In one country after another the first schools were opened by missionaries, who introduced writing in many of them. Missionaries built the first clinics and hospitals in many places, repeating what they did in Dark Ages Europe. Christianity has become a global religion because of the efforts of missionaries, who preached, translated the Bible, and built churches.

I find myself surprised by the image missionaries have in the popular culture.  Novels such as The Poisonwood Bible and Mosquito Coast (which was made into a movie with Harrison Ford) depict missionaries as a bunch of psychos who pose a threat to society. They are accused of entering other cultures and disrupting them and imposing Western values. Actually, this is largely true.

In China, for instance, missionaries opposed the practice of foot-binding. Chinese girls had their feet tightly bound so that their feet didn’t grow normally and they spent their lives hobbling on misshapen tiny stubs.

In India, missionaries opposed the practice of suttee, in which widows were expected to fling themselves upon their husbands’ funeral pyres. They supposedly earned greater karma by allowing themselves to be burned to death.

In East Africa they opposed the practice of female circumcision, in which girls were horribly mutilated. Around the world missionaries fought against slavery and the sex slave trade.

By the way, did you notice that many of these non-western cultural patterns were harmful to women? Yet feminists accuse Christianity of being anti-women.

In one country after another the first schools were opened by missionaries, who introduced writing in many of them. Missionaries built the first clinics and hospitals in many places, repeating what they did in Dark Ages Europe. Christianity has become a global religion because of the efforts of missionaries, who preached, translated the Bible, and built churches.

All this was done initially at great sacrifice; the first generations of missionaries died like flies. The history of missions is the story of people sacrificing themselves in order to empower others. Everybody knows the story of how Nate Saint, Jim Elliot and 3 others were murdered by the Auca Indians of South America in 1956. The Indians later converted from animism to Christianity.

The fact is that the world is littered with the graves of missionaries. As Christianity recedes in the West, however, so does the Western missionary movement. So many of my faithful supporters are elderly; when that generation passes from the scene, American missions will plummet precipitously.

But read Matthew 24:14, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” God, who mandates and underwrites the success of missions, is doing a new thing upon the earth. It has been called the Majority World or Developing World Missionary Movement. He is raising up Asian, African, and Latin American Christians who are the next wave of career missions. They are the ones who will complete the “Great Commission” (see Matt. 28:19).

This is why I stay at African Bible College in Malawi. It, and institutions like it, play a strategic role in this new movement of God. Americans like me are still needed because Malawians are too poor to support indigenous Bible college professors. Meanwhile, the flow is being reversed and we actually are seeing non-western missionaries coming to re-evangelize an apostate West.

Larry Brown is a minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a member of Central South Presbytery, and serves as Professor of church history, world history, hermeneutics and missions at the African Bible College in Lilongwe, Malawi.