Rocky Cape Christian Community

Back cover of a Moody Press book, exemplifying the popular myths and romanticism surrounding Western missionary heroes.

Even though the truth about David Livingstone has been public knowledge for nearly two generations (since the appearance of his co-workers' and Henry Stanley's personal papers) few Western Christians are able to to let go of a myth that has sustained them for a hundred years: The myth of the great Victorian missionaries, fearless men and women like David Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Adoniram Judson, Mary Slessor, Alexander Mackay . . . you know the names, who went into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature at cost of their lives.
 
What would you do if I told you that few, if any, of these great missionaries actually followed Jesus' instructions, and what they preached was not the gospel (good news) of the Kingdom at all?
 
Would you still like me, or would you like to keep on believing a lie?  
 
David Livingstone, if the truth must be told, led only one person to profess faith in Christ. That was a Bakwena chief, living in polygamy in what is now Botswana. That man soon reverted to paganism. David's co-workers, including the famous Susi and Chuma, far from being "something of a travelling Sunday School" as one author puts it, smoked marijuana and were renowned womanisers, promptly hunting up local prostitutes wherever they stayed. One of his men, Gardner, captured girls and kept them in the Livingstone camp for immoral purposes. Another one, Simon, dealt in slaves. David frequently lost his temper with his men, flying into hysterical rages where, in the words of a British medical officer, he "used the most abusive filthy language ever heard in that class of society."
 
Even though David Livingstone spoke against the cruelty of the slave trade, he was not opposed to slavery in principle, and regularly used slaves as porters (sometimes the majority of his porters being slaves), noting that most slaves in coastal cities "lived better than English factory workers."
 
After accusing his wife of having too many children, calling her "that great Irish manufactory," he sent her back to England where she became a confirmed alcoholic. His children grew up in fatherless abandon, one son dying on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, while in Africa David's passion to find the source of the Nile ahead of Speke, Grant, and the Bakers (other Victorian explorers) knew no bounds. Increasingly embittered by the success of others and his own failure to find "God's Highway" (a great river that would open central Africa to British commerce, thereby saving its people) David became a moody and violent man. When his brother, a Scotch clergyman, questioned his motives, David tore into him, punching him in the face "to draw blood." Not long before his death David lost his temper with Chuma and fired at him, point blank, but missed.  
 
With regard to his "discoveries," David Livingstone hated Speke and the Bakers for claiming Lakes Victoria and Edward as the sources of the Nile, while he felt certain to his dying day that the real source was the Lualaba (the upper Congo) and used the Bible and Herodotus to prove it. As to crossing Africa from coast to coast he also knew but did not mention the fact that Portuguese traders had been doing it for many years before him, and he merely followed their trail. But he made a fortune off selling the book where he wrote about his "discoveries," and on the urging of the American and British press, both his and Stanley's stories grew ever more lurid with the pasing of time. ("Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" being one of the most famous fabrications in modern history. What Stanley actually said when Susi came to meet him was, "Who the %*!@&#  are you?" and when he met Livingstone, who was never lost by the way, he fumbled for words and let Livingstone do the talking.)
 
So how did the real David Livingstone become the Livingstone of fiction and fantasy, the missionary hero described in the Moody Press book above?
 
Western society, with the help of the Western media, "created" David Livingstone because it needed him.
 
And Western society, because it keeps on needing "great men and women of God" has been creating them ever since -- the same press that picked David Livingstone, picking D. L. Moody, Billy Graham, Bob Marley, Mother Teresa, Jim and Tammy Bakker, John Paul II, an endless stream of religious celebrities. Religious "bad guys," religious "good guys," all performers, all part of the great business of keeping the world feeling good about itself and entertained.  
 
* * * * *
The world needs religious performers to convince itself of its own nobility and good intentions. Right after squashing the French in Canada, the Dutch in South Africa, bathing India and New Zealand in blood, and dumping eighty thousand wretched convicts upon the shores of Australia, the British Empire with its "Bible Queen" desperately needed to bolster its self-esteem. So did America just pulling out of the bloodiest war in history, right on the heels of the Great Awakening of 1857, thousands upon thousands of "committed Christians" fresh from the camp meetings, out in trenches mowing one another down.
 
Enter David Livingstone! Henry Stanley! "Our men," out there fixing the world! With nearly pathetic enthusiasm all of America and Great Britain couldn't get done roaring its applause.
 
Luke 16:15.
 
* * * * * *
 
The world needs performers to mimic, to emulate, to race after in mass meetings across the land. Right after David Livingstone a flood of young men from Great Britain and America rushed to "heathen nations" to see what they could do. Alexander Mackay, after his dramatic speech in Scotland (still quoted in mission papers) set out for Uganda, shooting two black porters that tried to desert him along the way. German missionaries evangelised Tanganyika and Cameroon, until they went home to fight for Kaiser Wilhelm. Anglicans and Presbyterians after winning the Boer War, followed Cecil Rhodes to newly opened mining regions, evangelising -- under British military protection, with a strict colour bar in place -- the vast reaches of what is now Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and beyond. Throughout India and China they raced, dividing mission territories along deminational lines: the Baptists here, the Swedish Free Church there, the Mennonites in Bihar, AIM in the Congo, UMCA along the coast. . . .
 
