Why do We Romanticize Foreign Missions?

[Charnock]

I love foreign missionaries. I love pastors. I love my co-laborers in the harvest. But I am sick up to my eyeballs of the guilt trips laid on American ministers and churches by folks who are fully funded to fulfill their calling. I want to be clear that most missionaries I know are hard working folks who give it everything they've got but, lately, I've come across a few who have a sense of entitlement and pride.

I become very annoyed by people who assume that foreign missionaries are the only people in the world who sacrifice and suffer hardship. In reality, many foreign missionaries live extremely well. They get "free" cars, appliances and many other perks. In the UPC, foreign missionaries are fully funded.

Here's the deal. It's one thing to know about, and be moved by, an incredible poverty among the people you're laboring to reach, another thing entirely to become personally impoverished specifically because you reach for that field.

When you have no power, no water, and few groceries you will have the right to lecture me about American laziness and apathy. As a former church planter, I have gone without those things so that the "work of God" could prosper, and so that others would not suffer. I do not say this to brag, or out of some plea for sympathy. I post it to make a point. There are men and women all around you that are waking to the fact that this continent is adrift. They are sacrificing everything to reach it, and giving to foreign missions as well. Reality is, you would have to change the way you operate if not for those wealthy, apathetic, Americans who are working their tails off to build God's kingdom here and there.

Don't insult their gifts and sacrifice by talking about the wealth and apathy of the American church.