Whose Mission?

If someone would have told me some years ago that I'd be living in a missionary house today, I probably would have kindly but firmly suggested them to seek psychiatric counseling :) My opinion about religion has changed a lot over the years. Whereas I used to disavow religion as a form of 'mauvaise foi' - tricking yourself into believing human existence has a special value in this world - I have learned to appreciate religion for its ability to connect and inspire communities and add symbolic meaning to crude realities. That said, it is still strange for me to be among missionaries. Religion may contain important values, in my opinion it never contains 'truth' (as far as I'm concerned, nothing does). The history of missionary zeal is so closely connected to colonialism that it is hard not to dismiss present-day missionary work as old-fashioned imperialism in disguise. My position and prejudice, however, are being challenged to the extreme as I am not only living in a missionary house, but also going to a missionary language school where I am being mistaken for being an apprentice missionary :) Talk about an identity crisis!

Luckily, reality is a lot more complex than my prejudice would have it. The missionaries of Jesus are in fact an offshoot of the movement of Scheut (CICM) and came into being because of a local need to have more involvement of local people and focus more on community building than on spreading the word of Jesus. An intern struggle between a more conservative elite based in the West and a more progressive wing in the Philippines led to the formation of the MJ Movement. Consequently, most missionaries here are Filipinos and not missionaries from abroad. Moreover, the library in the house is full of works on Islam, Judaism, Filipino psychology and Philippine tradition and history, which makes this an interesting place for study. On the other hand, I am sometimes somewhat embarrassed to live in such a comfortable house (although that is only temporary).

I still find missonary work - even in its present-day appearance - a very tricky business, but in a sense it is of course as questionable as development work. Development workers are often called the new missionaries and there is certainly some truth in that comparison (after all, development workers will also refer to their work as 'a misson'). One might even wonder if the motives of missonaries and development workers are really that different. It is one of the reasons why I feel as uncomfortable being called a development worker as I am being called a missionary. For all I'm concerned, I'll be an employee in a Philippine organization engaged in ecological and social support for the mount Apo region, and that is about as far as I am willing to go. but perhaps that is just some 'mauvaise foi' on my part...