I didn’t see any miracles in Africa. But what I did see were impoverished people who were just as reliant on the material world as we are. They worked for a living, just like we do. They went to the drug store when they needed medicine, just like we do. Even the poorest of villagers had mobile phones, just like we do. Unlike the romanticized view some Christians have of the poor, the people I met in Africa didn’t sit serenely around a table waiting for their daily bread to drop out of the sky.
4. The world needs us.
To put it simply, I wasn’t needed in Africa. Nearly every other building in the city where I lived was a nonprofit. Two church-run hospitals even shared the same wall. There were schools, orphanages and outreach centers, all run by indigenous people who spoke the language, knew the culture and were way more qualified than I was. And they were getting along just fine.
Underlying so much of the impetus behind missions is the assumption that we, as white American Christians, have something the rest of the world doesn’t. For whatever reason, we’ve decided that we alone hold the keys to progress and prosperity, and if we don’t save the world, no one will. But what I witnessed in Africa was a world that didn’t need saving. Not by me, at least.
5. Success is guaranteed.
I once heard a missionary say that most missionaries are liars. He said that missionaries don’t write home about their failures because they’re afraid of what their supporters might think.
Christians don’t like stories with less-than-happy endings. In fact, many Christians don’t want to believe that anything done in God’s name can end badly. In my experience, stories of failure don’t fit the desired narrative. Christians don’t know how common disappointment is on the mission field because those stories don’t make good testimonies.
When my trip to Africa fell apart for reasons outside of my control, I felt like I had nowhere to turn. I had never heard of a missionary coming home waving the white flag. So, I wrote a book about it. And since the release of Runaway Radical, I’ve been flooded with emails from missionaries desperate to share their stories—hurting people who are trying to make sense of what happened to them and just want to know that they’re not alone.
These are the stories that desperately need to be told. Embellishing or sanitizing a testimony might make God “look good,” but it doesn’t right a wrong. And it certainly doesn’t prevent the same thing from happening to the next person.