Last month, Indian affairs officials from the Brazilian government photographed from the air an Amazonian tribe that seems to have had little or no contact with the modern world. Pictures show men, women and children staring up from thatched huts and men painted with yellow and red attempting to scare off the airplane flying above them.

The flyover is the latest development in a controversy over “uncontacted” indigenous tribes and whether governments should prohibit outsiders from crossing paths with them. Groups like Survival International say about 100 tribes around the world have avoided or cut off any contact with outsiders, and half of them live in Brazil or Peru. The government of Peru has pledged to investigate the existence of uncontacted tribes on its side of the border, and to find out if illegal logging is driving them from their native lands as some allege. Disputes over land encroachment are central to indigenous issues: The French oil company Perenco is involved in a lawsuit in Peru that will determine whether it can drill in a remote jungle area inhabited by natives.

Actress Julie Christie is helping Survival International promote an isolation policy toward tribal groups. Survival claims tribal lands should be protected from logging and from outsiders who could introduce foreign sicknesses to the natives. (An unfamiliar virus such as a flu bug can overpower and kill a significant portion of a tribe’s population.)

Last March, representatives of the British television company Cicada Films were accused of unwittingly introducing an epidemic that left four Matsigenka Indians dead while the filmmakers scouted locations for the Discovery Channel’s “World’s Lost Tribes” reality show. Cicada Films denies causing any such outbreak. Brazilian activist Sydney Possuelo, featured in a 2003 National Geographic story, once favored modern contact with tribes but changed his mind after seeing the sicknesses and cultural challenges indigenous people face as a result.

Survival International doesn’t exactly express a positive attitude toward America, which it lists among its 2007 “terrible ten” list of abusers of tribal peoples’ rights for being one of four nations that voted against the UN’s “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” The UN Declaration, adopted in September of 2007, grants broad national rights to natives and contains language that could cause problems for yet another group Survival isn’t positive about: missionaries.

New Tribes Mission seeks to establish indigenous churches around the globe, but Venezuela stopped the group’s work among indigenous groups in 2005, when, as WORLD reported, President Hugo Chavez denounced the agency in a speech and accused it of spying for the U.S. and exploiting indigenous people. (Hundreds of indigenous Venezuelans later marched in protest of Chavez’s speech.)

It’s hard to understand how providing medical care and literacy is exploitation, especially among indigenous groups where the life expectancy of men and women is lower than average and suicide rates among youth are alarmingly high, but New Tribes and other mission organizations may face increasing opposition as governments like Venezuela’s and Brazil’s restrict outside access to tribes. In the process, those governments seem to be promoting the ideology of the “noble savage” and assuming it’s in the best interests of indigenous people to have no access to the modern world, or to the gospel.

The approach of summer brings with it appeals to support short-term mission trips, often to third-world countries. These trips frequently involve youths. Before their journey they troop to the front of the church, and we pray for them. Sometime later they return, and dutifully recount lives transformed, their own as well as those they went to help.

It’s something I want my own children to do when they are older, but on the immediate economics alone, youth-oriented mission trips are indefensible. People in need of churches, housing, and the Word could use the dollars and a couple of Christian men with carpentry skills far more than a passel of unskilled kids who are rounding out their spiritual resumes. But is there more here than the immediate economics?

One can argue, for example, that a spiritual resume is precisely what today’s kids need — to be exposed to the grit of poverty and the plight of the unchurched in forgotten reaches of the world. What Christian parent wouldn’t want his children to see first-hand, albeit in a relatively safe way, the world we have been protecting them from, and presumably preparing them to enter? The difficulty is that in calling these journeys mission trips, we divert resources from more effective missions. Given the reality that most families have limited budgets, forking over $25 for Jimmy’s mission trip to Brazil, and $75 for Susie’s mission trip to Kenya, means a more effective program gets $100 less.

But what if Jimmy and Susie are transformed by their experiences, such that they are more likely to give of their time and resources in the future? Then that $100 may reap dividends beyond what appears at first glance. I don’t deny that possibility, and hope, each time a young person from my own church goes to a distant country, that it proves so.

Still, it seems we ought to relabel these endeavors, perhaps calling them “Christian study abroad programs.” This is likely to wound someone’s sensibility about these things, perhaps especially those involved in the dozens of organizations specializing in Christian youth mission trips.

We all want these trips to be meaningful and valuable, but unfortunately, research by Calvin College’s Kurt Ver Beek indicates that short-term mission trips don’t lead to greater subsequent involvement in the lives of those they are intended to help. Nor do short-term missions result in significantly greater giving by mission-trip participants or their host churches. (For links to Ver Beek’s research, and articles discussing it, click here.)

The real test, where youth missions are concerned, is what these young people do when they are grown. I have no doubt that some of them are profoundly changed by a mission trip, making its cost a bargain. I also have no doubt that others get a good tan from their trip, and little more, beyond reinforcing the view of foreigners that Americans are vain and silly. But that’s the lot of any church, isn’t it, that the movers are mingled with the talkers, the saints with the sinners? And if we ever start separating these groups, I for one will be in big trouble.

So I’m wondering, what should our response be to the onslaught of youth missions this summer? What questions ought we to ask? Should we simply be thankful that young people are showing any interest in missions at all? Should we politely suggest that they can have experiences that are just as meaningful in our own inner cities, children’s hospitals, and poverty-racked rural areas? Should we pony up and keep our mouths shut? Am I a bad Christian for asking?

