Military and Missions: Not a Good Match

https://www.mnnonline.org/news/why-military-and-missions-make-a-good-match/

The editorial at Mission Network News argues that military and missions make a good match. The author is sadly mistaken. Apart from being accustomed to a life overseas, they have nothing in common.

I have experienced this firsthand. While in Italy during the 1990's I encountered a Baptist organisation that built its model on utilising retired military men to pastor churches that were deliberately established near US military bases. As retirees, these pastors had pensions and full access to the base. The mission was not meant to target the local population per se but its primary focus was on military members and indeed the congregation could be described as 100% military. As 'missionaries' they are in a position of comfort and privilege.

Rather than engage the culture and its religious beliefs, the 'missionary' (a misnomer in this case) is able to live on the colonial post and in the bubble of American culture created by the footprint of the base. Some Americans in the armed forces choose deliberately not to live this way. They spend as much time away from the base as they can and engage the local public and its culture. They have a job but the military is not their life and the base and the 'Little America' it represents is something they try to avoid. For others the base is their life and for this missionary model that's really what the practical outcome is – if not the goal.

But what of ex-military people who simply become missionaries with no official or unofficial attachment to an American base or diplomatic mission?

Career military people are dominated by a mindset and values that are deeply un-Christian and even anti-Christian. Their testimony as Christians is compromised along with the pension money many of them take. Well do I remember that many Italians resented the US presence in their country, its domination of their politics, and on a basic level the very military activities the base represents. Nuclear weapons were stored there and the base was used to prosecute America's wars. And now to plant a church that's wed to this larger apparatus and all it represents – it's a false gospel at best. Or to suggest that merely because someone was attached to this kind of overseas imperialist machine – that somehow this is going to qualify them as missionaries? Please, it's really rather absurd.

I realize for the Americans involved they cannot separate America from the Church and view the policies of the United States as completely commensurate with the Kingdom. They have been deceived by a false gospel and the many Balaam's which preach it. Of course in many respects I view the pensioners as being used by these organisations. They're banking on the fact that these missionaries have a supplemental income and support network. It allows them to piggy-back on the US government. In that respect there's something dirty and perverse about the whole thing.

The optics are terrible. One is reminded of the China missions movement in the wake of the Opium Wars. The work of the missionaries was viewed as the cultural arm of Western imperialism and thus they were the first targets in the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1901. The author of this Missions piece has seemingly learned nothing from history and the unfortunate relationship between the missionary movement and imperialism.

Ex-military Christians shouldn't be exalted for their bureaucratic skills and held up as paragons for missions work. Rather, they need to repent and repudiate their past lives and approach the world outside the United States on a fundamentally different level. This includes things like money, their standard of living, as well as their values concerning Western diplomacy, banking, military, and the like. Whether the ex-military missions model relies on 'missionaries' being near bases or not, it's a terrible model and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the antithesis that exists between the values of the stormtroopers of empire and the Kingdom of Christ. I was forced to learn this lesson first-hand and I repudiate with shame and loathing that I ever donned the filthy uniform of the United States military. I reject that organisation and would never (under any circumstance) use my former affiliation with that evil as a means of gain, let alone a way to attain position within some ministry or under the auspices of the larger Church.