Don Richardson
SAINTS AND CELEBRITIES: APPEALING TO THE MASSES
It has been the destiny of some missionaries to become celebrities. That was certainly true of David Livingstone, the greatest missionary celebrity of modern times, second only perhaps to Mother Teresa. But Adoniram Judson was also a celebrity. When Judson was speaking to a Baptist audience during a furlough in 1845, a Brown University professor wrote of the adulation expressed by the crowd:
Hundreds were gazing for the first time upon one, the story of whose labors and sorrows and sufferings had been familiar to them from childhood, and whose name they had been accustomed to utter with reverence and affection as that of the pioneer and father of American missions to the heathen. They recalled the scenes of toil and privation through which he had passed, they remembered the loved ones with whom he had been connected, and their bosoms swelled with irrepressible emotions of gratitude and delight.1
Ann Judson was also revered. “If she had lived in legendary instead of historical times,” wrote one of her biographers, “she would have ranked with Saint Agnes and Saint Cecilia.”2
C. T. Studd, England’s most outstanding cricket player, and six other Cambridge athletes and scholars became instant celebrities when they volunteered to serve as missionaries with the China Inland Mission. It did not hurt their image that they were all from wealthy (or at least affluent), well-bred English families. The back cover of Studd’s biography by Norman Grubb presents the contrast between youth and wealth, on the one hand, and sacrifice and self-denial, on the other:
Nurtured in the lap of comfort, educated at Eton and Cambridge, the hero of the British sport-loving public, C. T. Studd, whose Cambridge career has been described as “one long blaze of cricketing glory,” created a stir in the secular world of his youth by renouncing wealth and position to follow Christ. He was captain of the Eton XI in 1879, and of Cambridge University in 1883, being accorded in the latter year … “the premier position as an all around cricketer for the second year in succession.”3
Amy Carmichael was a celebrity—through her writings—though she never returned home to be surrounded by admiring crowds. Lottie Moon’s celebrity status only flowered after she died (conveniently on Christmas Eve). As the twentieth century progressed, there were other mission leaders and missionaries who gained celebrity status, among them John R. Mott, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Gladys Aylward, who was the subject of a Hollywood film. Celebrities in missions, like celebrities in the movies or in music or in sports, were often in the right place at the right time. Their ministries in many cases did not necessarily rise high above that of their nameless colleagues, but a particular event or a compelling personality or an admirer in a key position was the catalyst that launched them into a public role.
This has been true of Mother Teresa. She was not alone in devoting her life to sacrificial ministry. Indeed, “there may be hundreds of Mother Teresas doing similarly valuable work the world over,” writes Anne Sebba, but “the importance of the [Malcolm] Muggeridge film can hardly be overestimated.” It was not just the film but how she was portrayed: “She comes over very well on the screen because she does exude humility, there is nothing bogus about her. She was a symbol and so was Muggeridge, in his case a symbol of someone searching for goodness in the twentieth century.” People who met her often spoke of it as a spiritual encounter—sometimes transmitted through a third party. “Through meeting Muggeridge,” writes David Porter, one of her biographers, “I sensed that I was meeting her and, at a sort of third hand, meeting the Lord Himself.”4
Mother Teresa sprang from a centuries-old lineage of celebrated saintly lives in the Catholic tradition. Like her, they were known for self-denial and sacrificial service, and like her, they performed miracles. The stories of these saints is often categorized as hagiography—biographies that minimize or ignore the flaws of the subjects while accentuating the virtues. Hagiography is not limited to Catholic stories of the saints, however. In A Chance to Die, Elisabeth Elliot writes of Amy Carmichael that those who worked with her “found it nearly impossible, after her death, to think of any faults” they could attribute to her.5 In reference to Una Roberts Lawrence’s biography of Lottie Moon, published in 1927, Alan Neely writes:
It ranks with the “best” of twentieth-century missionary hagiographies, such as Rosalind Goforth’s account of her husband [Jonathan], Goforth of China (1973); Russell T. Hitt’s Jungle Pilot: The Life and Witness of Nate Saint (1973); James and Marti Hefley’s Unstilled Voices (1991); and Steve Estes’ Called to Die (1986), the story of Chet Bitterman, a Wycliffe translator.6
The old hagiography so prominent for centuries in Catholic and later in Protestant writings—particularly in accounts of missionaries—is no longer as treasured as it once was. Readers demand more honesty. Yet new missionary celebrities and heroes arise with every generation—sometimes, as in the case of Dr. Helen Roseveare, commended because of confessions of flaws and failures.
The danger of the celebrity status is the possibility of being pushed off the pedestal—as was the case with Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision. The motto inscribed in his Bible succinctly summed up his outlook on life: “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.” Yet with a heart that reached out to the whole world, he was unable to sustain the most intimate bonds of love with his own family. The love that he gave so freely to homeless orphans and ravished flood victims was given so sparingly to the ones who needed it most—particularly his wife Lorraine and his three daughters. Even before he had grown to celebrity status, he had left his family and threatened divorce, and the new worldwide ministry only seemed to exacerbate the problems. “Dr. Bob,” as he was affectionately called, had become a saintly legend throughout the Far East. But his ministry was not confined to that area of the world. For nearly a decade he held the distinction of being one of the “ten most traveled men in the world,” and everywhere he went he was hailed as a godsend. Back in the United States he traveled from coast to coast, awakening American Christians to the needs of the underprivileged world, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for orphanages, hospitals, and evangelistic ministries. When he returned home from his ten months of travel a year, family conflict inevitably ensued. There were also increasing difficulties with his board of directors. The friction continued for many years until 1967, when matters reached a boiling point and he resigned in a rage. “The next day World Vision presented him with legal documents of agreement, and Bob Pierce signed his life’s work away.”7
In 1968 Pierce traveled to the Far East with Lorraine on a “Good-bye Tour” sponsored as a final parting gesture by World Vision—no doubt in part to maintain their contacts in that part of the world. Near the end of that trip a call came from their depressed oldest daughter, Sharon, pleading with her father to come home. But he refused to interrupt his schedule. Lorraine flew home immediately, only to “discover her daughter had slashed her wrists in an attempt to end a life she found too painful to endure.” Later that year Sharon did take her life, at age twenty-seven.8 Suffering from physical and mental exhaustion, Pierce separated himself even more from his family, and never again would they enjoy a sustained happy relationship.
