Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

Map of Uganda. Image source.

So I need to talk about Renee Bach, the white American woman who went to Uganda as a missionary and set up a health clinic even though she had no medical training, and now 105 Ugandan children have died under her care.

NPR has an article about it: American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died. I recommend reading this; it gives a good overview.

(And I also posted another link about it on my June 27 blogaround, with my comment: "Oh wow this is terrible. And the only thing I can think is 'God doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called.'")

What strikes me about this story- the reason I feel, ahem, "called by God" to blog about it- is that what Bach did is EXACTLY what the romanticized missionary stories I heard my entire life in the evangelical church say to do.

To be clear, most missionaries don't do things as reckless and bad as what Bach did. Most missionaries are more grounded in reality and common sense. I find her story so striking because it sounds exactly like the idealized version of missions that is presented in American evangelical churches.

This is what happens when somebody actually "steps out in faith" and literally goes and does the things that, according to American Christians, perfect godly missionaries do. This is what happens when that naive romanticized ideal collides with reality. In this case, she claimed to be able to provide medical care for severely malnourished kids, and she actually just made things worse, and many died.

A bit of background about myself: So, I'm a white American Christian who's been living in China since 2013. I do not identify as a missionary. The first time I came to China was in 2010 on a short-term mission trip, when I was a college student. Back then, I was "on fire for God" and totally bought into radical Christian missions ideology. However, there were a lot of things I did NOT buy into- I did not believe God was "calling" me to go to China, and my motivation was NOT "we need to go help those pathetic Chinese people"- instead it was more along the lines of "the image of God lives in every person in every culture, and if I only know my own American culture, I'm missing out on so much of knowing God." That mission trip left me with an overwhelming, obsessive desire to move to China long-term, and I devoted myself to learning Mandarin Chinese- which I am now able to speak, read, and write. I researched a lot of different options for how to move to China- and many of them would have involved being a missionary. Personally, I didn't care that much about whether I came through a missions organization or just a normal secular job. I just wanted, needed, to be in China- and I believed "All Christians are missionaries wherever we are." Looking back on it now, I'm glad none of the missionary opportunities ended up working out. Back then, I was in the early stages of leaving evangelicalism, and I'm glad I didn't end up in an organization where I would have to constantly explain to my colleagues how I can be a Christian if I don't believe in "God called me" and all those other things I no longer believe in. Anyway I moved to China in 2013 and now it's 2019 and I'm still here.

So yeah, I have Some Things To Say about missions.

I want to touch on a bunch of aspects of Bach's story, and how they relate to the way white American evangelicals talk about missions:

Africa

So ... in my experience, white American Christians seem to think that countries where most people are not white are poor and unsafe and those people are so sad and need our help.

Before I came to China for the first time, I had never traveled to any non-Western countries. I didn't really have any idea about any specific country's characteristics; it was all just a vague mass of "exotic." I didn't choose China for any particular reason. It was just the mission trip opportunity I happened upon when I was like "I want to go on a mission trip this summer."

In particular, Africa is seen as a pathetic, needy land where everyone is poor, everyone lives in a dusty hut with no food, no water, no medical care. Where everyone just spends all their time being sad about how poor they are, I guess.

IN REALITY, Africa is a whole continent, with over 50 countries, all of which are unique. It's extremely diverse. Statistically, it is true that the poverty rate is way too high, and lots of people don't have access to clean water- but that doesn't tell the whole story. That doesn't mean everyone lives in the middle of nowhere with no resources. There are cities. There are universities. People are full people with full lives- not stereotypes.

(And I'll stop there because actually, I too know basically nothing about Africa...)

But white American Christians have this idea that these places are so poor, they have nothing, they don't know how to take care of themselves, and therefore if we just waltz in and improvise something, well even though we don't really know what we're doing, at least it's better than nothing.

This bit from the NPR article describes it very well:

"Just think of the arrogance," says Lawrence Gostin, who heads the Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. "Who are you to assume that you can do better than they can? It's not your judgment call to make."

Gostin adds that while the circumstances of Bach's case may seem exceptional, he sees her actions as stemming from an attitude many Americans bring to developing countries.

"The American cultural narrative is that these countries are basket cases."

And so, says Gostin, Americans assume that whatever their qualifications, they're sure to be of help.

The result, Gostin says, is that everyone from college kids to credentialed doctors routinely parachute into poor countries for medical missions that completely disregard local laws and conditions.

"People think that they're doing good. And they have no idea how much harm they can cause."

And people back home in the U.S. are often complicit, says Gostin. Because when these volunteers write blogs or post videos to share their exploits, "They're celebrated."

Yes, reading Bach's story, I get the impression that she felt like, "I'm not qualified to help- but there is no other option, so I have to." Umm. Yeah, not true. There are real hospitals. There are real doctors. There are real laws about how you can't just go around trying to provide medical care if you're not qualified.

God's calling

Yep, Bach believes she was "called" by God to do this.

On her first trip, in 2007, she worked at a missionary-run orphanage — staying on for nine months.

Once back home in Virginia, Bach — now 19 years old — came to a life-changing conclusion: She should move to Jinja full time and set up her own charity.

In an interview with NPR, Bach says it felt like a calling from God.

"It was a very, very profound feeling and experience. It's kind of hard to even describe in words," she says. "Like there was something that I was supposed to do."

This kind of thing- the idea that an average American Christian suddenly gets "called by God" to go do some absurd unrealistic thing in a foreign country- is how missions is portrayed in the American evangelical church. Yes, back when I was a teenager, I totally 100% believed that I could be just minding my own business and then suddenly God might "call" me and then I would have to go live in a hut on the other side of the world and be a missionary. I assumed that's how people became missionaries. It was totally a real, believable possibility that could totally happen to any Christian.

Notice, also, that God apparently called Bach to "move to Jinja full time and set up her own charity." Yes, not just move to Uganda, but SET UP HER OWN CHARITY. See, the more daunting and unrealistic the task from God is, the better the story. Of course it sounds impossible! That's why we need God's help! And God will make it a success.

In my case, back in 2010 when I was considering going on the mission trip to China, I did not feel that God was "calling" me. I just really wanted to go- and it confused me so much. Am I allowed to go on a mission trip just because I really want to, or do I need a special invitation from God? I always imagined that God's calling would be commanding me to do something I didn't want to do.

And after that, when I came back from that mission trip with an obsessive desire to move to China long-term, that didn't feel like "God's calling." It wasn't some out-of-context command to do some weird thing I didn't want to do. It came from my own realization about how little I knew about the world, and how I hated that about myself. After being in China, I just COULD NOT STAND living in a culture where I'm the majority and I have privilege and I understand how society works. I felt like it tempted me to believe that I understand the whole world, when in reality I only know a tiny tiny fraction.

I spent so long praying about my decision to move to China. Because God didn't "call" me. And so I worried that I wasn't "allowed" to do it. At times, I attempted to redefine "calling" so that "I have a huge internal desire to do this thing, perhaps the desire was given to me by God" would count. I'm no longer interested in redefining the term "calling" so at this point I just say no, God didn't call me to move to China. I just did because I wanted to.

But yes, the way Bach talks about being "called" by God to go start a charity in Uganda is 100% a normal thing people in American churches would say.

Being unqualified

The article says this:

Except Bach was not a doctor. She was a 20-year-old high school graduate with no medical training. And not only was her center not a hospital — at the time it didn't employ a single doctor.

She was completely unqualified. She had no business opening up a medical center.

But in the missionary stories I always heard in church, being unqualified- by "worldly" standards- was seen as a good thing. Christians like to say, "God doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called."

It wasn't about your own abilities. It was about God doing this amazing, seemingly impossible thing, and giving you the opportunity to be part of it, if only you'll trust God and jump in way over your head.

The less qualified you are, the better the story. And so, even though in reality, most missionaries spend years training and studying the culture of their destination country, they emphasize their lack of qualifications when they tell their story to the supporters back home. This is not good.

Bach was so young- only 20- and she moved to Uganda and started a charity for starving children. Wow. Look at how impressive that sentence is! How young- only 20! How scary and foreign Uganda is! How huge the task- starting her own charity! And how poor and needy the targets were- starving children! Wow! Hard to imagine a missionary story better than this- according to the way missions are talked about in American churches.

In reality, though, when a thing looks like it's impossible and it's going to fail spectacularly, typically it ends up failing spectacularly. "God" doesn't "work a miracle" and make it a success against all odds. In reality, when you have no medical training and you let people think you're a doctor, and you attempt to treat their extremely vulnerable children ... in reality it's not good.

And here's the part that scares me even more: Was she "stepping out in faith" when she took risks with these children's health care? I didn't see anything about this specifically in the article, but I know how American evangelicals talk about things like that. What if, when Bach didn't know how to help a patient, she prayed about it, and got a "feeling" from God telling her what to do, and she went ahead and did that even though she had no actual medical knowledge indicating it was actually the right thing to do?

Because that's how the stories go, when they tell them in church. God sends you into some situation where you are horribly unqualified, you're in way over your head, you have no idea what you're doing. And then of course, you encounter problems and you need to make a decision about what action to take- but there's no way you have the ability to make a good decision. Not on your own, at least. But you pray, and you get a *feeling* about what God wants you to do. And then, even though you still have no idea what you're doing, even though you're terrified, you "step out in faith" and do the thing. That's how the very best role-model missionaries live.

