now I believe.

Missions.

The very word comes to me with a slew of old prejudices and negative connotations. I'm not alone.

In the secular world, the idea of Christian missions work can be synonymous with the Inquisition in the popular imagination. Christians going out into the world to enforce their beliefs on peoples and lands who have their own unique and functional systems of thought. As we learned in school, missionaries often brought with them diseases, weapons, and a sense of ethnocentric superiority that wiped out native populations. Paradoxically, missionaries brought death.

Modern day missions in the minds of many unbelievers don't fare much better than their historical counterparts. If you ask my friends their opinions of missional activity in the church, they're likely to give a host of unflattering adjectives: arrogant, nonsensical, wasteful, misguided. The nice ones might start with "I'm sure they have good intentions, but..."

We were educated in a culture that was keen to point out American inadequacies. And this sense of self-criticism became overlaid on not just American history, but on any seemingly imperialist impulse of Western civilization. Thus, missions, with its focus on conversion to Christianity, and then necessarily on degradation of innate belief systems, became a bit of a dirty word in my mind. Missions were a manifestation of that insidious absolutism which our education in pluralism was trying so hard to extinguish.

But I'm no longer debating pluralism in a first-year AnSo class, and I'm not that same girl who did. So when a missionary came to church last week to speak, and ask for help raising funds, I was surprised. I've been around this church for almost a year--hearing about missions trips, praying for the safety of those in the field, moving in what sometimes seems a painstaking crawl towards an understanding of the necessity of salvation for every person, in every place. Yet, I had an instantly negative emotional reaction to his talk of missions (though an instantly warm feeling toward the hilarious, well-reasoned, and obviously gigantic faith of the speaker). Here was a pocket of unexamined, and unchanged beliefs. A time capsule from 11 months ago. Ok, well, what am I going to do with the impulse, the left-over beliefs?

Obviously, my view of missions needs to be tweaked. Shifted, perhaps, from that of an imperialist move of human will designed to wipe out indigenous culture, to that of a loving wave of God, washing over His land, attempting first to understand and relate to a culture, then to find common ground before sharing the Truth.

This shift is not to make myself feel better, but to be more in line with reality. I assume that most missionaries don't go into the rain forest and immediately begin proclaiming souls to hell from a perch on the tribe's sacred statue. So, the reality of modern missions is step one.

Secondly, the reality of God. Either I believe that Jesus is the Truth and the Way for all people, in all places, and at all times. Or I don't. And, if I don't, why do I bother to believe? What rubbish was the logic that led me to here? Assuming Truth in place of rubbish, the reality of God is an impenetrable force for missions. The love in my heart would impel me to share that love, and the full conclusion of such sharing spreads to all the corners of the earth.

I'd do well to remember one thing: Someone acted missionally in my life. And now I believe.