In later years he began traveling again, and with World Vision support he founded Samaritan’s Purse, an organization that provided assistance to missionaries in Asia. He died in September 1978, remembered by many people around the world as “Dr. Bob,” the man with the big heart. He was a deeply flawed man who, despite his failures, gained worldwide recognition for his good works—no small legacy to leave behind.
While Bob Pierce was flying around the world funding humanitarian ministries, Bruce Olson was essentially lost to the outside world, deep in the jungles of Colombia—though he would emerge often enough to win celebrity status that in some ways would rank with that of “Dr. Bob.” He wrote a best-selling book that tells of his mission work that won him the personal friendship of five presidents of Colombia, appearances before the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and many other honors. His fascinating autobiographical account entitled Bruchko (the name given to him by the natives) is summarized on the back cover:
What happens when a 19-year-old boy leaves home against his parents’ wishes and heads into the jungles to evangelize a murderous tribe of South American Indians? … What Bruce Olson discovered by trial and error brings a revolutionary message to traditional missionary activity. Olson has lived with the Motilones since 1961. He has reduced their language into writing. He has translated several New Testament books into the Motilone language. He has taught the Motilones health measures, agricultural techniques and the value of preserving their cultural heritage…. This epic account marks an exciting milestone in the history of missions.9
In 1988, a decade after he published his autobiography, Olson was taken hostage by ELN, a guerrilla group, which accused him of doing work that was detrimental to the native Colombian people. The group announced that he had been sentenced to death, but he was released after a nine-month captivity through the combined efforts of the Red Cross, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, and the State Department.
The greatest celebrity saint of the twentieth century in the minds of many people was Mother Teresa. In common with Bob Pierce, she gained worldwide recognition for good works, but without the glaring personal flaws. Like him, she struggled with administrative failures, though unlike him, she had an adoring throng of followers who did not try to interfere with her uncontested leadership of the mission. Her detractors focused primarily on matters of administration or philosophy such as her adamant stance against birth control and family planning—rarely attacking her personally except as related to authoritarian leadership. But no amount of criticism has been able to dim the shining star of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. “As you fly into Calcutta today, city of twelve million and growing, you are welcomed” by a giant billboard, writes Anne Sebba, “which announces this as the city of Tagore the poet, Ray the film maker and Teresa the nun. Extraordinary as it may seem, she has become a tourist attraction. Of the three, it is Teresa who is the best known internationally and it is she who has made Calcutta famous anew in the West.”10
Born Agnes Bojaxhiu in Albania in 1910, the youngest of three children, she lived a life of modest comfort until her father died in 1919, leaving his business ventures to his partners. Despite poverty, her mother was known in the community for helping others, and her example did not go unnoticed by her youngest daughter. Her mother’s devout faith and devotion to Mary also had a profound influence on young Agnes, who was assured of her mother’s blessing when she announced that she was going to be a missionary in India. At age nineteen, she did just that. “She was caught in a wave of enthusiasm,” writes Edward Le Joly, for “spreading the gospel in the missions, an enthusiasm generated by the writings of Pope Pius XI.”11
In the winter of 1929 Teresa was sailing up the Hooghly River to Bengal, as William Carey had done 135 years earlier. For two years she trained as a novice, and in 1931 she took her vows to become a Loreto sister, serving as a teacher specializing in geography—a position she held several years until she was named headmistress.
