaced are the spiritual values of most Western believers. Sad to say, it appeared to me that for the most part they had absorbed the same humanistic and materialistic values that dominated the secular culture. Almost immediately, I sensed an awesome judgment was hanging over the United States, and that I had to warn God's people that he was not going to lavish this abundance on them forever. But the message was still not formed in my heart, and it would be many years before I would feel the anointing and courage to speak out against such sin. Meanwhile, in Texas, a land that in many ways epitomizes America, I reeled with shock at the most common things. My hosts eagerly pointed out what they considered their greatest achievements. I nodded with politeness as they showed me their huge churches, high-rise buildings, and universities. But these didn't impress me very much. After all, I had seen the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Taj Mahal, the Palaces of Jhansi, the University of Baroda in Gujarat. What impresses visitors from the two-thirds world are the simple things Americans take for granted. Fresh water available 24 hours a day, unlimited electrical power, telephones that work, and a most remarkable network of paved roads. Compared to Western countries, things in Asia are still in the process of development. At the time, we still had no television in India, but my American hosts seemed to have TV sets in every room, and they operated day and night. This ever-present blast of media disturbed me. For some reason, Americans seemed to have a need to surround themselves with noise all the time. Even in their cars, I noticed the radios were on even when no one was listening. Why do they always have to be either entertained or entertaining, I wondered. It was as if they were trying to escape from a guilt they had not yet defined or even identified. I was constantly aware of how large and overweight most Americans seemed to be. Americans need big cars, big homes, and large furniture, because they are big people. I was amazed at how important eating, drinking, smoking, and even drug use were in the Western lifestyle. Even among Christians, food was a major part of fellowship events. This, of course, is not bad in itself. Love feasts were an important part of the New Testament church life. But eating can be taken to extremes. One of the ironies of this is the relatively small price North Americans pay for food. In 1998, personal expenditures in the United States averaged $19,049 per person, of which $1,276 or 6.7 percent went for food, leaving a comfortable $17,773 for other expenses. In India, the average person had only $276 to spend, of which $134 or 48.4 percent went for food, leaving a scant $142 for other needs for the entire year. I had lived with this reality every day, but Americans have real trouble thinking in these terms. Often when I spoke at a church, the people would appear moved as I told of the suffering and needs of the native evangelists. They usually took an offering and presented me with a check for what seemed like a great amount of money. Then, with their usual hospitality, they invited me to eat with the leaders following the meeting. To my horror, the food and fellowship frequently cost more than the money they had just given to missions. And I was amazed to find that American families routinely eat enough meat at one meal to feed an Asian family for a week. No one ever seemed to notice this but me, and I slowly realized that they had just not heard the meaning of my message. They were simply incapable of understanding the enormous needs overseas. Even today, I sometimes cannot freely order food when traveling in the United States. I look at the costs and realize how far the same amount of money will go in India, Myanmar, formerly Burma, or the Philippines. Suddenly, I'm not quite as hungry as I was before. Many native missionaries and their families experience days without food, not because they are fasting voluntarily, but because they have no money to buy rice. This occurs especially when they start new work in villages where there are no Christians. Remembering the heartbreaking suffering of the native brethren, I sometimes refused to eat the dessert so often served to me. I'm sure this made no difference in supplying food to hungry families, but I couldn't bear to take pleasure in eating while Christian workers in Asia were going hungry. The need became real to me through the ministry of Brother Moses Paulus, one of our early native missionaries. Millions of poor, uneducated fisher folk live along the thousands of islands and endless miles of coastal backwaters in Asia. Their homes usually are small huts made of leaves, and their lifestyles are simple, hard work, and little pleasure. These fishermen and their families are some of the most unreached people in the world, but God called Paulus and his family to take the gospel to the unreached fishing villages of Tamil Nadu on the east coast of India. I remember visiting Paulus' family. One of the first things he discovered when he began visiting the villages was that the literacy rate was so low he could not use tracks or printed materials effectively. He decided to use slides, but had no projector or money to purchase one. So he made repeated trips to a hospital where he sold his blood until he had the money he needed. It was exciting to see the crowds his slide projector attracted. As soon as he began to put up the white sheet that served as a screen, thousands of adults and children gathered along the beach. Mrs. Paulus sang gospel songs over a loudspeaker powered by a car battery, and their five-year-old son quoted Bible verses to passersby. When the sun had set, Brother Paulus began his slide presentation. For several hours, thousands sat in the sand listening to the gospel message while the sea murmured in the background. When we finally packed to leave, I had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on the hundreds of children sleeping on the sand. But the tragedy behind all this was the secret starvation Paulus and his family faced. Once I heard his long-suffering wife comforting the children and urging them to drink water from a baby bottle in order to hold off the pangs of hunger. There was not enough money in the house for milk. Ashamed to let the non-Christian neighbors know he was without food, Paulus kept the windows and doors in his one-room rented house closed so they could not hear the cries of his four hungry children. On another occasion, one of his malnourished children fell asleep in school because he was so weak from hunger. I am ashamed to tell the teachers or our neighbors, he told me. Only God, our children, and my wife know the real story. We have no complaints or even unhappiness. We are joyfully and totally content in our service of the Lord. It is a privilege to be counted worthy to suffer for His sake. Even when the teacher punished his children for lack of attention in class, Paulus would not tell his secret suffering and bring shame on the name of Christ. Fortunately, in this case, we were able to send immediate support to him thanks to the help of generous American Christians. But for too many others, the story does not end as happily. Is it God's fault that men like Brother Paulus are going hungry? I do not think so. God has provided more than enough money to meet Paulus' needs and all the needs of the two-thirds world. The needed money is in the highly developed nations of the West. North American Christians alone, without much sacrifice, can meet all the needs of the churches in the two-thirds world. A friend in Dallas recently pointed out a new church building that cost $74 million. While this thought was still exploding in my mind, he pointed out another $7 million church going up less than a minute away. These extravagant buildings are insanity from a two-thirds world perspective. The $74 million spent on one new building in the United States could build more than 7,000 average-sized churches in India. The same $74 million would be enough to guarantee the evangelization of a whole state or even some of the smaller countries of Asia. But I rarely spoke out on these subjects. I realized I was a guest. The Americans who had built these buildings had also built the school I was now attending, and they were paying my tuition to attend. It amazed me, though, that these buildings had been constructed to worship Jesus, who said, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. Matthew 8.20 In Asia today, Christ is still wandering homeless. He is looking for a place to lay his head, but in temples not made with human hands. Until they can build a facility of their own, our newborn Christians usually meet in their homes. In non-Christian communities, it is often impossible to rent church facilities. There is such an emphasis on church buildings in the United States that we sometimes forget that the church is the people, not the place where the people meet. But God has not called me to fight against church building programs. I think what troubles me much more than the waste is that these efforts represent a worldly mindset. Why can't we at least earmark 10% of our Christian giving for the cause of world evangelism? If Christians in the United States alone had made this commitment in 2000, there would have been nearly $10 billion available for gospel outreach. And what is more, if we had used these funds to support native missions, we could have fielded an army of evangelists the size of a major city.