C.S. Lewis famously says somewhere that when Jesus tells us to feed the poor, He does not give us lessons in cooking. There are certain craft competence issues that we have to figure out ourselves, relying on industry standards and our own sanctified wits. Of course, industry standards of craft competence and our own sanctified wits do not outrank the Scriptures, but we will discover, if we reflect on this carefully, that craft incompetence and folly have attributed to Scripture things it never said.
For example, we have not a word in Scripture that instructs us how missionaries from a first-world nation should interact with a third world nation. The book of Acts contains absolutely nothing about frontier missions. All the mission work in the book of Acts occurs, if I may speak this way, in North America. Mission trips were the equivalent of a church in Toledo deciding to plant a church in Baltimore. We do not have an apostolic example for work among bush men or aborigines, and we ought not to act like it just involves just a little bit more than a plane ticket to Baltimore and willingness to share.
I am not speaking here of the necessity of universal missions. The imperative encompasses everyone. Preach the gospel to every creature means that we should preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15). But since we must start somewhere, it should be done in an orderly way, one which takes into full account the true nature of the obstacles confronting us.
Because we have not recognized this reality, we have done an awful lot of damage, all of it swathed in the rhetoric of good intentions. The devil hates the poor, and one of the most pernicious things he has done to them is change all the labels on all the medicines in the first aid kits carried around by earnest and worthy good samaritans. But this trick notwithstanding, it has become apparent to many that we are doing real damage. The response of many in the old guard has been to point to the label, which clearly says that it helps the poor, and to insist on doubling down. “But why are things not improving?” someone asks. “It’s been seventy years of this now.” Those who point out that the poor are not actually being helped are then accused of being callused toward the poor, which is nothing more than being contradicted by the label on the bottle that is killing people. We should stop feeling so bad about that. You would think that the Scriptures mandated things like keeping dictators in power or creating cultures of dependency. Practitioners of the old nostrums float in like so many little white messiahs, make a mess, and return home with a slide show to get more funding.
Men who do not understand the law of unintended consequences, and who are not willing to think through how that law might apply to the work of missions, are men who should be removed from the mission field. One of the principal areas where unintended consequences kick in is in the realm of politics, about which more later.