Teresa’s call to minister to the poorest of the poor did not come from a sense of pity for the sick and homeless in Calcutta—a point that is repeatedly emphasized by those who have been closest to her:
“This is how it happened,” she told her spiritual director, Father Julien Henry. “I was travelling to Darjeeling by train [for my annual retreat], when I heard the voice of God.” Father Henry then asked her how she had heard his voice above the noise of a rattling train and she had replied with a smile: “I was sure it was God’s voice. I was certain that He was calling me. The message was clear: I must leave the convent to help the poor by living among them. This was a command, something to be done, something definite. I knew where I had to be. But I did not know how to get there.”12
Apart from the “voice of God,” however, Mother Teresa may have heard voices from the past. She had never imagined herself spending her life cloistered behind the walls of a girls’ school for India’s elite. The stories she had read in Catholic Missions as a girl were stories of self-denial and danger—stories about “sisters so poor that they lived in thatched huts with wild animals rampaging through the encampments and hardly enough money for food and clothes … and one issue told how a Mother Superior was saved by her orphans from a snake poised to bite her, another of a lucky escape from a tiger.”13
It took two years before Mother Teresa was granted permission to leave the convent, and soon she had three followers join her—all students from the Loreto school. That same year she obtained Indian citizenship and applied to Rome to form a new congregation, Missionaries of Charity. From the beginning, it was different from other religious orders—most significantly, it had no “walls” of security. “Our Sisters must go out on the street,” she insisted. “They must take the tram like our people, or walk to where they are going. That is why we must not start institutions and stay inside. We must not stay behind walls and have our people come to us.”14
Mother Teresa, missionary to India who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
During the 1950s the Missionaries of Charity grew steadily, and in 1960, when Mother Teresa left India for the first time in more than three decades, there were more than one hundred sisters in the movement. Her travels took her to America and Europe, and as she spread the message, funds poured in. Like Hudson Taylor a century earlier, she emphasized that she would not ask for money because she had no need to. “She was entirely dependent on the providence of God,” writes Sebba. “But she did remind her audience that she was giving them, too, a chance to do something beautiful for God. This, rather than directly appealing for donations, was a far more powerful method of raising money.”15 In the years that followed, the number of sisters grew to the thousands. Houses were established in cities all over the world, and the aura of saintliness accorded Mother Teresa was bestowed on them as well—at least in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, a one-time agnostic who became their greatest champion:
Their life is tough and austere by worldly standards, certainly: yet I never met such delightful, happy women, or such an atmosphere of joy as they create. Mother Teresa, as she is fond of explaining, attaches the utmost importance to this joyousness. The poor, she says, deserve not just service and dedication, but also the joy that belongs to human love…. The Missionaries of Charity … are multiplying at a fantastic rate. Their Calcutta house is bursting at the seams, and as each new house is opened, there are volunteers clamoring to go there. As the whole story of Christendom shows, if everything is asked for, everything—and more—will be accorded; if little, then nothing.16
In December of 1979 Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, bringing the spotlight of the world on her selfless missionary service. When asked how she identified herself, she responded: “By blood and origin, I am all Albanian. My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the whole world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.”17 Wherever she went, she was esteemed—whether speaking at a Harvard University graduation or at a Capitol Hill luncheon, as Dee Jepson, whose husband was a U.S. Senator, related: “In came this tiny woman, even smaller than I had expected, wearing that familiar blue and white habit, over it a gray sweater that had seen many better days…. As that little woman walked into the room, her bare feet in worn sandals, I saw some of the most powerful leaders in this country stand to their feet with tears in their eyes. Just to be in her presence.”18
Mother Teresa died in 1997, her death overshadowed by the tragic auto accident that took the life of Princess Diana of the United Kingdom the same weekend—an old nun and a young princess who considered each other friends.
While Mother Teresa and Bob Pierce were seeking to evangelize the world through humanitarian acts of charity, others, like Brother Andrew, were taking a more combative approach. God’s Smuggler, the title of a popular book about him, is the title most frequently associated with this unordained Dutchman whose controversial ministry has frequently been the focus of international attention. He has been described as “the James Bond of the cloth,” though he insists that his 1967 bestseller is a “curse” because it portrays him as a hero—an unusual claim, since he is the author of that book. The book brought him celebrity status, reportedly selling over ten million copies in twenty-seven languages.
His mission outreach, known as Open Doors, was initially focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but since that region of the world opened up to mission ventures, his attention has been largely on China and the Muslim world. Defying government laws and authorities, Open Doors is guided by the philosophy that it is far better to “obey God rather than men.”
In many ways the daring risks involved in smuggling Bibles across the borders of enemy countries was well suited to the young Dutch army commando whose childhood days in the 1930s had been filled with war games with neighborhood friends. Brother Andrew (a pseudonym) was born into a proud Protestant family who, like most Hollanders, suffered immensely during the Nazi occupation of their land. After that devastating war he joined the army and soon found himself fighting to maintain Dutch rule in the tropical jungles of Indonesia. This was not a setting where heroes were easily made, but by his own testimony he quickly established a reputation for himself: “I became famous throughout the Dutch troops in Indonesia for my crazy bravado on the battlefield. I bought a bright yellow straw hat and wore it into combat with me. It was a dare and an invitation. ‘Here I am!’ it said. ‘Shoot me!’ Gradually I gathered around me a group of boys who were reacting as I did…. When we fought, we fought as madmen.”19
It was inevitable that someone from the enemy camp would challenge his dare, and Andrew was soon on a hospital ship headed for home, nursing a badly wounded right ankle. During his hospitalization he spent many hours reading the Bible, a book that he had never had time for before. Back in Holland in 1950, he was converted, and almost immediately he was challenged to become a missionary. But to serve under the Dutch Reformed Church would have required twelve years of further schooling, so he looked elsewhere for sponsorship. Through the help of friends, he went to London to learn English and then on to Glasgow, Scotland, to study at the WEC (Worldwide Evangelization Crusade) training school, from which he graduated in 1955.
Although it had been his intention to serve as a missionary with WEC, that organization had no ministry behind the Iron Curtain—an area of the world that captured his attention. Just before his graduation, he had come across an advertisement for a youth festival in Warsaw. It was a colorful piece of propaganda intended to lure Western youth to that beautiful city to see firsthand what socialism could offer them, but for him it was an opportunity for ministry in a country that had been forgotten by Christians in the West.
His initial trip to Warsaw paved the way for speaking invitations back home in Holland and stirred his interest in visiting other Eastern European countries. His second trip took him to Czechoslovakia, where the rigid crackdown on religion became evident immediately. What impressed him most was the scarcity of Bibles, unavailable even at the largest religious bookstore in the country. In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he discovered the same problem. While speaking at a religious meeting, he learned that out of the entire group, only seven people, including the pastor, owned a Bible. “That night,” he later wrote, “I promised God that as often as I could lay my hands on a Bible, I would bring it to these children of His behind the wall that men had built. How I would buy the Bibles, how I would get them in, I didn’t know. I only knew that I would bring them—here to Yugoslavia, and to Czechoslovakia, and to every other country where God opened the door long enough for me to slip through.”20
For fifteen years Brother Andrew and his recruits smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain with few arrests. The work remained relatively obscure until after his widely circulated book God’s Smuggler was published. People from all over the world wanted to become involved, and contributions to the work dramatically increased. At the same time that the book was informing the Christian world of his work, it was also informing communist authorities—a development that brought a virtual halt to his trips into Eastern Europe.
