Missionary About-Face

After centuries of Western missionaries preaching Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America, “reverse missionaries” from the Third World are now quietly moving into America and across the globe in a religious about-face that turns the historical stereotype on its head.

Now, with churches booming in many Third World nations, tens of thousands of their fired-up Protestant and Pentecostal preachers have gone into the mission field, where they are now close to outnumbering their Western brethren, according to projections made at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

“Sometime in 1999, certainly by the year 2000, it would appear that the Third World will send out more missionaries than North America and Europe do,” said Larry Keyes, president of a training agency in Colorado that works with Fuller in analyzing evangelical missions.

Protestant churches are not the only ones experiencing a flow of religious workers from Africa and Asia into the United States. The Catholic Church’s long-standing tradition of deploying clergy and nuns wherever needed worldwide, even across national borders, is alleviating a chronic U.S. shortage of clergy with foreign-born priests and nuns.

“Almost every U.S. diocese has received missionaries, and we are very fortunate to have that kind of interplay of culture,” said sociologist Bryan Froehle, executive director of a Catholic research center at Georgetown University in Washington.

To commentators and clerics who bemoan what they call U.S. moral decay, the influx is sadly ironic. “We have become the kind of place civilized societies of the 19th century sent missionaries to,” former Secretary of Education William Bennett said last year as the ex-drug czar was promoting his third book on virtue.

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Indeed, some Christians coming from the Third World “look at the West as a place of spiritual need--with a strong sense that this culture has gone off the rails,” said Wilbert Shenk of Fuller Seminary.

Some of that rhetoric is a bit overdone. Western churches have hardly yielded the mission field to their onetime proteges.

Indeed, “the U.S.A. certainly sends out many more missionaries than it receives,” said Justin Long of Richmond, Va., associate editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, the premier sourcebook on Christian populations and missions.

Nonetheless, the reverse missionaries play an increasingly important role, particularly--although not exclusively--in ministering to immigrant communities.

“People are hungry for God--salvation, healing and deliverance,” said the Rev. Stephen Gyermeh, a native of Ghana who in 15 years has built a $1.6-million home for his Church of the Living God in Hyattsville, Md., and started six affiliated churches from the Bronx, N.Y., to Pasadena.

Other “reverse missionaries” say they are thankful for their faith--even if it was first brought to their homelands by missionaries under the umbrella of colonial intruders--and feel it’s time they return the religious favor.

“A debt of gratitude is motivating many, many of these folks, including myself,” said Ed Silvoso of San Jose, one of several Argentine evangelists and pastors being embraced by U.S. evangelical leaders for mission leadership in this country and worldwide.

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Special U.S. immigration laws passed this decade have permitted up to 5,000 clergy and 5,000 lay religious workers each year to apply for permanent residency. Last fall, Congress extended the laws to 2000, responding to pleas that religious workers--Christian and Jewish--provide needed help in soup kitchens and clinics and special services for immigrants.

Meanwhile, non-immigrant visas issued by the U.S. State Department for “temporary religious workers,” either clergy or lay workers, have risen each year, from 1,834 in 1991 to 5,082 in 1996, the last total available. There is no ceiling on how many can be admitted, but the maximum U.S. stay with such papers is five years, said Maria Rudinsky, a State Department spokeswoman.

Indeed, the flow is substantial enough to generate a problem with foreigners claiming bogus religious affiliations--Catholic and Mormon are favorite false claims--Rudinsky said. As a result, “we question them very closely on knowledge of their denomination,” she said.

Fearful of fraud, “consular and immigration officers are denying a considerable amount of applications, including some legitimate ones,” said former immigration officer Lloyd Sutherland, whose Washington firm, International Benefits Inc., aids religious groups with immigration red tape.

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The precise number of reverse missionaries is difficult to determine, whether analysts are tracking Third World missionaries entering this country or estimating the numbers of those fanning out across the globe.

A study of non-Catholic missionaries published in 1989 at Fuller Seminary concluded that about 36,000 Third World Christians were taking the faith to other cultures, compared with about 40,000 U.S. missionaries operating in other countries.

Now, almost 10 years later, “extrapolating those numbers coming out of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we probably have in excess of 60,000 or 70,000,” said Paul Pierson, dean emeritus of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Missions.

The Protestant and Pentecostal missionaries are not simply heading to North America and Europe to minister to enclaves of immigrants who speak the same language and yearn for back-home culture. They have embarked into the world at large, including missions to the nations where European and American missionaries toiled 100 years ago.

“Brazilian and Argentine churches are now sending missionaries to Africa,” said Shenk, a Fuller colleague. “That was totally unheard of 10 years ago.”

