Where Everybody's Crazy

OK, so I was at a mission conference the other day, and I came away very depressed; in fact, I came away wishing that I could give up this whole missionary thing. I'm not going to, but it was interesting to analyze my feelings a bit.

I think I came away wishing I could give up being a missionary because I didn't want to end up like those nice Christians that the conference was full of. I suppose it wasn't the missionaries belonging to the agency hosting the conference - who came across as thoroughly real people - so much as those from other agencies, which I will not name, but I think this is a common characteristic Of Mission Fellowships and their missionaries. They're not real. They're too nice.

And this is going to be unfair, but it's a rant and I don't have to be fair.

Mission agencies want their missionaries to be model citizens and good, clean-living people, and that's a laudable aim until you end up with an agency full of clones: nice white middle-class Christians like Jesus, with good Christian families, with their nice tidy minds and nice tidy faiths, and their nice white teeth and nice white children.

I don't know why, but that just makes me want to rebel. I want to show them what it means to be alive. I don't want to hang out with nice people, people who want to keep themselves nice and clean, people who live in a hermetically-sealed Christian world, shunning everything that could possibly pollute them or ruffle their neatly-trimmed haircuts. And I certainly don't want to become one.

Hell, the world's greatest missionary was a murderer. No point holding onto a stranger-to-sin, holier-than-thou exterior for him. I want to get my hands dirty, I want to hang out with the drunks and the drug dealers and the prostitutes, the sinners and the tax-collectors. Just like that guy did, all those years ago.