But he continued to seek out risky ventures. On the day that the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968, he tells how he packed his station wagon with Bibles and headed for the border. “I didn’t need a prayer meeting to tell me what to do. I figured if the Russians were coming to meet me halfway, I’d better get moving!” According to him, there was so much confusion at the border that the patrol officers waved him through without asking to see a visa or checking his vehicle. On his way to Prague, he encountered two divisions of the Soviet army, but he managed to get through without being detained. There he was invited to preach in a church, and afterwards the people tearfully thanked him for coming. Then, with a group of Czech Christians, he went out into the streets and distributed tracts and Bibles. “The Czech citizens took them like starving men taking bread. Czech authorities were too busy coping with the Russians to worry about arresting us, and we gave away tens of thousands of tracts before we finally depleted our supply and I headed back for Holland.”21
In 1965 he made his first trip to mainland China, where he found Christians requesting Bibles, and once again he began smuggling operations. Following the fall of Saigon in 1976 and the Communist takeover of Laos and Cambodia, he turned his attention to those countries. The most publicized and controversial Bible smuggling operation he conducted occurred in the fall of 1981. “Operation Pearl,” as it was dubbed, was, according to Time magazine, the “largest operation of its kind in the history of China.” Led by an ex-Marine, it was “executed with military precision.” More than two hundred tons of Bibles, packed in waterproof containers, were shipped from the United States to Hong Kong and from there were transported on a barge to the southeast China port city of Swatow, all at the cost of some six million dollars. There were harrowing moments when the crew feared they had been discovered, but the Bibles were unloaded without incident, and not until four hours after the barge had departed did authorities storm the beach. Hundreds of the estimated twenty thousand Chinese believers who had come to help were arrested, but those in charge claimed that well over half of the Bibles ended up in the hands of Chinese Christians for whom they were intended.22
As a result of this illegal operation, Chinese officials tightened restrictions on religious activities, causing an outcry against his organization, Open Doors, by some Western and Chinese churchmen who feared that such efforts only served to further alienate Chinese Christians from their leaders. Others criticized Brother Andrew on ethical grounds. In response, he wrote a small book entitled The Ethics of Smuggling, defending his work:
We do it because we know what we are doing. This world is enemyoccupied territory, filled with souls to whom Christ holds the rightful claim. Under his explicit command, we go in by every possible means—partial truth, concealment of truth, interpretation, change and opposition, or any other form of strategy that will help us get in there with the gospel….
It’s time we stop this silly bickering and instead use Holy Spirit boldness to see the nations as God sees them….
We are not facing an ethical issue but a loyalty issue. If we are true followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, we simply go into all the world because he sends us. We need no welcome, we need no invitation, we need no permission from the government, we need no red-carpet treatment, we need no VIP reception—unless it means Very Important Prisoner for Christ’s sake.23
But with the criticism came praise. “Operation Pearl … inspired calls from potential donors willing to finance massive new Bible-smuggling ventures to China or behind the Iron Curtain.”24 By the turn of the twenty-first century most of the criticism of Bible smuggling related to the high cost of such operations—particularly into China—where inexpensive Bibles printed there were readily available.
In an interview in 1995 with Michael Maudlin of Christianity Today, Brother Andrew, in what some might regard an exaggerated claim, stated that Muslim radicals had disclosed their political plans with him:
Hamas has outlined to me their plan to take over that area [Lebanon]. They’ve told me their timetable and what they’re going to do. And yet there’s no group in the Middle East more open to the presentation of Christ than Hamas. Hezbollah has even begged me for very open publicized dialogue with evangelical Christian leaders. But I cannot find any Christians who are willing.25
In the face of widespread criticism, Brother Andrew emphasized that “smuggling” is “only a small part” of the total ministry of Open Doors. Yet he conceded that it is the “smuggling” aspect that had an adventurous appeal to many people. The label has served him well. As “God’s Smuggler,” he entered the third millennium in his seventies, still drawing crowds.
One of the most sought-after speakers of the late twentieth century on the international missions circuit was Dr. Helen Roseveare, whose harrowing adventures as a missionary doctor in the Congo captured the attention of her listeners. Such attention and adulation would have been incomprehensible during her early years in Africa when she clashed with her colleagues and mission board on matters of medical education and community health.
Roseveare was born in Cornwall, England, in 1925. Her father, who had been knighted for his patriotic service during the war, was a renowned mathematician, keenly interested in the education of his children. At twelve Helen was sent away to an exclusive girls’ school, and after that to Cambridge, where she received her medical degree. During her freshman year at Cambridge, she turned away from her Anglo-Catholic background and joined the ranks of the Evangelicals. Her commitment for missionary service was natural. Her father’s brothers and her mother’s sister had served as missionaries, and from childhood she had contemplated being a missionary herself. That day came in 1953, when she sailed for the Congo to serve with the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
WEC’s focus was evangelism, and medicine was only a secondary sideline, which suited Roseveare, who envisioned her own ministry as primarily evangelism. Once in the Congo, however, she found the medical needs overwhelming. Her solution was to establish a training center where nurses would be taught the Bible and basic medicine and then sent back to their villages to handle routine cases, teach preventive medicine, and serve as lay evangelists. It was a far-reaching plan, but from the start she was blocked at every turn by her colleagues, who believed that a mission should not become involved in training the nationals in such fields as medicine.
