To a Young, White, Week-Long Missionary

A Guest Post By Liz Cooledge Jenkins

I’m excited for today’s guest post by my friend Liz Cooledge Jenkins! Her Substack, Growing Into Kinship, is a wonderful resource on patriarchy, peacemaking, and healing. I met Liz on the podcast last year, and her episode Nice Churchy Patriarchy, is still one of our most listened to episodes. I think you’ll enjoy her thoughts on one of those subjects every former evangelical understands.

The letter sat on my desk, looking at me, for weeks: the happy photos of college students hanging with friends in their wholesome Christian fellowship group; the brief but positive life updates from the son of an old friend from a former (conservative evangelical) church; the description of an upcoming week-long overseas mission trip; the request for support via prayer and finances.

I was surprised to find myself wrestling with the question of whether or not to give money. Even so many years removed from church environments that see short-term overseas evangelizing trips as good for our world, I found myself waffling a bit.

I remember how formative my own Christian fellowship group was for me in college, and not completely in a bad way. I remember writing support letters for a summer Christian service-learning program and being blown away when people actually gave money, some very generously. I remember how my world was expanded that summer, from spending time among communities very different from the mostly-wealthy, mostly-white communities I grew up in.

On this particular mission trip, the one my friend’s son is going on, the main activity is offering people water filters. Who wouldn’t want to increase access to clean water?

As I sat with the support letter, though, I realized that the definitive dealbreaker for me, at this time, is what my young acquaintance and his companions will be saying to the people they meet. The partner organization they’re working with offers literal water filters while also offering the idea of a water filter as an analogy for the gospel. Dirty water, made clean. As I re-read my acquaintance’s letter, I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give money toward the cause of white people telling people of color they’re dirty and need (a white evangelical version of) Jesus to make them clean.

The question of whether to donate settled, I then confronted a second question: Do I say something? Do I engage with the young white weeklong missionary, or do I simply not respond to the letter?

Not responding felt so easy. So non-confrontational.

But then I thought: What good does it do for people like me to stay silent about what we really believe at a time like this? About how we do and don’t see our world?

Writing back to my young acquaintance felt like one way—one very small way, but I believe small things like that add up—of speaking more honesty into our world. Of articulating a post-evangelical perspective on evangelism that might add to his experience or complicate it in some healthy way. Of encouraging just one young white weeklong missionary to consider what he might have to learn from the people he meets overseas and not only what message he has to bring them.

And so I wrote. And I wanted to share with you—an edited, redacted version, of course—in case it’s at all useful. Here it is.

Hi [name]!

I received your support letter a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking it over. Thank you for thinking of me! It’s awesome to hear that you’re thriving at [University], studying [major], and enjoying being involved in [Christian fellowship group]. I have so many great memories from my time in [different Christian fellowship group] in college—a spiritual community like that can be an amazing thing!

I’m writing to let you know that I’d be honored to partner with you in prayer for this trip, although I don’t plan to give financial support at this time, and I wanted you to know why.

I hope you know I support you as a human wholeheartedly. While I’ve moved away from the stream of the Christian faith that [Christian fellowship group] is a part of, I’m excited about the possibilities for learning and growth that an overseas trip can bring. I love the focus on expanding access to clean water, and I’m excited that you’ll get to talk and connect with people with very different backgrounds from your own. I hope the trip is everything you hope for and more!

The main thing that gives me pause here is the analogy of dirty water being made clean, as a way of describing the Gospel message—especially in the context of white missionaries explaining this analogy to non-white people. The language of “dirtiness” and “cleanness” has a long racialized history, with white people often considering themselves purer and closer to God than non-white people.

I’m haunted by a story African American theologian Willie James Jennings tells in the introduction to The Christian Imagination. When Jennings was a kid, two white men came through his mostly-Black neighborhood and spoke to Jennings’ mother, inviting her to their white church to experience a white-people-centered version of Jesus and the Gospel. But Jennings’ mother was already an important leader in her own Black church. The white missionaries didn’t consider this—how God was already present, how this woman was a pillar of faith, brilliant and thoughtful and skilled in leadership, someone from whom they could have learned so much.

I wonder what we communicate to people of color in other countries when white missionaries come in primarily carrying a message to share, rather than looking for what we might learn. It reminds me of the first white settlers who came to the land that would become the U.S. and thought they had a Gospel to give the native people but nothing to learn in return. Indigenous folks were often open to mutuality and figuring out how to share land together, but white settlers refused, took, slaughtered, and tried to destroy Indigenous cultures and traditions (a great book on all this is Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec). A few hundred years later, our Earth and our country are suffering from how deeply we lack the values Indigenous people would have taught us and can still teach us if we’re open to it: reciprocal relationship with the land, harmony in relationships with one another, equality, generosity, honesty, balance (more on Indigenous values in Becoming Rooted by Randy Woodley).

I hope you hear clearly that while I don’t think I can get behind the approach of the organization you’ll be serving with, I support you and hope this is a great experience for you. My prayer is that you’ll keep an open mind and see what you can learn and how different people’s perspectives on faith might challenge or change you. I really think this is a crucial part of our spiritual growth and faith formation as white people. It certainly has been (and continues to be) for me.

I would also welcome further conversation anytime—whether that’s now, or after you get back, or anytime at all.

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for hanging in there through a long and perhaps challenging note. If you have an update list and are willing to add me to it, I'd love that. Appreciate you!

Peace and blessings,

Liz

P.S. I don’t know if this is at all the way you would go about responding to a support letter; I don’t think it will look the same for everyone, and if you’ve said or done something different, I’d be curious to hear.

I hope more and more of us post-evangelical folks, progressive Christian folks, or anyone who finds themself unsure what to do with a support letter these days, might do something. Whether it takes the form of a letter or a phone call or a conversation over a cup of coffee, I hope we say something—something that feels right, true, and honest for us, and that is as kind as possible toward the generally well-intentioned missionary.

Our evangelical friends or acquaintances might think we’re heretics. They might think we’ve jumped off the liberal deep end. They might feel uncomfortable when confronted with our honesty. This is all okay.

And who knows? Maybe some people aren’t able to receive what we have to say now, but two or five or twenty years from now they might remember it. Post-evangelical folks know as well as anyone how tiny mustard seeds can grow. I know for certain that there are things people said to me when I was deep in the evangelical mindset—trying to help me, trying to show me a better way—that I wasn’t open to at the time, but I did listen, and I’ve thought of them in the years since.

Here’s to hard conversations marked by honesty and kindness. Sometimes it’s our job to initiate those, to go first. Here’s to having the courage to do so.

Photo by Lydia Matzal on Unsplash