The Problem With Francis Chan’s Ministry Move to Asia (Excerpt)

Francis Chan announced during a student chapel that his family would be moving to Asia to do ministry work and plant churches in unreached places.

The video begins with a drone shot view of rural Myanmar. Rice fields fill the screen with various hues of green. Then, music fades in and the volume and tempo increase as the view widens to include more roads and the countryside. A man’s voice narrates in American English as various images of Myanmar’s countryside fill the screen. He speaks of religious demographics and declares that most of the country is, to use the popular missiology term, “unreached.” His tone is excited, urgent.

This video is a promotional/awareness piece soon to be released by a conglomeration of ministries (including Francis Chan’s Crazy Love nonprofit) that plans to do outreach in Southeast Asia. In it, several leaders of American faith-based groups talk about their passion to make the message of Christianity known in every part of Myanmar, moreover, to see new churches planted in every community throughout the country.

Years ago, I would have found this piece of cinematography moving. I would have been the kind of person to share this video on my Facebook page. My old self would have asked people to watch it with me, adding the exuberant disclaimer, “This is what it looks like where I live. This is a great snapshot of life in Myanmar!” Years ago, I would have used a video like this not only with the intention of educating but also with the hope of challenging Americans to think bigger in terms of faith and outreach.

But there were a lot of things that the old me didn’t know. I was just about to move to Southeast Asia, and, as is often the case among expats, I had subscribed to the notion that a visit to, and an affinity for a new place, plus a set of local acquaintances, meant that I was now knowledgeable. It turns out, the work of actually moving to a new place and settling in was less of a culture shock and more of a deconstruction of my pride and sense of self-importance.

Today, I would never share a video like the one mentioned above. Instead, now when I watch similar promotional ministry videos, I realize that the White savior version of myself was blind to the most important aspects of the video and the way the story was told. Now I have concerns about storytelling, dignity, and the American Christian habit of muting other voices.

Here are some questions I would ask the creators about their ministry video:

• Why are the only motivational speakers in this video Western church leaders? Why didn’t they include the testimony of a Myanmar pastor?
• Why were there so many shots of White Americans grandly laying hands on and praying for Myanmar village people? (And did those Myanmar people consent to being part of a promotional photo op? Did they even consent to hands being laid on them?)
• Why did the video only include shots of Myanmar village life, or of slums, when there is much more to Myanmar than abject financial poverty?
• When the makers of this video used a celebrity pastor’s words, “heart of darkness,” while panning through images of Myanmar, did they really mean to imply that Myanmar is a place of utter darkness and evil?
• Did they mean to communicate, by their omission of any Myanmar voices, that Myanmar people won’t have anything to say about all of this?
• Did they mean to imply that there are no Christians in Myanmar? (Christians are about 8.2 percent of the population.)

I used to be okay with this kind of media material, partly because this was the narrative I had painted in my mind about Myanmar, and it was a narrative that carved out a space for an idealized version of myself: the narrative that Myanmar was broken, dark, and desperate for someone like me to come along and distribute dignity.

When I moved to Myanmar, I wanted very badly to start something cool, like a community health ministry, write some teaching materials, or help plant a church. I wanted to be the catalyst for something good. Even in my talk of simply “being a good neighbor,” I had an agenda. Behind my dreams was the notion that I cared about Myanmar more than the people of Myanmar did, that Myanmar needed someone like me to come in and help fix a few things.

This assumption was reinforced by the North American church, by people who said things like, “Myanmar really needs you!” There was a pioneering impulse bound up in my self-important dreams, an idea that no one had gone and done what I was about to go and do. But I’ve been changed by my relationships with Myanmar people-people who, as it turns out, know more than I do. I’ve been changed by relationships with Myanmar people who have a lot to teach me, and who care as much as, if not more than I do.

My husband, Jim, who has now lived here for nearly 14 years, has a favorite anecdote about one of his own embarrassing encounters with his pride. “I was living in a remote part of Myanmar,” he says, “and I decided to hike out somewhere where I hadn’t been before.” So he hiked out, in search of an adventure. He was beating through the jungle brush, following some barely recognizable trail. “I was congratulating myself as I went along,” Jim continues. “I was musing on the thought that no one was out here-it was just me! I might even be the first White person to have walked through this patch of forest. At that moment, I was climbing a tree in order to cross a stream, and when I landed on the other side, I was surprised to come upon another person.It was an elderly woman, probably in her eighties, out gathering firewood.”

Jim laughs when he retells this story, recalling the shock of realizing his pioneer instincts were so badly mistaken. “Here I was tromping around, thinking of myself like a wilderness explorer, when in fact, I was wandering through this grandma’s backyard!” It’s not only a funny story-it also paints a picture of the ridiculousness of the American Christian psyche when it comes to the way we describe places foreign to us , imagining ourselves to be the first to go somewhere, or the first to care about an issue.

Continue reading this article, originally published January 28, 2020, at https://faithfullymagazine.com.