Wow, that's horrifying, to imagine someone might use that method IN THE ACTUAL REAL WORLD when caring for a starving child in a medical setting.

And I want to be clear, nothing in the article said Bach actually did that. But it said she made medical decisions without any actual doctors present at the center. I personally believe it is extremely likely those decisions were based more on prayer than on actual medical knowledge.

The missionary blog

Oh, the missionary blog.

NPR's article mentions Bach's missionary blog several times. When I went on my China mission trip in 2010, missionary blogs weren't really a big thing yet- THANK GOODNESS. Instead, I sent email updates only to my family and people who had given me money for the trip. I remember a few years later, seeing kids from my church posting links on Facebook to their own mission-trip blogs, and the concept felt very cringe-y to me.

Why? Because if you're going to some country where you've never been before, you're gonna have a ton of culture shock, you're gonna be so clueless about everything that is happening- do you really want your initial reactions to that to be there on the internet for everyone to see, forever? *cringe*

Like yeah, my first day in China I had a lot of opinions about things, a lot of wide-eyed "wow can you believe this is how they do things here????" and I now realize all of that was incredibly naive and I didn't have A CLUE what I was talking about. So good thing I didn't broadcast that to tons of people all over the internet.

If you go on a short-term mission trip, don't make a blog about it. Because that's the culture shock talking, and the more you learn about the place where you're traveling, the more you'll realize you knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING at the beginning and you don't want the whole world reading that. Yeah, sure, it makes sense to send emails to your family and people who gave you money, but don't post stuff more publicly than that.

(As for me personally, when I first started this blog I used to do more posts about "wow look at this interesting aspect of Chinese culture", but the longer I've lived here, the more I've realized I don't know and it's not really my place to be acting like an expert on China.)

Bach's blog wasn't a short-term-mission-trip-my-first-day-in-this-country blog; she had been to Uganda before. But still, in my opinion, the posts mentioned in NPR's article have that wide-eyed-cluelessness "I'm on a grand adventure from God where I am the main character" feel.

Yes, let's talk about that part. So, when you go on a mission trip, one of the main goals is getting the people you meet in the destination country to become Christians. And maybe offering them some kind of service (in Bach's case, food and medical care) because they are in need. And both of these aspects are things you don't actually want them to know. You don't tell your targets "my goal is to get you to become a Christian." You don't tell them "I came here to help you because you're so poor and deserve my pity, look at me being such a good person, a white savior who stoops down to help you." But when you talk to your supporters back home, you do say those things.

And so when people write a mission trip blog, the audience they have in mind is those supporters back home, and other people from their own American Christian culture, who hold the same beliefs about missions.

But. It's the internet. Everyone can read it.

And people in your destination country have smart phones.

So you get missionaries posting photos of those "poor, needy" people they met, sharing romanticized versions of these people's stories- all without their consent. Treating them as stereotypes, as objects in a grand adventure that God is directing. What happens if those people- who, in reality, are intelligent human beings with a whole life, just like you- find your blog?

It's not very likely ... because of language and cultural barriers, it's not likely that people in your destination country are browsing around the same areas of the internet that you are. Except ... except for Facebook. What if you post links to your mission-trip blog on Facebook, and then you find "wow, our new friends we met in X country have Facebook, this is great, we can keep in touch!"

What if they read what you really think about them? *cringe*

The things people write on mission-trip blogs- those are the things that we're not supposed to say out loud where our evangelism targets (and other non-Christians) can hear us. The internet connects people in ways that they maybe didn't realize they didn't want to be connected.

Here's an excerpt from the NPR article:

Ten years ago, Renee Bach left her home in Virginia to set up a charity to help children in Uganda. One of her first moves was to start a blog chronicling her experiences.

Among the most momentous: On a Sunday morning in October 2011, a couple from a village some distance away showed up at Bach's center carrying a small bundle.

"When I pulled the covering back my eyes widened," Bach wrote in the blog. "For under the blanket lay a small, but very, very swollen, pale baby girl. Her breaths were frighteningly slow. ... The baby's name is Patricia. She is 9 months old."

See what I mean? It reads like "wow, here I am on this amazing adventure that God has sent me on. I met this mind-blowingly sick baby- isn't it exciting?" Do you think the parents want this dramatized account of their child's life-threatening condition broadcast for American Christians to read?

But that's how Christians talk about the people they meet on their mission trips. That's how they've always talked, when they go back to their home churches and share their "mission moment" during the Sunday service. That's bad enough. But now, in the 21st century, when blogs allow them to share their ignorant stereotypes with a much wider audience than before, ooooh I cringe.

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Bach's story is exactly what would happen if someone literally did all the things that American Christians say missionaries do. Go to Africa, a land so backwards that they don't know how to do anything, a land where they're desperate for help from random unqualified Americans. Follow God's "call" and put yourself into an absurd, impossible situation so you can watch how amazing it is when God turns it into a success story. Go even though you have no qualifications and don't have a clue what you're doing- that gives God an even bigger opportunity to show off. And document it all on your missionary blog- all the one-dimensional people you meet, all the shocking situations you end up in because you had faith and obeyed God's call, all the excitement and fear of living this wild adventure that God allows you to be part of.

The most impressive missionary stories in the white American evangelical church have people doing exactly the things that Bach did. In reality, though, she did a very bad thing. She was reckless with children's lives, and many of them died.

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Related:

This whole thing reminds me of the news last year about John Allen Chau, another missionary who did all the things that a perfect role-model missionary should do. Here are my posts about him:
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To
Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts

And another related post:
Runaway Radical: The Stories You Can't Tell In Church

My Urbana 12 Commitment Card

Logo from Urbana 2012. Image source.

Urbana 18 is going to be held December 27-31, so I'd like to talk about my experience with Urbana. Urbana is the huge student missions conference that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship holds every 3 years. It's about missions- about the world, about God calling you to go be a missionary, about embracing different languages and cultures, about the needs of humanity on a global scale, about our radical obedience to a God who wants us to sacrifice everything for the gospel.

ANYWAY here is a rough timeline of what happened to me:

2009: Went to Urbana
2010: Went on a short-term missions trip to China
2012: Went to Urbana
2013: Moved to China, and I've been living here ever since.

Umm. Did I come to China because of Urbana? No? Kind of? Maybe? It's more complicated than that. It wasn't like "while we were in that giant auditorium singing 'I Will Go' I just got this sense like God was telling me, 'Perfect Number, go to China.'" It wasn't like how the Christian leaders at my college encouraged us to sign up for Urbana by name-dropping famous missionaries who apparently "heard the call" at Urbana. It wasn't like that.

(And because it wasn't like that, I spent 2010-2013 living in the US, wanting SO MUCH to be in China, but not even sure if I was "allowed to", because "God didn't 'call' me." But that's a story for another time. Seriously, ask me about that sometime and I will TELL YOU. Or look through my blog posts from 2012.)

I already believed- because I had been taught this in church for my entire life- that God loved the whole world, and that all around the world there are people who desperately need our help, either because they're living in poverty, or because they haven't "heard the gospel." And I believed I should obey God no matter the cost. Urbana just helped me see, in real-life practical terms, what it would mean to live like I really believed those things. (I no longer necessarily think those are good things to believe...)

It wasn't like "I moved to China because at Urbana God told me to move to China." Nope. Not one bit like that. Maybe it was more like "I moved to China because of these things I believed about God and the world, which I had believed my whole life, but Urbana reminded me of them in a way I couldn't shake."

(I've actually been working on a post about "the real reason I came to China" for a while, so stay tuned for that. Maybe in the next few months.)

Anyway. What I really want to talk about in this post is my Urbana 2012 commitment card.

What is a "commitment card", you ask? Well on the last day of a Christian conference, they have all the attendees fill out a "commitment card" where you write down what actions "God is calling you" to take as a result of your experiences at the conference. As it happens, a while ago I found an image online of an Urbana 2012 commitment card, and I posted it on the blog post I wrote about radical Christian missions. Here is the image:

Urbana 2012 commitment card. Image source.

Here is the text, the different "commitments" you can choose from:

I say "yes" to Jesus, who extends God's lavish welcome
1. I am deciding to become a follower of Jesus for the first time.
2. I am deciding to recommit myself to following Jesus.

I commit to extending Jesus' invitation
3. I will invite someone who is not a follower of Jesus to study Luke with me

I commit to join Jesus in his global mission
4. I commit to serve and learn in a global or cross-cultural setting

5. Short-term: less than one year
6. Mid-term: one to two years
7. Long-term: more than two years

So for each of the numbered items, there's a box you can check if you're "committing" to that one. Yep, this is exactly what the commitment card I filled out looked like. I remember I checked off the last one- commit to doing cross-cultural missions long-term, ie more than two years.

All right, that was 2012, that was 6 years ago, how about we revisit that "commitment" and see if I did it or not?

Well to start out with, let's talk about what the word "commitment" means. This is a two-year commitment. Wow. That is a really big deal. I wonder about the other students who checked off that box. I wonder if it was a decision they made at Urbana, or if they had already been planning to move to another country.

In my case, I was already planning to go to China, before I went to Urbana 2012. The commitment card didn't represent me making a decision; it was just me writing down the decision I had already made, the decision that had been on my mind constantly since that short-term mission trip in 2010.