Through sheer determination Roseveare prevailed, however. Two years after arriving in the Congo, after spending months in the building process, she had set up a medical center in Ibambi, and her first four students had passed their government medical exams. But with hardly a chance to catch her breath, she was relocated at Nebobongo in an old leprosy camp that had become overgrown by the jungle. She had forcefully argued against the move, but to no avail. There she built another medical center and continued training African nurses. She had worked hard against insurmountable odds, and she had succeeded. It was hers, and she was proud of what she had accomplished.
Roseveare’s strong will and determination might easily have been overlooked in a male medical doctor, but she was perceived as a threat to many of her male colleagues. So, apparently in an effort to keep her in her place, a decision was made at the annual field conference in 1957 to relocate John Harris, a young British doctor, and his wife to Nebobongo to head the medical work. Roseveare was devastated:
In her terms, he’s just taken over Nebobongo—her place, which she’d built up out of nothing, out of her dreams, out of her heart, out of the money she’d raised. This was the place where she’d dug the water holes, cleared the ditches, fired the bricks. She had acknowledged the facts that you could not have two people in charge, that he was a man, and that in Africa a man was the superior being, so she handed over the keys. Then she found she couldn’t take it. Perhaps she had been her own boss too long. But now she had lost everything. She had always taken morning prayers: he took them now. She had always taken Bible class; Dr. Harris took it now. Dr. Harris organized the nurses, and Helen had always done that. Everything that had been hers was now his.26
From the beginning there was almost continual tension between the two doctors that more than once culminated in bitter controversy. On one occasion Harris arbitrarily fired Roseveare’s chauffeur on the grounds that he had used the van without permission. She was furious that Harris had fired him without consulting her.
WEC missionaries were scheduled for furloughs every seven years, but due to ill health she returned home in 1958 after only five years on the field. She was disillusioned with missionary work and, according to her biographer, “feeling that it was unlikely she would ever return to Congo.”27 But she became convinced that her real problem was her singleness. If she had a doctor-husband who would work with her and stand by her during the difficult times, she reasoned, everything would be all right.
Helen Roseveare, missionary doctor to the Congo.
Once her mind was made up, Roseveare did not vacillate. In the words of a missionary colleague, “she couldn’t drag everybody after her at her speed. You can’t keep pace. You’re walking stride for stride and suddenly she’s a hundred yards ahead. And just when you’re catching up, she’s off two hundred yards in another direction.”28 In her desire for a husband, she went full speed ahead, planning and scheming. While taking additional medical training she met a young doctor who, she became convinced, was right for her. She bought new clothes, permed her hair, and even resigned from the mission in an effort to win him, but the plan did not work. It was a very trying time for her, as she later confessed:
The Lord spoke very clearly during my furlough that he was able to satisfy me…. I wasn’t interested in a spiritualized husband. I wanted a husband with a couple of arms. Well, in the end I jolly near mucked up the whole furlough…. I couldn’t find a husband in the mission, so I got out of the mission. God let me go a long way, and I made an awful mess. Then God graciously pulled me back and the mission graciously accepted me back.29
Roseveare’s return to the Congo in 1960 coincided with that country’s longsought independence. It was an uneasy time for whites, and many missionaries believed the risks were too high. Some left with their families immediately. Helen, however, had no intention of turning around and going home. If God had truly called her back to the Congo, she was convinced he would protect her. Her stand made it difficult for the men. How would it look if they slunk away while the women bravely stayed on, and who would protect the women if they were gone? But in Helen’s mind, such reasoning had no merit and was, in her biographer’s words, “pure male chauvinism.”The very fact that most of the men were married made their circumstances different. And as to protection, there was little a male missionary could do.
Roseveare’s decision to stay offered her tremendous opportunities for service. Harris and his wife were on furlough, and she was once again in charge of the medical center at Nebobongo. Much was accomplished in the three years that followed, despite the political uneasiness as the Simba Rebels gained strength in their opposition to the new government. Reports came periodically of attacks against missionaries elsewhere, including reports of missionary women who had “suffered” at the hands of the rebels—an act so degrading and humiliating it could not even be named. Roseveare herself endured a burglary and an attempted poisoning, but always in her mind the situation was improving—and even if it was not, too many people depended on her. She had to stay.
By the summer of 1964 the Congo was in the throes of a bloody civil war as the Simba Rebels violently took control of village after village. On August 15, the mission compound at Nebobongo was occupied by soldiers, and for the next five months Roseveare was in captivity, though she remained at the compound, living in her own house until November. Brutal atrocities were committed in the name of black nationalism, and few whites escaped the violence and bloodshed. Helen was no exception. On the night of October 29, while the compound was under rebel occupation, she was overpowered by a black rebel soldier in her little bungalow. It was a night of terror. She tried to escape, but it was useless: “They found me, dragged me to my feet, struck me over head and shoulders, flung me on the ground, kicked me, dragged me to my feet only to strike me again—the sickening, searing pain of a broken tooth, a mouth full of sticky blood, my glasses gone. Beyond sense, numb with horror and unknown fear, driven, dragged, pushed back to my own house—yelled at, insulted, cursed.”