My friend has been involved in Rwanda, both with mission work and in trying to help people develop trades and small businesses. This was the country that in 1994 saw nearly 1,000,000 slaughtered in tribal violence, though it got less media attention in the U.S. than the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding saga, Lorena Bobbitt’s sharp-edged revenge, or Kurt Cobain’s suicide. As Stalin not only quipped, but could testify to first-hand: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

My friend passed along to me some news items about large-scale efforts by churches and government agencies to promote reconciliation and education. This got me to thinking about the dyadic nature of reconciliation — the reality that while large organizations can sponsor educational lectures and conferences and committees, there is only violence when one man strikes down another, and hence only reconciliation when a man can look at someone who was once his enemy and not want to spill his blood.

That isn’t to belittle the efforts by people like Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church has a major initiative in Rwanda. It’s to underscore, instead, the hopelessness of man’s efforts to change the nature of himself. Men butcher one another by the millions with ease, but how much effort must it take not to kill those who have killed ones you love? Violence is a conflagration, but peace, it seems, is the slow mending of a single heart at a time. We should thank God that He is the surgeon, and not we.

My friend also directed me to this video of a trip he and some others took with Christian artist Sara Groves to Rwanda. I’m struck by his simple, faithful, seemingly hopeless act of love: one man giving another his shirt, as if a single shirt can erase the terror and suffering, as if a single shirt can heal the heart of man.

It can’t, but by the grace of God, maybe it can become more than just one shirt on one scarred back. We don’t know, do we? But we give our shirts nonetheless, those among us faithful enough to believe in lost causes. It’s certainly not enough, in a place where one million souls cry out from the dirt. But maybe that’s how God works, and has always worked, by taking the futile gestures of faithful men and fashioning them into great, grace-filled things.

In some respects, the Christian West’s colonization of Asia has proved harmful for women. In The Jesus of Asian Women, Filipino author Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro offers a sobering narrative of female oppression in the Philippines, India, Korea, and Hong Kong. Because Western Christian imperialists saw Asian religions and culture as vile and idolatrous, they thought redemption possible “only if Asia’s heathen souls adopt Western culture and abandon Asian religions and ways of life” (11).

Orevillo-Montenegro also laments the fact that the first Western Christians only seemed concerned with saving souls and failed to address the oppressive social realities facing Asian women. One of the book’s major themes is that the teachings of Jesus should expose “the oppressive elements of religion and the dehumanizing structures of society” (19) rather than enable them:

Christology should not endorse the oppressive structures in culture, religion, and society, by being silent and hiding behind metaphysical concepts while the broad masses of Asian peoples, mostly adherents of Asian religions, suffer poverty, exploitation, and marginalization under the imperial powers of this world. Women and children in particular continue to suffer under patriarchy and sexism in the church and society.

When Western missionaries reduced Christianity to an escape-from-Hell-plan instead of seeing it as a way of life that embraces God’s sovereign covenantal redemption of all creation, they missed the connection between “the historical context of Jesus’ death and the suffering inflicted on the colonized peoples by the colonizers” (44).

It should be noted that the author intertwines her poignant concerns about the conflation of Christianity and Western culture with her own conflations of Christianity and feminism (another Western culture). She notes that Asian men are captive to the “Euro-American, middle-class, white, male theologies that are not only patriarchal, androcentric, and sexist, [but] sometimes misogynistic” (53). However, is it really true, as she says, that “a male-centered or androcentric Christology inevitably promotes patriarchal norms and sexists attitudes toward women” (53)?

If readers can get past Orevillo-Montenegro’s more extreme points, she presents challenging issues that the gospel needs to address. If our missionary activities are directed at the reality of Christ redeeming all things, should not Christians also fight passionately for the human rights of Asian women who are culturally oppressed?

I wish I was fluent in Japanese. I would have understood more of the prayers at a Tokyo house church I recently visited. I was convicted, actually. In praying for friends and the nation at large, church leaders wept (some of them praying in English, for my sake I think). It was refreshing to be around a group of Jesus followers who so loved their country, their families, and friends that tears flowed from earnest desires for the Holy Spirit to move people to follow Jesus. Only 4 percent of the population follow Jesus in Japan and, on average, career missionaries told me, it takes over 8 years (some say 10 to 15 years) of regularly hearing the gospel of redemption before a person becomes open to believing the truth of the covenant gospel story.

I don’t weep over America or my friends and family members who are not followers of Jesus. I hardly ever pray for them. I have no excuse. If I love them, like I claim to, one should think that I would desire to pray and weep for the Holy Spirit to move in a country as idolatrous as America. But I don’t. Instead of loving my country and its people I spend a lot of time throwing rocks at the big, bad “culture.”

Hurling rocks at non-Jesus followers for not living and thinking like those who are guided by Holy Spirit seems silly and is pathetically bloodsport for many of us. Sadly, for example, the rebukes in the Bible are too often directed at “America” by many Christians when, in fact, the contexts of those passages would normally apply to the church for not being redemptive salt and light in the world–which has always been the missional destiny of God’s people since Abraham.

Did Jesus spend more time rebuking religious people or those who were not followers of God? Do the prophets mostly rebuke religious people or the pagan nations who follow idols? Are the woes in the book of Revelation directed at religious people or “the culture?”

I wonder what would happen if Jesus followers in America wept and prayed over America instead of throwing rocks at non-Jesus followers for not having the convictions that only the Holy Spirit can bring? Instead of 3,500 churches dying ever year in America, maybe Christianity would actually grow in States.

I wrote an article for WORLD two years ago about A Way Out, a ministry in Memphis that rescues women from prostitution and topless dancing.  More than anything, I was struck by the fact that I just didn’t know many Christians who were down in the cracks of society looking for people to help.  A Way Out is way down in the cracks, trolling for hookers and handing out Bibles, picking up hookers from apartments where pimps with guns want to shoot them (the volunteers), you name it.  I thought about all this while reading an article about XXXChurch, who visits porn conventions and hands out Bibles that look like this:

In case you can’t read that, it says, “Jesus Loves Porn Stars,” and it’s a Bible.

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