Wherever they went, Western missionaries broke up native communities, teaching people the value of money and private property -- previously unknown to "primitive tribes." With the help of colonial governments (India and Africa) missionaries urged their converts to drop communal living arrangements, carving up tribal land into independant family plots, every family going it on its own, with its own house, its own animals -- eventually its own radios, bicycles, cars, television sets -- and getting its children educated for personal advancement. By the time of the second World War, a vast multitude of missionary educated Africans and Asians (even those educated in Mennonite missions) stood ready to fight with the Allies against Hitler and his horrible crime of "racial superiority."
 
Only to come back, if they survived, to colonial Apartheid and the colour bar at home.
 
All this hypocrisy and corruption -- high-handed administration by foreigners exploiting them in the name of Western Christianity -- blew up in the 1950s and 60s as a vast number of new nations fought for and gained their independence, becoming the "Third World" that wallows in the throes of international debt slavery today. But the David Livingstone legend, the myth of the great Victorian missionaries, never died. It only grew bigger and brighter, in fact, as the world needed it more and more.     
 
In the words of T. Ernest Wilson, Plymouth Brethren missionary to Angola: "Ever since I was a boy, I wanted to be a missionary in Africa. This desire had been awakened and stimulated by reading the life stories of Livingstone, Arnot, and Mary Slessor, and by hearing men home on furlough from the mission field. Frankly, I was a hero worshipper. I thought that these were the greatest men of modern times, and longed to follow in their footsteps and see the places where they worked."
 
The more that went, the larger and more colourful grew our repertoire of missionary tales -- great men of God growing ever greater in popular fantasy until they evolved as veritable Paul Bunyans of the Spirit World, kneeling in prayer for so long every day they wore grooves into the hardwood floors of their closets, all getting together and weeping for revival until the floor was slippery with their tears.
 
Luke 16:15.
 
* * * * *
 
The early church had its martyrs, eventually canonised, completely shrouded in legend and fantasy but still with us today. Teaching at a private high school, Colegio San Lorenzo in San José, Costa Rica, a number of years ago, I found myself in charge of about forty teenagers in a crowd of a thousand, while the priest sprinkled a new gymnasium with holy water. Standing in front of a large icon of San Lorenzo, an early Christian martyr burning at the stake, he dedicated the gym to this saint, praying to him that he would help all who played or performed there to do so in the spirit in which he died. Then the cheerleaders came out, with the help of the school's football team, to do a triple-tiered handstand while the vast assembly leaped and whooped and whistled its praise.
 
The mediaeval church had its great mystics and reformers, Santa Teresa de Avila, Saint Thomas Becket, Martin Luther, Joan of Arc. . . .
 
The modern church has its missionaries.
 
Just like every family in the Middle Ages liked to have at least one daughter or uncle in the monastery, modern families like to have at least one member "on the mission field." A matter of self-satisfaction. Prestige. Young people cannot think of themselves as complete, according to the modern church's standard, until they have served on a "mission field" abroad.   
 
Luke 16:15.
 
* * * * *
 
But where, in all this, is the Kingdom of God? Where is the GOOD NEWS (the "Gospel") of his Kingdom?
 
To how many people around the world have messengers come with the healing hopeful Gospel of all that believe becoming one family, one in faith, one in spirit, one in day-to-day life in the body of Jesus on earth? To whom has the Kingdom come where the will of the Father is done on earth as it is in heaven?
 
Missionary performers work as individuals, bent on great things. Great men, great deeds. Becoming martyrs, perhaps, in dangerous places far away.
 
But Jesus never called us to perform -- neither does our best performance impress him. He called us to witness, beginning in Jerusalem and Samaria (at home, in other words), and going from there to the ends of the earth. For this "testimony of Jesus" to be willing to live or die.   
 
Witnesses always point to another. To Jesus. Losing their individuality, their names, their faces, for a cause infinitely more exciting than themselves -- building on earth true models of the Kingdom of Heaven, sign posts to new heavens and a new earth, fully restored (John 13:35).  
 
Two ways. Two destinies. You cannot aspire to religious fame if you set out to walk with Jesus and his church community. More likely, you'll end up picking strawberries or castrating pigs.
 
"The first shall be last," Jesus said, "and the last shall be first. . . . What is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15).
 
Peter
 
P.S. Sometime soon, the Lord permitting, I may write of E. Stanley Jones, Amy Carmichael, Anabaptist or Moravian believers that went out, not to do great things or get famous, but to live the Gospel with those to whom they went. That is a much nicer story to tell.
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au