But the way Christians always talked about Urbana and God's "calling", I imagined that typically, these "commitments" were something new, something that had just come up within the few days that people were attending the conference. As if someone showed up at Urbana with no plans at all to do long-term missions, but with their "heart open to God", and during the conference they felt like God was "calling" them to go to such-and-such country that they had never been to before and knew nothing about.

(I even knew Christians who chose not to go to Urbana specifically because they were worried that God was going to "call" them to go be a missionary in some foreign country. Ha, I could write a whole post analyzing what this says about obeying God and not being allowed to make our own choices.)

I have no idea, in reality, how long people thought about it before making "commitments" at Urbana. I don't know what percentage of them counted the cost. But I do know that we were encouraged to "step out in faith" and "trust God" and go ahead and make that commitment even though we didn't yet understand how it would work out in practical terms. After all, if God is telling you to do it, then God will make sure those minor details work out. (Minor details like "I don't speak the language"...) No worries.

It seems to me that an idea which comes to you in an emotionally-charged Christian environment like the Urbana conference can disappear just as fast when you go back to your normal life. If, out of nowhere, "God calls you" and you "commit" to moving overseas for 2 years, but that's something you had never actually thought about before, then how on earth is that actually going to happen? Raw emotion isn't going to get you there. You have to find a job or find a missions organization. You have to fill out visa applications. You have to buy a plane ticket. You have to pack medications and maybe get vaccines, depending on which country you're going to. You have to at least learn how to say numbers, so you can buy stuff, and "where's the bathroom?" But before you do any of that, you have to do A LOT OF RESEARCH to figure out where to even start.

So I wonder, how many students made "commitments" at Urbana to do missions, and then nothing ever came of it.

What about me though? I committed to 2 or more years of cross-cultural missions. And I've been living in China for 5 years now. So, uh, does that "count"?

I mean... Back when I was an evangelical, I believed in the concept of "we are all missionaries, no matter where we are." Basically, even if you're not living in a foreign country, even if you're not in a Christian job like being a pastor, even if you just have a "normal" life (whatever that means...), you should still think of yourself as a missionary. That means that you should work hard to "show God's love" to people and to "share the gospel" with them- that should be a high priority for Christians no matter where we are or what job we have.

And I still believe that. Well, in an ex-evangelical way. I no longer do evangelism- because it's BAD and UNLOVING to assume that I know what complete strangers need (ie, they need to become Christians). But I believe in doing good and loving people even if that's not part of my actual professional job description. Do the right thing, spend time and effort caring about people, etc.

Umm. So. ... Am I a missionary?

LOLOLOLOLOL no. No, I very much DO NOT identify as a missionary.

Do I "serve and learn in a global or cross-cultural setting"? (The actual text of the commitment card.)

I mean, yes... except that I think the "serve" here is actually Christianese for "doing the things that good evangelicals are supposed to do, like evangelism." So if we're using that definition, then no. If any of this is dependent on being a good evangelical, then no, no I have NOT spent 2 years doing that.

Overall, I have no regrets about this. I did good enough. I moved to China. As for that stuff about continuing to buy into that whole ideology about evangelism and missions, nah I don't feel bad about leaving all that behind.

One more thing I want to say about the concept of committing to move to a different country for 2+ years: Actually, that's not really something you can commit to, because there could be unexpected problems that come up and force you to move back to your home country.

When I first came to China and I was teaching English, I had a coworker who was also from the US, let's call her Anna. She had been working in Shanghai as an English teacher for less than 1 year, and then she started having health problems, and she had to move back to the US to get treatment.

I met another American here in Shanghai, let's call her Cathy. She came to China because she got a job as a music teacher here, but then when she got here the school was like "actually you won't be a music teacher, you're going to teach English." Yeah, that happens sometimes- the job they actually want you to do is completely different from the job they said you were going to do.

Cathy, as you might imagine, was NOT HAPPY about this. She spent a few days scrambling around to find a new job- at one point saying to herself, "If I don't find a new job today, I will have to go back to the US." She did find a different teaching job, and she worked there for a few months. But then she had problems with her visa, and China is a giant bureaucracy, and she couldn't get those problems solved so she did end up moving back to the US.

I have another American friend, let's call him Tim, who was studying in Japan in 2011 when there was a huge earthquake that caused a huge tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdowns. It was bad. Wikipedia says 15000 people died. Because of that disaster, Tim ended up leaving Japan and coming back to the US. From what he told me, it sounded like most of the international students he knew in Japan were leaving.

In her book When We Were On Fire (which I blogged about here), Addie Zierman talked about the period of time she and her husband spent in China. For her, it was a very low point in her life. She developed depression because of the culture shock and because of how isolated she felt. For her own mental health, she needed to leave.

And the book Runaway Radical (which I blogged about here) tells about how Jonathan Hollingsworth went to Cameroon as a missionary, because he was so "on fire for God" and bought into all that ideology about sacrificing everything for the sake of the gospel. When he was there, he suffered spiritual abuse from the leaders of the missions organization. The situation got worse and worse, and finally he decided to leave, and they wouldn't even give him his plane ticket or refund any of the money his donors had raised. He was able to get back to the US, eventually.

My point is, sometimes you plan to move to a foreign country and live there for a certain period of time- 1 year, 2 years, whatever- but then circumstances outside of your control force you to leave. So I'm really really uncomfortable about the idea of "making a commitment" about it. Yes, you can make a commitment to try, to put in a reasonable amount of effort in pursuit of that goal, but making a commitment to actually do it... uhhhh... Especially if you've never even traveled there before and you really have no idea what you're committing to. (*cough* like most of the students at Urbana *cough*) When you don't know how hard and painful it is to be an immigrant.

I just hate the idea that someone could spend so much time, effort, money, and emotional energy to move to another country, and then something bad happens and they're more or less forced to move back to their home country- which is a difficult situation just by itself- but then on top of that, they feel the weight of guilt because they broke a commitment they made to God. If it was me, no matter what the problem was that forced me to leave, I would feel like it was my fault, that I should have just tried harder and I could have found a way to stay. Or I would feel like my sin was in making that commitment in the first place- making a "rash vow" like Jephthah, am I right? Like it didn't matter if I'd vowed something that was actually impossible for me to do. It's my fault for not adding fine print to the Urbana commitment card.

(By the way, here is a link to the BEST POST I HAVE EVER READ about the biblical story of Jephthah's daughter. "The story of Jephthah is the story of everyone who decides that vows and codes and rules must be absolute. That way of thinking always ends in death.")

Anyway. I'm revisiting my 2012 Urbana commitment card because it's a big deal to commit to 2 years of cross-cultural missions, and that matters to me. InterVarsity keeps statistics about these commitment cards, as if they really matter and these are real commitments we are making. Look at this link- it says in 2012 at Urbana, 4248 students committed to that last option on the commitment card, 2 or more years of "long-term mission." I was one of them. I want to know what happened to the other 4247. 6 years later, where are they? Did they do their 2 years? Did they quit being evangelical, like me? What did it actually mean, that we made this commitment?

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Readers: If you have experience with making "commitments" at a Christian conference, leave a comment about it! Especially if you went to Urbana.

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Related: 
I Didn't Count the Cost Before I Moved To China
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To
InterVarsity just strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel. (I no longer support InterVarsity because of what they did to queer people in 2016.)

Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts

Clip-art image of an island. Image source.

Last week I published This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To, about John Allen Chau, a missionary who was killed by the island tribe he was trying to "reach." I wrote:

Chau is going to be seen as a hero and a role model. There is absolutely no part of this story that will come across as a cautionary tale for evangelicals, nothing that will serve as a warning that other people should NOT do what he did. It's perfect, and that scares me.

Right now, I'm so freaking angry about being proven right.

Well, the evangelical blogosphere got right to work, publishing posts about how Chau was doing a good thing and he just loved Jesus so much and loved the Sentinelese people so much, etc. All of which COMPLETELY MISS THE POINT, which is THEY DO NOT WANT CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD. LEAVE THEM THE **** ALONE. Evangelical Christianity doesn't understand the concepts of boundaries and consent. They think if a missionary *feels* loving toward a group of people, and works hard for years to prepare to live among them, that gives him the right to go and do it whether that group of people likes it or not.

Receipts, receipts, receipts, I got your receipts right here. Let's start with this podcast from Christianity Today, What John Allen Chau’s Missions Agency Wants You to Know. It's an interview with Mary Ho, the international executive leader of All Nations, which is the missions agency Chau worked with. Ho talks about how Chau prepared for years for his trip to North Sentinel Island:

He first contacted [All Nations] about two years ago, and he's a very interesting young man, very focused. Since he was about 18 years old, I believe, he took a mission trip. And on that mission trip, he really felt a call to be a missionary. And around that time, he started researching on the different people groups and he came across the North Sentinelese people. He really felt that this was his life call. That his life call was to take the love and the goodness of Jesus Christ to the North Sentinelese. Since then, every single decision he has made has been to thoroughly prepare himself for this life call, and to prepare him to love and care for the people well. As you pointed out earlier, All Nations missionary John Chau, he graduated from Oral Roberts University. He majored in sports medicine, in health, in exercise science. Later he got trained as a wilderness EMT, worked at a national park, got trained in linguistics by SIL, which is probably just about the best place to get trained in linguistics. He became acquainted with all the writings on cultural anthropology. So, this young man, he was intent on fully equipping himself, and I think he knew what his life purpose was about.