Once in the house, it was all over in a few minutes. According to her biographer, the soldier “forced her backwards on the bed, falling on top of her…. The will to resist and fight had been knocked out of her. But she screamed over and over again…. The brutal act of rape was accomplished with animal vigor and without mercy.”30
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” rang over and over again through her numbed consciousness. Though she never could have understood it at the time, that terrible violation allowed her to have a ministry to others. One young Italian nun on the verge of a mental collapse, having been repeatedly raped, was convinced she had lost her purity and thus her salvation. The Mother Superior had tried in vain to reason with her and only reluctantly sought out Roseveare, whose frankness about her own experience and her spiritual insights brought consolation. It was a cathartic time for both of them—a time that helped prepare Helen for more sexual brutality that she would endure before her release.
Her rescue came on the last day of 1964. For months Roseveare had faced the almost daily threat of death; she hardly knew how to deal with her newfound freedom and the rude shock of suddenly being back home. There was a sense of joy and relief but also a sense of great sorrow as she listened to horror stories of the martyrdom of some of her dearest friends and colleagues. Initially, the prospect of returning to Africa seemed remote. But as the Congo political situation improved and as heartrending letters from African coworkers and friends arrived, the pull to Africa became intense. She was needed now more than ever.
Roseveare returned to Africa in March of 1966. Arriving at the devastated mission compound, she was greeted with jubilation, but she soon discovered that life in the Congo had irrevocably changed since her first term in the 1950s. Things would never be the same. The new spirit of independence and nationalism had penetrated every area of society, including the church, and no longer was there an automatic feeling of respect and admiration—especially from the younger generation—for the lady doctor who had sacrificed so much for the Congo.
Had Roseveare simply been caring for the sick, her work might have been more appreciated, but as it was, her seven-year term was filled with turmoil and disappointment. Africans were now in control, and as a white woman, she was denied the authority she needed as a teacher. Students challenged her in the classroom and resented her demands for excellence. Their careless work habits clashed with her drive and dictatorial ways.
Despite her remarkable sacrifice and great accomplishments during those seven years, Roseveare left Africa in 1973 broken in spirit. Students had rebelled against her authority, and even her colleagues questioned her leadership ability. It was a tragedy, at least in human terms, that her twenty years of service in Africa ended in such a way. Her own words tell the story best:
When I knew I was coming home from the field and a young medical couple were taking my place at the college and an African colleague was taking over the directorship of the hospital, I organized a big day. It was to be a welcome to the two new doctors, a handover to my colleague, graduation day for the students in the college, and my farewell. A big choir had been practicing for five months. I got lots of cassettes to record everything and films to snap everything. Then at the last moment the whole thing fell to bits. The student body went on strike. I ended up having to resign the college where I’d been the director twenty years.31
Roseveare returned home to face a “very, very lonely period” in her life. But instead of bitterness there was a new spirit of humility and a new appreciation for Christ’s death on the cross. She was not prepared for what would follow—an even greater ministry than her ministry in Africa. In the following decades, Alan Burgess wrote her biography, she wrote several autobiographical books, and the film Mama Luka featured her work in Africa. She became a muchsought-after, internationally known speaker for missions—hailed for her honest reflections on her own failures—a breath of fresh air in a profession that for too long was stifled by an image of super-sainthood.
Another English woman whose missionary outreach has gained the attention of the broader public is Jackie Pullinger, whose work in the Walled City has been the subject of books and several television documentaries. Like Mother Teresa, her mission was to the “poorest of the poor”—in this case in a walled, drug-infested area of Hong Kong. She arrived in the Walled City, the area called Hak Nam (which in Chinese means “darkness”) in 1966. “Behind these tawdry shops rose the ramshackle skyscrapers,” writes Pullinger, telling of her first visit. “We squeezed through a narrow gap between the shops and started walking down a slime-covered passageway. I will never forget the smell and the darkness, a fetid smell of rotten foodstuffs, excrement, offal and general rubbish.”The narrow alleys, filled with opium and gambling dens and drug-ravaged prostitutes were dark even at midday, except for occasional shafts of sunlight. It was a lawless six-acre cesspool of humanity—tens of thousands—where police rarely ventured. Such a place seemed impossible in the midst of the wealth of Hong Kong, but there was a reason, as Pullinger explained, writing in 1980:
How can such a place exist inside the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong? Over eighty years ago when Britain apportioned to herself not only the Chinese island of Hong Kong, but also the mainland Peninsula of Kowloon, and the Chinese territories behind it, one exception was made.
