Missionary Martyrs: Are We Paying Too High a Price to Evangelize the World?

Moderator note: There’s a plethora of John Allen Chau reaction articles now. I’m not doing a Filing on each (as you can see from other threads!). But posting the Slate article here:

Martyr or “American Dickhead”? Why missionary John Allen Chau’s death on a remote Indian island is so unsettling to Christians.

Intriguingly, however, even Christians have not hailed Chau as a clear-cut hero of the faith. “Chau’s stunt not only had absolutely no chance of success, it also stood to bring sickness and death to this tribe,” the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher wrote last week. “How could any Christian justify this?” Dreher was among those pointing out that Chau’s death has prompted a regional backlash that could make life harder for the minority population of Christians in India, not to mention Christian aid workers and long-term missionaries there.

Part of the reason Chau’s story has prompted a backlash among both Christians and secular observers is because Chau seemed to approach the island with a cartoonish style of Western swagger. In his diary, parts of which have been made public by his family, he wrote of attempting to befriend the islanders with offerings of scissors and safety pins, and by singing Christian “worship songs.” “There’s been such a sea change in evangelical missiology over the past 50 years about the danger of cultural imperialism,” said Thomas Kidd, a historian at Baylor University who wrote a blog post about media reactions to Chau’s death.
“There’s much more sensitivity among evangelicals than there was at the time of [the missionaries in Ecuador’s] death.” …..

The apparent fact that Chau was not acting impulsively or independently will make his case more unsettling for many evangelicals. “There’s a high-wire act that evangelicals have to contend with,” said Kidd. “To outside observers, they’d say of course this is cultural imperialism, you’re imposing your culture. Evangelicals say, we can set aside culture and just boil it down to the Gospel.”

That’s an idea that would not have occurred to the five men in Ecuador, who have been the subject of hagiographic books and movies since their death, including the 2006 drama End of the Spear. (Attending an evangelical college in the late ’90s, I lived for two years in a dormitory named for one of the men.) Kathryn Long points out that the deaths in Ecuador came at a critical moment for evangelicals, as they were beginning to see themselves as a distinct cohort. The influential magazine Christianity Today was founded in 1956. Billy Graham’s evangelistic “crusade” took over Madison Square Garden for 16 weeks in 1957. At the time, the five missionaries “symbolized what evangelicals wanted to be,” Long said. Now, John Allen Chau may become a symbol of exactly the opposite

Denny Burk cites:

http://www.dennyburk.com/another-harsh-assessment-of-john-chaus-mission/