She talks about how All Nations requires their missionaries to go through training, and even sometimes advises someone not to go if they don't believe that person is prepared enough. She says Chau knew about the risks of introducing diseases to the Sentinelese, so he was vaccinated and he quarantined himself for several days before he went to the island.

Well whoop dee doo. I guess the point is, if you assume Chau was just some random guy who woke up one morning and decided to illegally go to North Sentinel Island, you would be wrong. Instead, he worked hard for years to prepare to illegally go to North Sentinel Island. We are supposed to be like "ah, I see, that makes it okay."

Like if you work hard enough, you can earn the right to violate other people's boundaries. What? No, reality does not work that way. The Sentinelese have made it clear they do not want outside people on their island. And that should be the end of the discussion. Their island, their choice.

Oh but he worked hard for yearssssssss! Maybe 5 or 10 years! Well guess what, the Sentinelese have worked hard for thousands of years living on their own. The idea that some American gets to override that because he worked so hard and really really wants it and has good intentions- no. See this is what I mean when I say evangelical Christians don't know what boundaries are.

Ed Stetzer, dean of the School of Mission, Ministry and Leadership at Wheaton College, also seems to think that Chau's preparedness somehow completely changes the story. Here's Stetzer's article for the Washington Post: Slain missionary John Chau prepared much more than we thought, but are missionaries still fools? (I highly recommend Chris Stroop's "translation" of Stetzer's evangelicalese into English. For example: "I am having to do way too much damage control for evangelicals this year. Please clap.") Stetzer writes:

While both Christians and non-Christians have raised profound questions about the biblical and ethical appropriateness of pushing into places where you’re not wanted, much criticism of Chau has focused on what appeared to be his lack of preparation.

Umm. Did it though? Personally, because I have been part of that Christian missions culture, from the moment I heard about Chau I assumed he had some kind of backstory about how he was "called by God" and "loved" the Sentinelese people, and spent years telling all his American Christian friends about how obsessed he was with "reaching" people "for the gospel", and had a well-thought-out plan about how he wanted this whole thing to go, and prayed over every single part of his mission efforts, and so on and so on. People don't do stuff like this because they're "crazy" in some weird, impossible-to-understand way. No, people do stuff like this because they live in a culture that sees it as good. They pray about it and think about it logically, and because they start with certain assumptions about how the world works, they end up quite reasonably coming to these kinds of conclusions.

When I say "assumptions about how the world works" I mean things like "all non-Christians are living sad, meaningless lives" and "people who don't believe in Jesus go to hell" and "God calls us to take risks and make sacrifices, but it is SO WORTH IT, even if we die."

Stetzer then says the real question is about the concept of missions itself. Obviously, he is in favor of it. He says:

For some, the very idea of trying to convert others to a certain faith and taking any risk to do so is simply abhorrent. But Christians worldwide genuinely believe that people who hear and respond to the gospel are better off when they do.

In other words, when he's writing for a "secular" audience, he does this "oh but you gotta understand, we REALLY DO think people are in danger of going to hell, and we REALLY DO believe we are helping them by evangelizing, so you can't criticize us" routine. (He made the same argument in a post for CNN back in 2017.) And, ughhhhhh. UGHHHH. Okay, the reason this makes me mad is because HE'S RIGHT. Like if you really do believe that non-Christians go to hell, and you really love them and want to save them, then logically, you should become a manipulative creep that puts on a show of being kind and loving in order to coerce people into changing religions. And that's how I used to live when I was an evangelical.

Basically, Stetzer is right about that, and therefore we don't really have any common ground to work from, if I were trying to convince him that it's, you know, *bad* to be a manipulative creep who coerces people into changing religion. (He also wrote an article for Christianity Today, elaborating on this point. "I actually believe what is offensive to many today— I really believe that the world needs Jesus. And, I am OK that you think me a fool for believing that." All right, what do I even say to that... I got nothin'.)

But he seems to think non-Christian readers will be like "ohhhh, okay, I didn't realize that, okay that totally excuses this kind of Christian behavior, so I will not criticize them." HAHAHAHAHA yeah right. My feeling is more along the lines of "we can't reason with these jerks, so let's not even try."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Belief in hell completely ruins anything good about Christianity. (Note: I am a Christian who does NOT believe in hell.)

Stetzer then goes on to talk about 2 things he thinks Chau should have done differently. To me, this reads as "I totally agree with what Chau did, but people won't like it if I say that, so I'm going to pretend to criticize a few small aspects so that I end up looking 'reasonable.'" Like, to me, neither of these read as real objections.

The first so-called objection is that Chau should have gone with a group, rather than alone. Just like Jesus sent the disciples two-by-two. Stetzer is acting like this is some well-known, universal, biblical command. Ha, watch this, I can come up with some biblical-sounding arguments for why it's totally legit to go alone. Hmm, remember the bible story about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch? God told Philip to go do missions alone, so that's what he did. Maybe God told Chau to go to North Sentinel Island alone. Also, Chau probably had a lot of Christian friends back home praying for him. Maybe they supported him financially, and he sent out email updates about how his missions work was going. (I haven't heard anything about that in any of the news stories, but I will be 0% surprised if it's true.) See, he wasn't *really* alone. And also, for practical reasons, he is less of a threat to the Sentinelese people (in terms of spreading disease, and also in terms of how they perceive him) if he's just 1 person, rather than 2 people or a group.

I just find it bizarre how Stetzer seems to be claiming "see, Chau's problem was that he went there alone, when every missionary KNOWS you should NEVER do that." Ha. Yeah right. Yes, I am sure that missionaries believe it's generally better to go with other missionaries, rather than alone, but hey, if that's what God told you to do... well maybe it's not ideal but you gotta do it anyway, for the sake of the gospel.

As for Stetzer's second pretend-criticism:

Also, in regard to people’s choices, Jesus makes it quite clear in Mark 6:11, saying, “And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place.” It appears that Chau returned to North Sentinel even after being shot at with arrows, one of which, according to his journal, stuck in his Bible.

Well I would laugh out loud if this whole situation wasn't so sad.

Like, oh, Christians are supposed to give up and go home if their evangelism targets aren't interested in being evangelized? SINCE WHEN? This is very much NOT what I was taught in church.

I was taught if people weren't interested in hearing the "gospel", that just meant it was "harder", that it was more of a "challenge"- not that you should leave them alone and stop trying. You shouldn't give up- you should "pray for God to soften their hearts" and "look for opportunities to start spiritual conversations."

Also, I would like to know why the Indian government's decision to stop trying to contact the Sentinelese, after decades of trying to send them gifts every now and then, and being rejected over and over, is somehow NOT enough of a sign that Chau was not "welcome." Apparently, it took Chau actually going there and getting shot at on his first attempt- that's when he should have known he was "not welcome" and he should leave, according to Stetzer. Well that's rich. Kind of seems like Stetzer is inventing rules after-the-fact and then claiming that CLEARLY this is what JESUS SAID and so THAT'S where Chau went wrong.

But do you want to see THE WORST article about Chau? It's this one, from Desiring God, and oh it is bad: What God Might Do with Satan’s Arrows (written by Garrett Kell).

Kell seems to completely buy into the whole "God totally called Chau to go share the gospel with these sad lost people" nonsense. But it's worse than that:

Questions have emerged about John Chau’s zeal, training, prudence, and legacy. But another even more important question sits under the surface of such a tragedy: What is God doing in all of this?

How is God working to reveal his glory to the Sentinelese people? Could he bring them forgiveness for their murder and freedom from their own pain? How will he bring healing to the heartbreak of the Chau family? Could our God be using injustice, arrows, and a fallen missionary to make his reconciling grace known to the entire world?

What? NO, no no no nonono. "What is God doing in all of this" oh god no. As if, just because someone got killed while "obeying God's call", that means there's some huge grand purpose to it, oh this is bad, this is bad. Okay, the Sentinelese DO NOT WANT contact with the outside world. LEAVE THEM THE **** ALONE. But Kell sees them as nothing more than characters in his imagined story about "God's glory" and "the gospel"; it doesn't matter what they want.

(Also, Kell takes the Lord's name in vain by assuming that God will side with him rather than with the Sentinelese people.)

Then Kell tells the story of John Williams and James Harris, missionaries who were killed by the people of an island called Erromango. Apparently, this is a beautiful story with a happy ending because years later, other missionaries came and succeeded in getting the islanders to become Christians, and then there was a big ceremony where the islanders apologized to Williams's descendants, and isn't that just great. On Twitter, Jesse T. Reese said "This article is an unbelievable piece of #ChristianAltFacts propaganda that sanctifies genocide, and it only gets worse if you dig a little" and wrote a thread about how ACTUALLY missionaries have caused a lot of harm to the people of Erromango. Go read it.

Oh, but Kell's article gets even worse:

We cannot know for sure what God is doing. But might he be stoking the hearts of his church with a fresh fire to reach the unreached peoples of the world? Could God be using the death of John Chau to stir the souls of more missionaries to take the good news of Jesus to the Sentinelese people? Could he be stirring you? Is it possible that God might be working to bring them the message of forgiveness for killing the missionary as well as healing from the injustice done to them generations ago? Could God be plotting a reunion of forgiveness in months, years, even centuries from now that will magnify his mercies before the world? Can you picture that moving ceremony on the shores of North Sentinel Island?

