Spotlight: Can We Still Make A Difference?
January 23, 2008
Jillian Snyder
Jillian Snyder explores two different perspectives on Christian missions in today’s world.
Amalia Nickel
The missionary kid: Amalia Nickel is a young woman entrenched in the tradition of the Western missionary movement. The daughter and granddaughter of missionaries, Nickel’s family has lived throughout Asia for the past century. Her family relocated to the country of Pakistan in the late 1980s. Living in Karachi, the nation’s largest city, Nickel’s family worked with the Baloch people group in southern Pakistan.
Her father taught in a seminary as well as helping operate a Balochi radio station – the only radio station available in the Balochi language. Her mother worked with women and took care of most of the housework for the family.
However, the Nickel’s devotion to the Baloch was overshadowed by the inevitable difficulties of a Western family living in Pakistan. Finding it hard to gain a sense belonging in a country that heavily separates the genders, Nickel says that even activities such as riding her bike outside the family home led to pornographic letters addressed to her in the family mail box.
In addition to these issues was the general isolation from the West faced by the Nickel family. Living overseas in the era preceding globalization, Nickel recounts having no contact with family back home. “The West was totally separate from us,” she says. These problems, exasperated by threats toward her own family as Westerners in a Muslim land during the Gulf War, increased this sense of isolation. Nickel recalls times when she and her brothers would “call a family meeting and beg our parents to go home.”
In 1994, the Nickels did return home to Canada and began a new life that had its own difficulties. One of the main struggles Nickel recounts was an “unrealistic view” of the West. “Canada,” she says, “became the greatest place on earth. It was like Disneyland.”
However, after the family’s return home, Nickel soon realized that coming back had elements of isolation just as much as her time in Pakistan. In Canada she struggled with anger and depression and cut her arms regularly. “I don’t know if I could tie it to Pakistan, but I’d been through so much more than people knew, and so I felt like nobody understood me.”
Despite these struggles, Nickel still says that the benefits of her childhood “far outweigh the negative.” She credits her time in Pakistan as providing her a vision of loving others that was embodied by her family’s work. This experience, she says has, “given me this overwhelming desire, this true calling to live with compassion and love that was such a huge part of what my family was, and still is.”
Another important part of Amalia’s healing process was her growing love for India. Nickel has visited India four times. “I told God I would never go back to Pakistan and God instead sent me to India.” She points out, “all the good things that I learned while in Pakistan I learned because of India,” and adds that “it’s really a place of beauty and healing for me.”
As for her opinion on missions in general, Nickel has mixed feelings. “I just feel that most missionaries have been colonists—telling people that they were wrong and you were right.” She adds, “I don’t think that [approach to missions] makes people’s lives better. They have no money; they have disease and you’re telling them that the gods that they and their ancestors have worshipped for centuries are wrong.” Nickel instead advocates a “more practical” approach.” Some of the positive aspects she’s seen in modern missions are movements such as those that rescue young women out of the sex trade.
Overall, Amalia advocates dialogue between the West and other cultures as a means of bringing others together. “I think dialogue is extremely important. We need dialogue because we need to understand each other through respectful dialogue, through the principle of love.” It is a dialogue that could only be had out of Amalia’s experiences, whether painful or beautiful.
Slava Petlitsa
The evangelized
MH: How has Christian missions affected you personally?
Personally, I owe my conversion and my first steps in Christian life to missions. Growing up in an atheistic country I was strongly prejudiced against all types of religion. In my view Christian believers were poorly educated, weak and gullible people easy influenced by others.
Initially I was attracted to the Evangelical Free Church Mission in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine because I had a strong desire to learn English, and I knew that foreigners who attended the church spoke English. I was surprised to meet a number of doctors, professors and teachers who professed the Christian faith. I got involved in a Bible study, trying to understand how these highly educated people could fall victims of such indoctrination. That was my first encounter with the Bible. Our discussions were instrumental in understanding the main message of the Bible since commentaries and any type of biblical literature were very scarce in the former Soviet Union at that time. I must say that at that point my observations of the missionaries, their behaviour and relationships among themselves and with the Ukrainians were more important to me than the scrutiny of the Word of God: I wanted to see Jesus’ teaching in deeds and not in words alone.
Having now participated in various mission trips and programs myself, I am strongly convinced that this is exactly what many people are craving: more than anything else they want to see the transformative power of Jesus’ sacrifice in us, His representatives.
MH: Do you feel that missions can still make a difference?
To do missions is not an option; it’s the Lord’s mandate to us. Following what was said above, I would like again to emphasize the importance of personal testimony in promoting the spread of the Gospel. If we want people to follow Jesus, we ourselves must follow him unconditionally in every aspect of our lives. There is no room for slacking here; indeed, it can determine somebody’s eternal destiny.
Quite a number of Christian organizations today are changing their focus from mainly teaching and preaching the Bible to actively serving the communities they live in and sharing (or at least trying to share) the same struggles and privations which people around them are suffering. If we stick to these principles even when there are no conventional conveniences around us and our stomachs are empty, such a “sermon” will be heard with attention and respect.
MH: How do you observe the compatibilities of your culture in Western Christianity?
Sometimes instead of blending with the culture in question, missionaries try to modify culture according to their idea of what is the best. To become an agent of any change in a given society we, as missionaries, should try first to become members of that society. It is a long and often sacrificial process and many missionaries try to skip it. As a language teacher I would like to emphasize that the language aspect is extremely important, because people perceive us through the way we speak. Learning the language of the host culture is the most crucial step in becoming a member of that culture. Unfortunately, language acquisition is one of the weakest spots in the preparation of North American/Western missionaries. This is where one of the biggest improvements in our missions can be and should be made.
Can we still make a difference?
In the twenty-first century, the practice of Christian missions faces threats from inside and outside the religion. After a boom in the early part of the twentieth century, missions, with its alleged and real claims of colonialization and imperialism, are met with suspicion to contemporary culture. However, is missions only about telling people that you are right about your faith and walking away? Mars’ Hill interviewed several people seriously affected by missions work in order to find out if Christian missions is still relevant to today’s globalized culture.
“We don’t fit in even though we may know the language and adapt well to the culture, we’ll never be Cambodian and the Cambodians don’t want us to. They do want respect and equality. We can treat them like colleagues and brothers and sisters because our [common] faith.” – Jack Campbell, missionary to Cambodia
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