Both Oars In Send in the missionaries

Feb 11, 2011

Hollywood has released a mixed bag of films about missionaries. Two of my favorites are “The Mission” and “Mosquito Coast.” “The Mission” juxtaposes the good and the bad missionary. “Mosquito Coast” provides mostly the ugly in the form of two dueling zealots, one a crazed genius inventor and the other, a ludicrous evangelical preacher. Although both are well-acted and worthwhile, neither movie gives a realistic presentation of a missionary nor the range of positive contributions that missionaries have made in lesser developed countries over the years.

To be fair to Hollywood, history does contain a mish-mash of good, bad and even ugly missionary outcomes. When God chooses to work through His naturally good, but fallen agents, there is bound to be a range of results. It is just not that easy to facilitate positive and necessary change in others without making some very human mistakes.

My favorite missionaries are the Missionaries of Charity, the order started by Blessed Mother Teresa that provides care for dying adults and abandoned children around the world. Whenever I feel that my job is tough, I visit them. They do their work cheerfully regardless of the outcomes. They are clearly inspired by the Holy Spirit.

However, success in a mission is not solely reliant on divine guidance. It is accomplished by following two very important principles: subsidiarity and solidarity. Subsidiarity requires that solutions to problems are sought at the most basic social level.  What is solvable by an individual or small group should never be taken over by a larger group.  In short, we are not called to solve for but to work with others in making social advancements.

Solidarity requires that we work in such close proximity with others that we take on the aspect of those we intend to assist. At the most basic level, solidarity asks that we live with and how those we desire to assist live. This involves more than adopting simplicity as a new bohemian chic. True solidarity allows the missionary to gain an empirical understanding of what they are fighting to change.

Adherence to these two principles helps to avoid unintentionally making the people one is trying to help even more dependent. It also keeps one from drowning already struggling people in unsustainable and locally inappropriate solutions. Finally, it allows the appropriate local authorities to establish priorities in order to ensure that money is directed to what is really needed rather than to what is the easiest to provide.

Unfortunately, these principles have been largely ignored as the world has come to help Haiti. Haiti’s Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, has gone as far as to accuse the NGOs of not only making Haitians more dependent, but infantilizing them. In truth, the NGOs have done worse to the Haitian government — they have made it a scapegoat for every issue that they have accepted funds to address but have yet to deliver on. A lot of the frustration over the lack of progress in Haiti is a direct result of NGOs not just falling into these three pitfalls, but jumping into them.   

A clear consequence of ignoring these principles is the decision to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to temporary shelters, which will do nothing long-term to change the quality of life in Haiti. If those who championed the shelter programs had asked any local, rich or poor, they would have said to give out land, not shelters (In two years, we will see the wisdom of this alternative idea).  

In my experience, what makes missionaries more effective than the new mega-industry of world relief workers is not necessarily the quality of their character, but the nature of their mission. Authentic missionaries are methodical institution builders, not adrenaline driven relief workers. They adhere to subsidiarity and solidarity because their drive comes from the privilege of working with people attempting to develop into better communities and nations, not from the rush created by the latest natural disaster. 

Living in a country overrun by an alphabet soup of transitory relief organizations and pop-up, well-intended, but often misguided do-gooders drawn by the ease of raising funds for the sympathetic victims of a cataclysmic event who also happen, unfortunately, to be citizens of the poorest country in the hemisphere, I find myself wanting to scream, “We’ve had it with the clowns; send in the real missionaries!”