Are "Good Intentions" Good Enough?

I know I’m a tad bit late, but a couple months ago I finished reading Jamie Wright’s The Very Worst Missionary a Memoir or Whatever. If you know me, you know I’m a memoir junky so when I heard from several people that this a fun and necessary read, I purchased it on Kindle and dove right in. It didn’t take long before I was hooked. For one, the book is hilarious. But more than that, it’s painful and authentic (or painfully authentic?). I’m also a fan of people who use a sort-of dark humor to deliver hard and uncomfortable truths—a reason why I’m a HUGE fan of Mary Karr (if you haven’t read Liar’s Club yet, get on it ASAP).

Anyway, the book is Jamie’s journey of first becoming a Christian and then a missionary in Costa Rica. Her story is one that resonates a lot with my own. Like Jamie, I didn’t grow up evangelical, so coming to it as an adult was…interesting, to say the least. I certainly felt out of place at first, trying really hard to fit in to the Good Church Lady mold, but falling flat on my face over and over again. I think coming to Christianity as an adult gave both of us a sort-of advantage to see things a little more objectively, to recognize more easily the parts of the system (not Jesus, of course) that were broken.

For Jamie, the particular aspect of the system that she critiques is that of “missions.” This isn’t a new conversation, by any means. Jamie points out the economic damage done to communities by free missionary labor. She exposes what goes on behind the scenes in many “well-meaning” efforts. Included in this is the emotional harm done to orphans “when a never-ending stream of smiling volunteers comes and goes from their lives.” Besides highlighting how incredibly patronizing so much of the endeavor can be, Jamie tells of her experience with locals, and how they entrusted her with the very sad reality that many of them indeed play along with what the white saviors are doing. In one part, she shares the story of locals who pretended to “get saved” so the missionaries would keep coming back and giving them free stuff. Meanwhile, the missionaries take pictures and post about how “blessed” they are to have “led people to Christ.”

That reality is heart-wrenching for me, particularly because it felt so personal. I used to be one of those well-meaning, picture-posting, I’m-so-#blessed people—not just as a participant, but as a leader, for many years.

It all hit home for me when Jamie began to recount her weekly visitations to a particularly under-resourced neighborhood in a developing country (in her case, Costa Rica) to spend time giving snacks and playing with the “poor kids”—a common thing I used to do on my mission trips. Not only does Jamie highlight the relational damage that can be done to families when foreigners provide basic things that parents cannot, but she is honest (and right) about how we refuse people their dignity when we assume they’re as ignorant as we are.

“The more time I spent in the community, the more I realized that poor people are poor and perhaps uneducated, but they’re not dumb,” she says. Jamie explains that the mothers knew the SUV she would drive up in to feed their children was worth more than their family would see in decades, “and while I do think they knew we meant well, I’m pretty sure they also knew we were utterly clueless.”

I’ve been thinking about this since I read it months ago. It creeped into my mind this morning during my prayer/reflection/meditation/reading-whatever-you-want-to-call-it-time and stole the direction of my focus. I became overwhelmed thinking about the times I believed I was doing God’s work, only to be pushing folks away at best, or hurting them at worst. I began recalling my own moments of cluelessness on mission trips with both my mega-church in Miami and the mission organization I led for every summer. Well-intentioned, I went into communities thinking I was changing people’s lives without ever considering the fact that instead, I could be harming them, robbing them or their dignity. The truth is, I didn’t know a single thing about sustainable humanitarian work or the economics of the country I was “called to serve.”

Additionally, I was clueless in assuming that my group was the first and only one to share the gospel with them, that we brought some sort of spiritual gift that their own community couldn’t provide. I was clueless to assume that I could relate to them, particularly when I had no idea what they’re lived experience is, or that my privilege (and lack of awareness of it) made it nearly impossible to communicate the message of Jesus to them in a way that wasn’t patronizing and that actually sounded like…good news.

During my prayer time, all I could muster to God was, what did you think of that? I wondered, are “good intentions” enough? God, were you pleased with me in my naiveté or frustrated with my ignorance?

A few weeks after finishing the book, I flew to Boston to visit my sister. While I was there, we spent a day in Salem, complete with a trip to the Witch Trials museum. I had learned a whole lot about the Trials on Europe’s end during a Women in Church History class, but learning about what happened on the same soil as I was standing on felt different, eerie. We took this cheesy and terribly dated tour where we sat in a dark room while lights shined over still Papier-mâché-looking humans (albeit terrifying, if you ask me) as a voiceover shared how the Witch Trials all started. Perhaps many of you know this, but it was all a bunch of Bible-thumping Puritans that began and perpetuated the craze. And by Bible-thumping Puritans I mean… Christians, very much like us. The kind of Christians who really, really loved Jesus and wanted to do right by him. These Jesus-loving-Christians accused, shamed and murdered dozens of women and a few men because they thought the devil had taken over them (as it turns out, a group of young kids—perhaps due to boredom—were faking that they had lost their minds).

God, were you pleased with their well-intentions or frustrated by their ignorance?

There was a picture going around recently on Facebook of the famous “Declaration of Independence” painting of the US founding fathers, Christians who wanted to worship freely. In this particular picture, documentary filmmaker Arlen Parsa put a red dot over the faces of every God-fearing founding father who owned slaves—and as you can imagine, nearly every single face is covered.

God, were you pleased with their well-intentions or frustrated by their ignorance?

Remember when God said it’s a narrow road?  I’ve been wondering lately if the narrow road is that space few inhabit where good intention isn’t just the baseline, lowest bar we expect from Christians. I’ve been wondering if that narrow road that Christians are called to walk on with integrity is the road where good intention doesn’t just stand on its own, but is met holistically with preparation, skill, and knowledge and education. 

Someone from that old mega-church surprised me recently by reaching out for advice after we hadn’t spoken for several years. She called to receive a hopefully simple and straight forward answer on how to engage her faith in contexts where it’s hard (like family, for example), but after nearly-three hours of going back and forth about theology, faith, life, I concluded that there really is no simple and straight-forward answer because, well, doing this thing with integrity is not straight-forward or simple. Life and faith are complicated and for some reason, evangelicalism has made us uncomfortable with that. But I think that part of being a good steward is learning to wrestle well in the tension.

Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said it would be hard and that we would have to be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves: it takes actual effort to not perpetuate ignorance and live a faithful life. It takes time, learning, and patience to wade through the gray areas, admitting that we don’t know it all or have it all together. It takes humility to admit that perhaps what we’ve been taught to believe as right and well-intentioned can actually be wrong and harmful.

 Doing God’s work requires that we be holistic followers of Christ, not one-sided or naïve, but well-rounded, astute in our pursuits. 

And that narrow road? It’s where we refuse to be lazy exegetes, Christians “the world” has every right to make fun of. Perhaps that narrow road is a call to holistic living where the Holy Spirit collides with our passions and our education, where we can confidently stand in the gray area of life as we figure out how to share the message of Jesus thoughtfully and effectively, making this world a better place together, in the midst of the mess.