The old wall village of Kowloon was to remain under Chinese Imperial Administration…. The Chinese magistrate died—he was never succeeded by either Chinese or British, and lawlessness inside the Walled City came to stay. It became a haven for gold smuggling, drug smuggling, illegal gambling dens and every kind of vice.32
In an era when community and mission teams were being emphasized, Pullinger was the ultimate example of individualism—a true “lone-ranger.” But she defended her decision to go alone with neither a partner nor mission board support: “Abraham was willing to leave his country and follow Jehovah to a promised land without knowing where he was going,” she argued. “In the same way thousands of years later Gladys Aylward journeyed in faith to China.”33
Born a twin in a family of four daughters, she had sensed a call to missions at a young age. After graduating from the Royal College of Music, “the missionary idea came back,” she later recalled. “So I wrote to Africa (that’s where missionaries go to) to schools, to societies, to broadcasting companies. And they all wrote back, no—they did not want me.” But after a dream in which she saw Hong Kong in the middle of a map of Africa, she decided to venture out on her own. The advice of a minister launched her on her journey: “If I were you, I would go out and buy a ticket for a boat going on the longest journey you can find and pray to know where to get off.” That advice, combined with her dream, brought her to Hong Kong.34
Pullinger was able to make connections with others who were ministering in the Walled City, and she began teaching classes part-time in singing, percussion band, and English at a mission-run school. But her primary concern was a youth club that she organized and conducted with occasional volunteer help. To those who wondered what kind of work she actually did, she had a ready reply: “I’m doing unstructured Youth work.”35
Initially, Pullinger saw very little success in her ministry. She struggled with the language, and most of those who showed interest turned out to be “rice Christians”—expecting money or something else from what they perceived to be a rich English woman. But then, quite suddenly, things began to change, as young men made decisions that took hold. She credits “speaking in tongues”—the power of the Holy Spirit—for turning things around. “As I continued praying in the Spirit,” she testifies, “the results became apparent when more boys like Christopher made decisions to become Christians.”36
Christopher was going through initiation to become one of the Triads, a Mafia-like organization that had its roots in the early nineteenth century. By the time Pullinger became familiar with them they had “degenerated into hundreds of separate Triad societies all claiming to be part of the Triad tradition.” Yet they still had power by the very fact that they “inspired terror” both inside and outside the Walled City. Christopher had attended the Youth Club but then dropped out and avoided Pullinger—until one day when he was cornered in a narrow passageway—she carrying her accordion and blocking the way so that he was unable to pass by. “I asked him to carry the instrument for me to the repair shop.” Through that encounter and her “praying in the Spirit,” he severed his connections with the Triads, got a legitimate job, turned his life around, and began helping out in the Youth Club.37
Standard evangelism tactics did not work for Pullinger in her ministry to people in the Walled City. Rather than “insisting that new young Christians join the church,” she writes, “I expanded our Bible study group; we met several times a week and were now open on Sunday mornings also…. We had raucous singing sessions and ping pong. If I insisted on a prayer, most of them would go outside and hoot in a friendly fashion in the alley till I had got it over with. Then back they swarmed.” She justified her lack of emphasis on Christian literature, after an experience with a young man who expressed interest in becoming a Christian. She talked with him and then gave him a gospel of John. With that he left and she did not see him again for two years. When she unexpectedly encountered him one day, she asked why he had stayed away for so long. He responded: “I wanted to know Jesus and you gave me a library.”That response set the stage for a new direction in her thinking: “I re-examined some of my concepts about studying the word of God. The early Christians certainly had no Bibles; they must have learned another way.”38 She was determined to focus on personal interaction and not insist that reading be a required aspect of Christian devotion.
Despite her best efforts, Pullinger faced setbacks in her work. The more influence she had, the more threatening her work became, and there were some who wanted her out of the Walled City. After a break-in and a night of vandalism that could have destroyed her Youth Club, she determinedly cleaned up the mess and repaired the damage. After that, she was given unsolicited protection from a notorious gang leader whom she referred to as “Big Brother.” But she never had enough help to accomplish what needed to be done: “Many people came to me and asked to help in the club. It sounded romantic and exciting to work in the Walled City, but few stuck it [out] more than a few weeks.” Her solution? “I learned how to cat-nap, sleeping on busses and ferries.”39
Her most effective coworkers were those whose home was the Walled City and who had been converted through her ministry. Through their outreach, the work continued to expand and adjust to change—including the destruction of her “mission field.” In 1993 work began on the demolition of the Walled City. In its place a park was built. For many people the adjustment was difficult, and Pullinger was there in the transition. In the years since, the work has continued to focus on drug rehabilitation and evangelism, and there are centers and camps not only in Hong Kong but elsewhere around the world—in India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Europe.
Reflecting back over her early years of ministry, Pullinger writes: “It was a time of learning and of growing up: often I was in awful confusion.”40 But those years laid the foundation for a worldwide ministry of bringing hope to society’s most hopeless. The secret of her effective ministry may have been her perspective—her attitude toward her surroundings—that stayed with her through the decades, even after the Walled City was no more:
I loved this dark place. I hated what was happening in it but I wanted to be nowhere else. It was almost as if I could already see another city in its place and that city was ablaze with light. It was my dream. There was no more crying, no more death or pain…. I had no idea how to bring this about but with “visionary zeal” imagined introducing the Walled City people to the one who could change it all: Jesus.41
One of the bestselling mission books of the twentieth century was Don Richardson’s Peace Child, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, became a Reader’s Digest Book-of-the-Month selection, and was made into a film. His book Lords of the Earth was also a bestseller. Richardson put missiological issues in story form that caught the attention of laypeople. His principle of Redemptive Analogy—“the application to local custom of spiritual truth”—generated debate in missiological circles after he first introduced the concept in a seminar at Dallas Theological Seminary in 1973.
Don Richardson, missionary to Irian Jaya and author of Peace Child.