John Piper’s call from five years ago in the wake of another martyred missionary is just as relevant today: “I call thousands of you to take [their] place. Let the replacements flood the world. We do not seek death. We seek the everlasting joy of the world — including our enemies.”

God can spark a movement from a martyrdom. He’s done it before. Let’s pray he’s doing it again.

HOLY CRAP. NO. LEAVE THEM THE **** ALONE.

No. NO NO NO NO NO. That is the WORST possible outcome of this: that more missionaries would be inspired to go and barge in on the Sentinelese people. Kell waxes poetic about how wonderful it will be when someday there is reconciliation between Christian missionaries and the people who killed Chau- SEE, THIS IS WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY EVANGELICALS DON'T BELIEVE IN CONSENT. The Sentinelese have made it clear they DO NOT WANT this fantasy that Kell is imagining. But does he care what they want? Ha. Nope.

(See also: White Christian saviorism is a helluva drug, by seelolago.)

Also, remember a minute ago Ed Stetzer was claiming that JESUS CLEARLY SAID you should leave people alone if they make it clear they don't want to hear your "gospel", and then I said hahaha nope that is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what I was taught in church, but good try Ed Stetzer? See this is what I mean. Garrett Kell very much does NOT believe Christians should just give up and go home because the Sentinelese do not "welcome" them. He thinks that just makes it a better story, a more amazing victory when the missionaries finally succeed, some time in the future. If they kill one missionary, well that means we/God should respond by sending "thousands of you to take their place." The Sentinelese are just playing hard-to-get, as it were.

Ughhhhhhh. This is very not okay. Just LEAVE THEM ALONE. I've never been so angry about being proven right. I knew that Christians of the "unsaved people go to hell" persuasion would love this story and see Chau as a great role model driven by love for God and love for people. Those of us who live in reality see that historically, this kind of missions has done a lot of harm to indigenous people. But evangelicals imagine that they are the heroes of some grand story that God is writing, a myth that says hard work earns them the right to override other people's consent, and actually consent doesn't even matter in the first place- what really matters is that in the end, more people become Christians.

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Related:
This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To 
Because of an Idea
Runaway Radical: The Stories You Can't Tell In Church

This Is Exactly the Martyr Fairy Tale We Aspired To

Aerial photo of North Sentinel Island. Image source.

In the Christian culture I was part of in college, there were 2 types of people:

1. Those who were totally willing to be "martyrs"- to die for Jesus if that's what Jesus wanted. Willing, and maybe even excited about the possibility.
2. Those who were NOT willing to "follow the call" and die if that's what God wanted, and they felt guilty about that.

Feeling confident in one's unwillingness to die for Jesus was not an option. We couldn't "count the cost" and then decide "no."

Last week, I read the news about John Allen Chau, an American missionary who was killed while trying to "bring the gospel" to an isolated tribe off the coast of India. It's sad, it's terrible, and everything about it feels so familiar to me, as an ex-evangelical. Familiar, but also not. Familiar because what Chau did was exactly what we were encouraged to do, when the church taught us about missions. But not familiar, because I don't know anyone who actually literally went and died like that. It feels surreal and jarring and heartbreaking to see that ideology collide with reality like this.

Every detail I read about this feels like "yep, that rings true with my experience of Christian missions ideology" but also I cringe so hard seeing how completely wrong and destructive the outcome is when that ideology is applied to the actual real world.

So... Chau was killed by Sentinelese people- who are they? All right, a bit of history: This is a group of people completely isolated from the rest of the world. They live on an island that is part of India. Historically, when people on other islands in that area have been visited by outsiders, it hasn't gone well. Survival International says, "The tribe have made it clear that they do not want contact. It is a wise choice. Neighboring tribes were wiped out after the British colonized their islands, and they lack immunity to common diseases like flu or measles, which would decimate their population." Decades ago, the Indian government used to periodically send gifts and attempt to contact them, but they stopped because the Sentinelese seem fine on their own and don't want to be contacted.

It's an uncontacted tribe, that doesn't want anything to do with the rest of the world, but do you think that matters in American evangelical missions ideology? HA. Hahaha. No. Nope, evangelicals know what everybody else needs. Evangelicals know that if a group of people have never heard about Jesus, well that's a PROBLEM that needs to be SOLVED.

It just makes me sick, remembering how we took it for granted back then... the idea that it's so SAD that people somewhere far away have never "heard the gospel" and somebody needs to go tell them. Oh god, I feel disgusting thinking about it... the term "unreached people group." Uh, yeah let me define "unreached people group." So the idea is that people typically only have close interactions with other members of their own culture, their own "people group." So it's not necessarily useful to talk about being a missionary to a certain place, because you might go to a place and only interact with people from one certain subculture- one "people group"- and even if people from that group "get saved" that doesn't necessarily help the other "people groups" living in that area because they aren't likely to interact closely enough that "the gospel" would be transmitted from members of one group to another.

Take a look at what Chau wrote: "I DON'T WANT TO DIE. Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else to continue. No I don't think so." He's thinking along these exact lines. Somebody needs to "reach" the Sentinelese people. He's willing to do it, even if it costs him his life. This is exactly what I was taught in church.

The Joshua Project is a Christian missions group that keeps track of all the "people groups" in the world, and the "progress" that has been made with "reaching" each group with "the gospel." (This isn't directly connected to Chau's story; I have no idea if he was influenced by the Joshua Project or not. I am talking about it here to show how normal this way of thinking is for American evangelical Christians.) Oh god, it's gross, it's so gross. Using terminology like "progress" to indicate what percentage of each "people group" are evangelical Christians. "Progress"- as if changing the religious beliefs of strangers around the world is a project we are working on, an objectively good goal to work toward. Ewww. Actually, the Joshua Project has this phrase written right across the top of their website: "Bringing definition to the unfinished task." See that? "The unfinished task", ie, making sure every person in the world has an opportunity to hear about Jesus, which is realistically only going to happen if a good enough percentage of each people group is evangelical. (I love the trying-to-be-subtle language on the Joshua Project website, basically saying that real Christians are evangelical- even if a large percentage of the population identifies as Christian, well, that doesn't necessarily count. BARF.)

The Joshua Project... yep, back when I was a good evangelical, I had heard of them, and definitely believed they were doing a good thing. I remember I was at a Christian conference and representatives from the Joshua Project were giving out fliers with little descriptions of specific "unreached people groups", to prompt us to pray for them every day. Look at their website- there's even an app you can get that will tell you a different "unreached people group" to pray for every day. Predatory Christian-supremacist bullshit. Grossssssss.

Take a look at the Joshua Project's page about the Sentinelese. Look at this disgusting bit:

What Are Their Needs?
Sentinelese people need to know that Creator God exists, and that He loves them and paid the price for their sins.

They need basic medical care.

Prayer Points
* Pray that the Indian Government will allow Christians to earn the trust of the Sentinelese people, and that they will be permitted to live among them.
* Pray that God will open doors to Sentinelese people to receive the gospel message.

I am angry, because this is crap. "Sentinelese people need to know that Creator God exists-" no, stop right there. Who the **** are you, person writing this page. How can you claim you know what they need? They do not need our help, they do not want our help, leave them the **** alone.

Furthermore, it is DISGUSTING to pray that God would violate these people's wishes. What is this crap- pray that the Indian government would allow Christians to go live among them. Pray that God would force people to do things they don't want to do. Because CLEARLY God agrees with us- God's going to side with us, American Christians, and do what we want instead of what the Sentinelese want.

When ex-evangelicals tell you that in church we never learned about consent and boundaries, this is the kind of shit we're talking about.

Yeah, I used to participate in that. I used to pray that God would manipulate people into changing religions. Gross.

I remember back then, sometimes we would express concern over how "arrogant" we seemed, like we were just barging into other people's personal lives and telling them they had to change. We felt a little weird about that, like it wasn't right. But... we believed in hell. We believed that everyone who didn't believe in Jesus was going to hell. (Maybe if someone has really never heard of Jesus they might get a free pass, maybe, but let's not bet on it.) So yes, I understood that I might come across as arrogant for my belief that I knew the correct things that everyone else needed to believe, but... if it's the truth, if I REALLY DO know the correct things that everyone else needs to believe... or else they go to hell, well... then I'm not wrong to barge into people's personal lives and tell them what to do.

And we called that "love."

In an Instagram post from Chau's family after his death, they wrote that he "had nothing but love for the Sentinelese people." I believe it... or rather, I believe he "loved" them in the way that Christians "love" their evangelism targets. The way Christians talk about "having a heart for [whatever place]." Seriously, this is language that missionaries (including kids who just go on short-term mission trips) use- they "have a heart for Japan" or "have a heart for Africa" or whatever. It means they see that place as needing help, and they love those people so much that they simply must go and help them.

For what it's worth, I very much rejected this kind of language back when I went on a mission trip to China and then ended up obsessed with it and wanting nothing more than to move there. (Ahem, here. I live in China now.) I did NOT say "I have a heart for China." I was evangelical, and people all around me used that language, it was the normal thing that you say about Christians who travel to non-western countries, but to me it always felt objectifying. Viewing a country with one billion people as if it's some kind of little hobby of mine, some special interest I have... eww, nope, I never liked that.