The career of Nilo Jaren M. Lapasaran Jr. illustrates the point. A Filipino minister who had a comfortable church leadership and broadcasting position in his native country, he came to the United States a year ago to start a congregation in Pasadena. His Assembly of God co-workers back in the Philippines are sending mission teams to Australia, Southeast Asia, South Korea and Japan, he says.

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“My dad is 65, and was supposed to retire, but he went to Tokyo, where many Filipino women are marrying Japanese men and encountering a lot of cultural problems,” said Lapasaran. “He started counseling the women and held a Bible class, then started a church there for Filipinos.”

Another example is Father Tovia Lui, sent three years ago by his cardinal in Western Samoa to the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese.

“Staying in a parish allows me to minister to many people, but mostly I work in the Samoan community, meeting the needs of old people, visiting the sick, celebrating the liturgy in our language and encouraging Samoans to appreciate their own culture,” Lui said.

Presbyterians in the San Gabriel Valley are supporting missionaries from Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil who are developing ethnic Presbyterian local churches. The Rev. Tony Rodriguez of Rosemead, who heads church development for the San Gabriel Presbytery, said that Brazilian minister Jairton Barros de Melo recently befriended a group of ex-professional soccer players from Brazil at a park. “He told me that only after you become a friend with a Brazilian can you then invite him to a Bible study,” Rodriguez said.

The Rev. Samuel Magala, an Anglican priest still attached to his diocese in Uganda, has been an assistant parish priest for nearly five years at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys. Although only 15 to 30 native Ugandans usually attend his late Sunday service at the otherwise white parish, he said that nearly 200 Africans attended his baptismal service in May for the baby of Ugandan and Nigerian parents.

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Seeing a need within the Japanese-speaking community in Houston, a church in Japan sent a pastor there. “He actually drives more than 200 miles to Brownsville, Texas, to visit with people of Japanese background as well as reach out in Houston to doctors and professionals looking for fellowship,” said Doug Stringer, founder-president of Turning Point Ministries in Houston.

Most missionaries gravitate--or are assigned--to immigrant communities with common languages and national backgrounds. “Many have started out with an ethnic basis and never get beyond that,” said Fuller Seminary’s Shenk.

The choice of language indeed determines the evangelistic field. Argentine-born evangelist Luis Palau, now a U.S. citizen based in Portland, Ore., conducts revival meetings--nearly always in English--to a cross-section of Americans at major U.S. arenas and settings. But Carlos Annacondia, a popular Argentina-based evangelist in the Pentecostal healing tradition, preaches in Spanish to primarily Latino audiences around the world, most recently in Oxnard, with a planned rally in the Los Angeles area in February 1999.

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While established church leaders generally welcome the shifts in missionary flow, they see some problems arriving in the form of either untrained pastors or aggressively proselytizing, sect-like churches.

Les Thompson, founder-president of Logoi, a Miami-based mission agency, contends that the great majority of Third World “missionaries” who come to America are primarily fleeing difficult economic or political circumstances back home. After getting secular work, if religiously motivated, they may try to start a church.

“I think ‘reverse missionaries’ is more romantic talk than reality,” said Thompson, referring to would-be pastors who lack the backing of a recognized denomination.

“Most of them have very little theological training, and their churches are small, no more than 100 people, mostly poor Hispanics.”

Among the exceptions out of Latin America are two wealthy, fast-growing and authoritarian denominations with charismatic founders who are controversial in their homelands:

* Mexico’s La Luz del Mundo (Light of the World), led by Samuel Joaquin of Guadalajara. Critics accuse Joaquin of fostering a power-seeking cult of personality, among other things. La Luz del Mundo has about 40 churches in Southern California.

* Brazilian-based Iglesia Universal del Reino de Dios (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God). Founded in 1977 by Bishop Edir Macedo, the powerful Pentecostal-style church battles the government and Catholic Church in Brazil with major media outlets, but encounters opposition only occasionally as it spreads to other countries.

In Southern California and other urban areas, Iglesia Universal typically acquires vacant movie theaters for daily Spanish-language services. Nearly 1,000 worshipers packed the largest of four Sunday services recently at the old Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Another 13 congregations stretch from Reseda to San Bernardino and San Diego.

The success of such highly disciplined groups worries mainstream evangelical mission leaders, said Silvoso, who heads Harvest Evangelism in San Jose.

But despite cases of demanding sectarian churches and of “a simpler, less sophisticated theology,” the reverse missionary flow is mostly good news in the eyes of the Fuller Seminary’s Pierson.

“Their major focus is on conversions and a Christian lifestyle that rejects certain kinds of destructive behavior,” said Pierson, predicting that the foreign missionaries will eventually address broader social ills of society.

“One characteristic of the new movements is belief in the ongoing power of God to deal with problems here and now,” he said. “In the mainline churches, most of that is in the past.

“It’s healthy to have religious competition.”