It was in a chapel service at Prairie Bible Institute in 1955 that Richardson, then twenty years old, responded to the call to foreign missions. For him it was a very specific call to the headhunting tribes of Netherlands New Guinea. Among the students who also heard the call that day was Carol Soderstrom, who would become his wife five years later. In 1962, after completing a course with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and awaiting the birth of their first child, the Richardsons sailed for New Guinea to work with the Regions Beyond Missionary Union among the Sawi, known for cannibalism and headhunting. The setting was quickly captured by Richardson’s colorful writing:
The brooding jungle stood tall against the sky, walling in the overgrown clearing as if to create an arena for an impending contest…. The wildness of the locale seemed to taunt me. Something in the mood of the place seemed to say mockingly, “I am not like your tame, manageable Canadian homeland. I am tangled. I am too dense to walk through. I am hot and steamy and drenched with rain. I am hip-deep mud and six-inch sago thorns. I am death adders and taipans and leeches and crocodiles. I am malaria and dysentery and filariasis and hepatitis.”42
If fear of treachery and disease weighed heavily on their conscious and subconscious thinking, fear of never coming to grips with the language was a very conscious struggle. The nineteen tenses of each verb and the complex vocabulary was mind boggling. “In English you open your eyes, your heart, a door, a tin can or someone’s understanding, all with one humdrum verb ‘open.’ But in Sawi you fagadon your eyes, anahagkon your heart, tagavon a door, tarifan a tin can, and dargamon a listener’s understanding.”43 Though he frequently felt as though his “brain circuits would get shorted,” he maintained an eightto ten-hour-day language learning schedule and soon became proficient enough to communicate in Sawi. He viewed the task as a “great adventure”: “I often felt like a mathematician must feel as he tackles problems and breaks through into new formulas which work like magic.”44
As he learned the language and lived with the people, he became more aware of the gulf that separated his Christian worldview from the worldview of the Sawi: “In their eyes Judas, not Jesus, was the hero of the Gospels, Jesus was just the dupe to be laughed at.”45 Eventually Richardson discovered what he referred to as a Redemptive Analogy that pointed to the Incarnate Christ far more clearly than any biblical passage alone could have done. What he discovered was the Sawi concept of the Peace Child.
The warlike nature of the Sawi was a factor that had greatly troubled him from the earliest days of his residence among them. Despite his best efforts, he could not prevent the tribal wars among the three villages in the vicinity of their work. He blamed himself: “I concluded … that Carol and I had unintentionally deprived Haenam, Kamur and Yohwi [the three villages] of the mutual isolation they needed to survive in relative peace by drawing them together into one community. It followed that for the good of the people, we ought to leave them. It would be a bitter pill to swallow, but I knew without us, they would scatter to their deep jungle homes and be at peace.”46
So distressed were the Sawi on hearing of his proposed departure that they met in a special tribal session and then announced to him that the following day they were going to make peace. Encouraged by this turn of events, he anxiously awaited the next morning. Not long after dawn, the Sawi peace ritual began. The diplomatic process, though rarely exercised, was a deeply emotional experience. Young children from each of the warring villages were to be exchanged.
As long as any of those children lived, the peace would continue. The decision as to whose child would be given up was a wrenching ordeal. Mothers with little children were filled with apprehension when they realized what was happening. Finally, a young man grabbed his only child, rushed toward the enemy camp, and literally gave his son to one of his enemies. A child was given in return for his, and peace was established. It was a peace based on trust—an element that had seemed to Richardson to be nonexistent in the Sawi culture. But in their own way the Sawi “had found a way to prove sincerity and establish peace…. Among the Sawi every demonstration of friendship was suspect except one. If a man would actually give his own son to his enemies, that man could be trusted!”47 It was that analogy, then, that he used to point the Sawi to God sacrificing his Son on the cross.
The Peace Child analogy alone did not solve all the communication barriers. Other analogies were also to be discovered, and for the Richardsons there were many more trying experiences to endure. But through their patient toil, the Sawi gradually began to turn to Christianity, which better prepared them to withstand the “cultural disorientation” soon to be unleashed on them by the influx of oil, logging, mining, and immigration from other islands of Indonesia. As a nurse, Carol treated some two thousand patients a month, while at the same time teaching basic hygiene and other preventive care. Together they translated the New Testament and taught the Sawi to read.
By 1972, after a decade of ministry among the Sawi, much had changed. The meeting house used for Christian gatherings was enlarged twice and then replaced by a “Sawidome” that seated a thousand people. It was to be a “house of peace in which former enemies” could “sit down together at the Lord’s table, and a house of prayer for the tribes without God’s Word.”The building was dedicated in the summer of 1972 and was believed to be the world’s largest circular building made entirely of unmilled poles.48
After completing the translation of the New Testament, the Richardsons left the Sawi under the care of their own church elders and another missionary couple. They moved on to work with another missionary couple in analyzing the Auyy language. Then, in 1976, the Richardsons returned to North America, and he began teaching at the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, where he became the Director of Tribal Peoples’ Studies. Here his emphasis on “Redemptive Analogies” found ready acceptance, and others joined him in similar efforts to develop more effective means to communicate the gospel among tribal peoples.
Redemptive analogies, Richardson insists, are not new. They are as old as Scripture itself and as applicable today as the commission to go to “the uttermost part of the earth.” It is perhaps noteworthy that his rediscovery of these timeless methods and principles occurred in what must truly be considered the uttermost part of the world—Irian Jaya.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brother Andrew. Battle for Africa. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1977.
______. God’s Smuggler. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1967.
Burgess, Alan. Daylight Must Come: The Story of a Courageous Woman Doctor in the Congo. New York: Dell, 1975.
Dunker, Marilee Pierce. Man of Vision, Woman of Prayer. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1980.
Egan, Eileen. Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa—the Spirit and the Work. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
Le Joly, Edward, S.J., Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.
Muggeridge, Malcolm. Something Beautiful for God. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1971.
Olson, Bruce. Bruchko. Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1978.
Pullinger, Jackie, with Andrew Quicke. Chasing the Dragon. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1980.
Pullinger, Jackie. Crack in the Wall: Life and Death in Kowloon Walled City. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989.
Richardson, Don. Peace Child. Glendale, CA: Regal, 1974.
Roseveare, Helen. Give Me This Mountain. London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1966.
______. He Gave Us a Valley. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1976. Sebba, Anne. Mother Teresa: Beyond the Image. New York: Doubleday, 1998.