Chau "loved" the Sentinelese people... but how can you love someone you've never met or communicated with at all? If they don't want you to be there, but you go there anyway... how is that "love"? No, he "loved" them in the sense that he really believed they were in danger of going to hell because they didn't believe in Jesus, and he wanted to help them escape that fate. But it wasn't love in any sense that applies to the actual real world.

Over here in the actual real world, it's dangerous for isolated island people to come into contact with outsiders. Because of disease. But does that matter, in this evangelical missions ideology? Ha, do you even have to ask? No, of course it doesn't matter. If God "calls" you to go to some certain place, if God "gives you a heart for" that place, then you just go. You don't worry about those details, silly little details like diseases which have, historically, wiped out significant proportions of island societies. God will handle that. God will make sure that doesn't happen.

I'm serious, that's what I really believed back then. That's what Christians taught me. God might call you to do something risky. God might call you to do something that "the world" will think is a bad idea. But if God called you, then you have to do it. There were stories told in church, of people being told by God to do all sorts of things that seemed doomed to fail, but they just obeyed God and had amazing success and everything was great. That's what faith is, they said- doing stuff that God tells you to do, even if by all accounts it seems like a really bad idea. That's what Christians are supposed to do.

Another extremely familiar part of Chau's story is this, a statement from Dependra Pathak, director general of police of the Andaman and Nicobar islands:

"We refuse to call him a tourist. Yes, he came on a tourist visa but he came with a specific purpose to preach on a prohibited island," Pathak said.

Ah yes, the missionary on a tourist visa. That's the oldest trick in the book. When you go on a mission trip and you apply for your visa, you don't tell them the purpose of your trip is missions. You say you're a tourist, or whatever. When I came to China on a short-term mission trip, years ago, I was on a tourist visa. My whole group was. We made sure to never ever use Christian language in public, so that if we were being watched in China they wouldn't know we were there on a mission trip. Even in our emails, we avoided certain words- instead of "pray", we said "talk to Dad."

I've heard of long-term missionaries in China playing the tourist-visa game. They get a multiple-entry tourist visa, which means you can enter China as many times as you want, but each time you can only stay 90 days. So they live in China long-term, but they make sure that once every 90 days they go down to Hong Kong for the weekend. (Easiest way to do something that will count as "leaving the country.") That's how the game is played.

Oldest trick in the book.

Does it matter to Christians that it's sort of dishonest to hide one's real purpose in entering the country? LOLLLLL nope of course it doesn't matter. We are saving people from hell! God told us to come here! So what if some *earthly* government has *rules* against what we're doing? We follow God's rules instead.

Speaking of governments and rules: it is illegal to go within 5 nautical miles of North Sentinel Island, where the Sentinelese live. Am I shocked that Chau was willing to break the law in order to "bring the gospel to them"? Ha. Silly little things like laws- nope, Christian missionaries don't have to follow those. Obeying God is more important, no question about that. Like, of course it's a risk, of course we don't want to get arrested, but if you're a good enough Christian, then you're willing to take that risk for God.

Seven local Indian people who helped Chau get a boat and get to the island have been arrested, because yes, what they did was illegal. See, over here in the real world, breaking the law is a very serious thing and people get arrested and it's not pretty. I don't know if Chau thought about how his actions would affect them. But I can easily imagine a Christian believing that God's "mission" was more important, so it's okay to get other people to help you break the law.

You know what else isn't glamorous, here in the real world? Death. See back then, in church, Christians talked about dying for God like it was so cool. Obviously we don't want to die, but those stories about martyrs amazed us. Those people were the best Christians. Obeying God so much that they even died for it.

When I was at Urbana (InterVarsity's huge student missions conference), there was a speaker who told us it was worth it to die because of obedience to God's "call." I wrote about this in a post last year:

I remember one speaker at Urbana who talked about how her husband was murdered while working as a missionary in the Middle East. And she said even though it's very tragic that he lost his life, it would have been even worse if he hadn't obeyed God's call and hadn't become a missionary. He was living according to God's amazing plan for his life, and that's better than any alternative.

And we all nodded along and "amen"ed and wished we could be courageous enough to die for God. I didn't even question it- I totally believed her claim that it's better to die while obeying God's call than to live a long life and miss out on God's plan for your life. Thinking about this now, I feel sick. I can't believe I have to say this, but: Death is bad. Death is serious. It's not something we should just casually throw around, or aspire to... but oh god, we did aspire to it, back then. We wanted to be martyrs. (Well, we either wanted to be martyrs, or we felt guilty for not wanting to...)

This is a tragedy, and I really feel bad for Chau. And disgusted at the Christian missions ideology that caused this. It's not glamorous to suffer and die "for God." It's just ... heartbreaking.

What really bothers me is how perfect Chau's story is, from an evangelical perspective. This is the perfect fairy-tale martyr story. We all know that it's more godly to be a missionary than just a "regular" Christian, and being a missionary to an unreached people group is even better. And wow, the Sentinelese people are basically as "unreached" as you can possibly get. That is the very very best way to be a missionary! And he broke the law to get to their island, ooooh how exciting! (Chau wrote "God sheltered me" when he was able to get to the island without being stopped by Indian authorities.) He finally got there, and told them, "My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you." And then they killed him. Seriously, you could not make up a martyr story that sounds better than this.

From an evangelical perspective, it's perfect. But I'm not evangelical anymore, so I'm looking at this from a new angle and I'm horrified. The belief that a group of strangers on some faraway island need us to come and teach them our religion. WTF? Contacting an uncontacted tribe that wants to stay uncontacted. Breaking the law. The risk of infecting them with deadly diseases. The idea that it's fine to do dangerous and illegal things if that's what "God called" you to.

Chau is going to be seen as a hero and a role model. There is absolutely no part of this story that will come across as a cautionary tale for evangelicals, nothing that will serve as a warning that other people should NOT do what he did. It's perfect, and that scares me.

Do y'all remember Jim Elliot? Okay, here is the story of Jim Elliot- or at least, here's the story I heard in the evangelical church: Jim Elliot was a missionary who wanted to "share the gospel" with a remote tribe in South America, back in the 50's. But they killed him. He is a martyr! Then, years later, other missionaries went back to that same tribe and were able to "share the gospel", and some of them accepted Jesus! Hooray, it's a happy ending! Because of what Elliot did, those people were more "open" to "the gospel" and isn't that just great.

Christians LOVE this story. There was a movie about it in 2005, "The End of the Spear."

But now that I'm reading the news about Chau and seeing what this actually looks like in reality, how much of a mess and a nightmare it is, I'm starting to suspect maybe the story of Jim Elliot wasn't actually so perfect and wonderful either. Hmmmmmmmm...

So that's the sum of my thoughts on this. As far as I can tell, Chau was following the exact same evangelical missions ideology that I was taught. Back then, we talked excitedly about God "calling" each of us to some specific faraway place. We prayed for "unreached people groups"- prayed that God would send a good evangelical Christian to coerce them into changing their beliefs. What those "unreached people groups" actually wanted didn't matter- of course it didn't! We talked about giving everything for Jesus, and the most ultimate way to do that was to go get killed while obeying God's "call." Everything that Chau said or did feels so normal and familiar to me, like a perfect role-model missionary that everyone at church would admire. As if the only reason the rest of us Christians aren't doing the same thing is that God didn't "call" us- not because it's dangerous and illegal and a bad idea and does more harm than good. If God "calls" you then none of those other concerns matter.

It's the perfect martyr story. But now that I'm not evangelical anymore, now that I no longer see "God's plan" as more real than the actual reality of the actual real world, I'm horrified. This whole thing is just bad.

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Related:
Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts 
Because of an Idea
Runaway Radical: Radical Christian Missions 
Runaway Radical: The Stories You Can't Tell In Church
On Zebedee's Sons and Counting the Cost 
Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

What "God's Calling" Means For a Naive Kid

2 disciples leaving their fish and nets to follow Jesus. Image source.

All right, I'm an adult, I've been working full-time for a few years now, changed jobs a few times, responsible to pay my own rent and bills and stuff, and I suddenly remembered something.

Remember back when I was in college and I came to China on a mission trip? When I was 100% devoted to Jesus, and a bunch of the other students on the trip were talking about how they were planning to be missionaries in the future. Like, long-term, called-by-God, all that. I had never considered that before- I planned to just live my normal white American life- but I believed God was in charge and it wasn't my decision. If God said I should move to some strange country and be a missionary, then that was that.

I was worried, actually. I was worried that God would "call" me to drop out of college and become a missionary immediately.

Fortunately, God didn't, and I stayed in school a while longer and got my BS and MS degrees. Then came to China.

Now all these years later, I think about that again, and I'm like HOLY CRAP, HOLY CRAP do you know how bad that would have been? If I didn't have a college degree? Do you know how much harder everything would be? For the rest of my life...

All the full-time jobs I've had- no chance I could have gotten them without a college degree. All that job interviews I've ever gone to- nope, they wouldn't have given me the chance with no degree. I know that now, I'm an adult, I know how the real world of jobs works. I didn't know ANYTHING back when I was in college. Only a life of academic success, always being the top of my class, accepted to all the colleges I applied to (except MIT). Authority figures always gave me opportunities, gave me a chance to prove myself, and always were impressed at my intelligence. I didn't know how hard it would be for me to even find a entry-level job. I didn't know about the paradox where you can't get a job because you don't have work experience, but you can't get work experience because nobody will give you a job. You guys, it was hard for me even with an MS degree. Turns out job interviews aren't about whether or not people are impressed with my raw talent in math. They're about a company trying to find a person to fill a certain role. If the company is looking for someone with a certain amount of experience I don't have, yeah maybe it's not "fair" to me but so what? That's not something the company concerns itself with.

