March (Web-only) 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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My "Stranger in a Strange Land" column in the latest issue of Books & Culture is about the Eucharist—how it has been marginalized in our worship, and how I have seen a hunger for it among many young people. That is part of a larger story in evangelicalism.

In the Baptist churches I was raised in, most people still went to church on Sunday night. Often that was a time when visiting missionaries came to raise support. They dressed like the people they were serving, and they displayed various artifacts brought back from the mission field. Occasionally, though not often, they showed slides or a film.

On one of those relatively rare occasions, when a film from Africa was shown, the missionaries spoke particularly forcefully about the false beliefs of the African people to whom they were bringing the gospel. Above all they spoke of the crippling superstition of the Africans, their belief in a world of spirits.

I had heard and read such things many times before. My grandmother, who helped to raise my brother and me, had been a missionary to China. I grew up knowing missionaries, and I read countless missionary biographies and autobiographies. But on that Sunday night, I saw something I had never seen before. I saw that the world of the Africans, as the missionaries described it, was in many ways close to the world of the Bible: a world where much could turn on the interpretation of dreams, a world where unseen powers and principalities battled.

Without in the least intending to, the missionaries were giving the impression that the very notion of believing in spirits—and all that implied—was a sign of superstition, to be cleared away. Mumbo-jumbo. And for the first time I had a troubling thought that was to recur often over the years: ...