I did it, somehow I did it. I'm working full-time as an engineer in China. (Been doing this for a couple years now and it's going great.) That was my goal. But wow, can you imagine? Can you imagine if "God" had "called" me to drop out of college? 

I was so naive back then. I knew nothing about how the real world works.

Sure, I knew that it would be "harder" to get a job if I had no degree, but that was just a vague word- "harder." I've done a lot of hard things in my life; I like challenges. I didn't get that it wouldn't be that kind of "harder"; it would be "harder" as in, I'm completely ineligible for the interesting engineering jobs I want, I'm stuck in some low-paying thing that requires way more people skills than I have. For my whole life. And maybe I could go back to school someday, but it wouldn't be like going to school as an 18-year-old, it would be with all the responsibilities of living an adult life, on top of the classes and homework.

How easily we threw around the idea of "leaving the nets and following Jesus" back then. We didn't know anything.

I prayed, on that mission trip in China back then. I worried, because a mission trip seemed like the kind of setting where God might "call" people. I didn't want to drop out of college. I really really didn't want to.

My reasons? Mainly that studying math and engineering was (is) a huge part of my identity. I identify as an engineer (even when I worked as an English teacher when I first came to China, I still told people "I'm actually an engineer"), and so it made sense that I should be in college, majoring in engineering. If I left that behind, I would have to reevaluate my identity. Ooooh, was I making it an idol? Was I finding my identity in STEM instead of in Jesus?

Also, I didn't want to drop out of college because my classmates might think some sexist thoughts about what women aren't good at. Did God understand that? It wasn't just about me; I'm a representative of women in engineering, whether or not I want to be.

And I didn't want God to "call" me because then I would have to tell people. I would have to tell my parents, who paid for my entire education. Of course they would have tried to talk me out of it. They would have told me having a college degree makes a huge difference. They would have said a lot of things that were true about the real world, but which I wouldn't have been able to understand, with my privileged life and radical Christian missions ideology. Education handed to me so easily that I took it for granted, and Christian leaders preaching about how wonderful and beautiful it is to give up everything for God, to suffer for Christ, "it's hard but it's worth it." I had no idea what I was talking about.

Those were my reasons, back then. Finding my identity in my STEM ability, feeling a duty to defy sexist stereotypes, and the fear of telling my parents. Those were the reasons I hoped God wouldn't force me to quit school. It never occurred to me to think about the consequences for my career, consequences that would follow me for the rest of my life.

Would I have done it? Well... here's what probably would have happened, if God "called" me: I would have convinced myself/ my parents would have convinced me that God meant I should finish undergrad first, and then go off and be a missionary. Which I believe, from my current vantage point of being a real adult with a real job, would have been okay. Having a BS degree makes life much easier than not having one. That would have been okay, in terms of future job prospects and my financial situation.

(Pretty similar to what I actually ended up doing, except I stayed in school long enough to get an MS, and God didn't "call" me- I came to China because I wanted to.)

I was 100% committed to Jesus back then, so if I really believed Jesus wanted me to quit school, I would have done it. But I don't believe there was ever really a chance of that happening, because I can't imagine how I could actually be so certain that's what Jesus wanted. It's much more likely I would be certain that he wants me to go to a particular country but I don't know the details of the timeline. In which case I would finish school first, because that makes sense. Because that's how it typically works. When my friends said they're going to be missionaries someday, they meant after they graduated college.

I was so naive back then, back when I wanted to "give up everything for Jesus" as if that was some beautiful adventure, complete with romanticized suffering that would "draw me closer to God" and let me experience his [sic] deep love and how wonderful it is to rely on him and know him.

And yes, I was naive when I actually did make the decision to move to China. I came here right after graduation, and I became an adult here. And it's been hard. Show up as an immigrant with no full-time work experience and expect to find a job. That's why I was stuck teaching English at first. It's been hard.

I don't regret anything, because I love my life and it's not useful to wonder about if I should have done things differently in the past. I'm proud of myself for learning Chinese and working as an engineer at a Chinese company. I love my Chinese husband.

But wow. I really didn't know anything back then.

And wow, I think about how easy it was for me to imagine God "calling" me to drop out of college. I didn't get how big of a deal that would be- how bad of a decision. I didn't get that it would affect my career for the whole rest of my life. We were just kids- privileged kids on fire for God. We didn't have any idea what we were talking about.

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Related: 
I Didn't Count the Cost Before I Moved To China
Runaway Radical: The Stories You Can't Tell In Church

The Christianity of GCN Conference

Serving communion at GCN Conference. Image source.

I went to the Gay Christian Network conference because I really want to be in a Christian environment that's not awful for me. I miss going to church, but I don't go because I can't find any kind of church or Christian group that's not awful for my mental health.

I was hoping the Christianity of GCN conference would be the Christianity that I follow. It wasn't. But that's all right- it never tried to force me into believing anything, and there were parts that were really really good, parts that were so exactly what I needed.

First of all, the message of the entire conference, proclaimed over and over again by every speaker, was this: You are loved. God loves you. You are a beloved child of God. Maybe in the past somebody told you you can't have a relationship with God, or you can't be a worship leader or pastor, or you need to change in order for God to accept you- well they're wrong. You are loved and accepted and able to serve in the name of God exactly as you are.

LGBTQ Christians very commonly experience rejection from the church; they are excluded either directly or indirectly. So over and over, GCN conference preached a message of inclusion. At the church-like service on Sunday morning, the choir sang "Draw the Circle Wide" as we all had communion, and wow, that was powerful.

Draw the circle wide
Draw it wider still
Let this be our song
No one stands alone
Standing side by side
Draw the circle, draw the circle wide

Wow. So bizarre to me to hear a worship song with that kind of theme. (Maybe "worship song" isn't even the right term for it.) Over and over, all the speakers at the conference preached inclusion. Everyone is loved. Everyone is worthy. They didn't tell us we had to believe or do certain things in response to God's love. There was no altar call. There was no "God loves you unconditionally, therefore you need to make a decision to commit your life to him." The only thing we were commanded to do was continue to include others and spread the love.

So I'm kind of confused about this. I'm ex-evangelical; the Christianity I learned was always about trying to get people to believe certain things or obey God in specific ways. The pastors I knew would say that GCN's general message about God's love was good and true, but that it was only half of the story- and that when you leave off the other half, you're just preaching some deceptive feel-good nonsense which doesn't actually do any good. "The other half" being the things people are required to believe or do, otherwise their life will suck and/or they go to hell. If you don't warn people and let them know what the requirements are, maybe you're actually doing more harm than good- you're giving them a false sense of security. That's what I was taught; I'm not sure what to make of this "God loves you unconditionally" stuff when it's not followed by "and therefore it's totally reasonable for God to ask you to do the following things."

There are two possibilities:

1. This message of love and inclusion really is the message that GCN wants us to hear
2. GCN believes the "God loves you" stuff is only half of it, that the "here are God's requirements" part is also essential, but that many LGBTQ Christians already know it or are not in a place right now where they'll be receptive to it. Now is not the time- if we try to preach that now, it might push them away. Right now we just give them the first half, hopefully that will convince them to stick around with the church and then somebody else will tell them the second half.

I find possibility #2 to be incredibly dishonest, sort of a bait-and-switch thing. I should know, I did so much evangelism back when I was "on fire for Jesus," I know all about how to sugarcoat the idea of hell and condemnation and dress it up like it's good news.

So... could it be #1? Could it really be? I'm having trouble even comprehending that- a form of Christianity whose main message is that God loves you, a form of Christianity which isn't at all interested in forcing people to believe certain things. Wow, could that really exist? That's ... wow. I want a Christianity like that. [Note: It's possible that some of GCN's leaders and the speakers at the conference believe possibility #1 and others believe #2.]

On that note, I'd like to tell you about something that Bishop Gene Robinson said. He was one of the speakers at the conference, and was the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church. I remember when he was in the news back in 2003, back when I was a good anti-LGBT evangelical. At the conference 2 weeks ago, there was so much applause for him; he is an important role model for queer Christians who want to become pastors. To me, he had been just a symbol in the culture war, a sign of how the church is "abandoning the bible"... I had never thought about what it would be like to be told you can never be a leader in the church because you're gay, and then to see someone who proved that wrong, how powerful that would be. Anti-LGBTQ Christians don't understand how deeply their "culture war" affects the actual lives of actual people.

Anyway I want to tell you one thing Bishop Robinson said. He was talking about how he had been asked to do a prayer at Obama's inauguration, and he agonized over the words to use to make the prayer inclusive to people of different religions. He finally decided to use the phrase "God of our many understandings." Later, he heard from Jewish and Muslim people who thanked him for saying it that way.

And I just about fell out of my chair.

Did I mention I grew up evangelical? I heard all about how isn't it terrible that people water down their language to make it "inclusive," how they don't proclaim the name of Jesus because someone's going to be "offended," making some weak, meaningless prayer that's so vague it hardly says anything. Isn't it so pathetic and wrong when so-called Christians care about being respectful to other religions? Come on! They need Jesus. Don't act like those false religions are just fine- no, what those people need is to get out of those lies and follow Jesus instead.

I'm stunned, just totally stunned. I've never heard a Christian leader say it's good to be respectful to people of other religions, that it's important that they not feel excluded during a prayer at a public event. I just ... wow. This is just totally unimaginable to me. I like it, sure, but I'm still shocked. Are there churches that regularly preach such things? What would that type of Christianity even look like? Like, I want to be part of it, but it's just so unimaginable that something like that could even exist.

(Bishop Robinson also did not use pronouns for God- he never said God was a "he." I don't remember any of the speakers on the main stage calling God "he." I like that too.)

The message of GCN conference was love and inclusion. And let me tell you, it's one thing to believe that in a theoretical sense, but it's a whole different experience to see hundreds to LGBTQ Christians and allies believing it and preaching it wholeheartedly. It was an amazing thing.

But at the same time, there was a lot of Christian-culture-type language I was really not comfortable with. People talked about "God's calling" or "God's plan" or "a relationship with God." The speakers on stage would talk about something that happened to them and say "that was God"; listening to the other conference attendees, I heard many anecdotes from the "isn't it funny how God works" genre. (For example, I met a gay man whose mother has never accepted him, but now she is old and depends on him to take care of her every day. On hearing this, someone made a comment about how such an ironic situation clearly must have been brought about by God.)

Yeah, that gets all the eye rolls from me. I don't believe God actively does things in our lives. You really think that this world, a world full of systemic injustice, is the result of God intervening over and over in every Christian's life? I don't want anything to do with a God like that.

Again and again, people talked about having a relationship with God, communicating with God, how God is doing this or that in their life. There was one conversation I was part of, where this woman was talking about her job and about the kind of company she wants to work for in the future, which is sort of in a different area than her job now, but she wants to work in that area because she'll be able to make a difference in the world. She used language about how it's totally "God's plan" that she does this in the future. And then she told us about how excited she is about how some high-up person in that industry just followed her on twitter. Wow! How exciting! She only had 9 followers before that! Clearly this is GOD WORKING! God is OPENING A DOOR!

Come on. It's just a twitter follower. It doesn't mean anything.

I'm not trying to mock. I'm sad because I used to live that way. I believed I was constantly in communication with God, and I looked for meaning in every little tiny thing that happened to me. Everything is a super-huge big deal, everything is a sign that "God is working." It's so stressful to live that way.

What happens when we make a big deal out of some little thing, when we go on and on about how it's God's plan, we thank and worship God because of it, and then nothing ever comes of it? Back in college I sent out an email to a big mailing list about a bible study I was starting, and somebody called me and said she wanted to come. And I worshiped. I took it as a sign that God was totally working, God was going to do great things in this new bible study, that I was a devoted follower of Jesus right there on the front lines, that God saw all my hard work and valued it. I emailed my evangelism friends to tell them the good news. And then that girl never actually came.

What do you do with that?

(Well, the only thing you really can do is decide- with absolutely no evidence- that even though she never came to the bible study, her reading my email and calling me on the phone was a big, important step in her spiritual life, and God used it for great things even though I will never personally see those results. Yeah okay.)

It was so much stress, living that way, looking for "God working" in every little thing, constantly speculating about the meaning behind the mundane things in my day-to-day life. And sometimes it required a bit of memory loss. You know how Christians say you should keep a prayer journal so you can look back on all the prayers God has answered? I've never done that. (I kept a journal, but never organized it like a "prayer journal.") But it wouldn't have been good. What would it be like, to read back through all the things I was so excited about, where I was so sure I saw God working, so overflowing with awe and worship that I would literally bow down on the floor and pray... what would it be like to read those things, maybe a year later, with the knowledge that they never amounted to anything? (Maybe the whole "prayer journal" concept is more for "look at all the things you were so worried about, and then they never happened and you've actually forgotten about them now" rather than "look at all the things you were so excited about, how you were totally sure God was going to do certain things in the future, and then they never happened and you've actually forgotten about them now.")

All this excitement over one twitter follower in the industry "God called" her to work in... I feel sad about that. I really do.

I didn't say anything to her. I don't go around telling people that God's not actually intervening in their lives or that their "relationship with God" is bad for them. If those beliefs make them feel better, then okay fine whatever. And actually, for LGBTQ people who have been told that they're not able to have a relationship with God, it can be really good and healing for them to say they do have one. For me though, it's the opposite- I was totally devoted, followed all the rules, people admired my "relationship with God." It controlled and consumed my whole life, drove me to squash down my whole identity, my needs, and my emotions. I'm so glad I'm out of that relationship. The whole concept is really unhealthy for me now, and kind of triggering.

There was another part in the conference, where I was having a conversation about the concept of "God's calling," because one of the speakers in a breakout session had said "your calling might change" and I have no idea what they mean by that- if God wants you to do something, how on earth could that change? God changes God's mind?

Anyway, I happened to be asking this question to another random attendee, who said maybe at first God calls you to something, and then later on, God gives you a more specific direction to go in. Or maybe God calls you to do something and then later calls you to do something different in order to THROW THE DEVIL OFF.

And I was like "... I don't really believe in that."

And she said, "You don't believe in spiritual warfare?"

And, wow it would take a long time for me to answer that question. (I covered it a little bit in this post.) But wow, THANK GOD I never believed that God might "call" me to do something that God wasn't planning on me actually doing, just because God wanted to confuse the devil. Like, CAN YOU IMAGINE? That adds a whole new layer of second-guessing "God's calling." Like how's this supposed to work, I'm going to start doing all this stuff in obedience to what God said, and then satan's gonna make a bunch of plans to combat it, and then suddenly God will be like "NOPE LET'S DO THIS DIFFERENT THING INSTEAD" and satan will be all "NO ALL MY PLANS HAVE BEEN FOILED"? Like, really? That sounds like it would inconvenience me way more than it would inconvenience satan.

I'm ... wow. Still can't get over how absurd that whole idea is.

Anyway, yeah, my point is, at the conference there was a lot of talk about "God's plan" and how God did this or that specific thing in someone's life. I'm not a fan of that kind of language. But it's important to point out that, when I mentioned to people that I don't believe in "having a relationship with God", nobody tried to convince me I was wrong. Instead they asked questions and sympathized with the way I've been hurt by evangelical Christianity.

The worship time was also an interesting experience for me. When we walked in to the big "auditorium" on that first night, the song "My Savior My God" was playing. Uh. Yeah. Okay, the song itself is fine, the lyrics are fine, I don't have anything bad to say about the song itself, but ... for me, that song has the feeling of "back in 2010 when I was on fire for God" and, just, ugh.

Then the worship time started, and after a few songs, the worship leader (Darren Calhoun) said something to the effect of "I know for some of you, these songs aren't good for you. That's okay. If you need to leave for a little bit, it's okay. You can do your self-care." And that was really really good. First of all, I don't think I've ever heard a church say it's okay if you don't want to participate in this or that part of the service. I've never heard a church acknowledge that some of the songs they use might have bad associations for some people, and it's fine for those people to leave because they know their own needs. And he used the term "self-care"! That's a word I learned from the feminist blog-o-sphere, a word that goes against the whole entire ideology I learned in the evangelical church. Self-care. No, instead the church taught me to sacrifice my own needs and desires. If there was a sermon about the need to rest and take care of ourselves, it was "you need to take care of yourself or else you won't be able to serve others", not "you matter and you deserve to have your needs met."

So wow. That was really good.

And during the worship songs, I didn't really know what to do. I don't pray, and I don't sing to God, and I'm not interested in trying. I felt like the music was kind of nice though, and I wished I could be part of it somehow. So I came up with the brilliant idea of singing some kind of "harmony" part higher or lower than the melody of the song. Yeah I basically know nothing about music, but I was in a choir in college, and we had different groups (sopranos, altos, tenors, etc) and usually one group would "have the melody" and then the other groups would be singing the same words except higher or lower in such a way that they all sounded good together. (There are probably actual terms use to describe this concept. Idk. I don't know anything about music, but if you ever want to learn matlab or something, talk to me.) Yeah. So, for these worship songs at GCN, sometimes I sang the same words but either higher or lower than the melody.

I did that so I would be concentrating on how the music sounded, instead of on the words or how I feel about the song itself. Or, in evangelical-speak, I was singing but "didn't really mean it" and therefore my "worship" doesn't count. Whatever. If I was just singing the normal way, those songs would have been unbearable.

Communion was really good. I don't go to church (and I don't feel bad about it), so I hadn't been able to do communion for a long time. I know that within Christianity there are lots of different interpretations on the meaning of communion; the one I grew up with was "this is about you feeling really really guilty for your sins and sad about Jesus' death." Currently, though, my view is more like "you have a physical body that needs food, and God cares about that- your physical needs are real needs that matter." (And also a bit of "if anybody tries to tell me I can't have communion because I'm 'not a real Christian', or that my interpretation is wrong, well **** you, I'm a Christian, I have a right to be here.")

Anyway, that was the first time in a long time that I've gotten the little bread and grape juice without thinking the person serving them to me would probably not accept me if they knew what I really believe. They always say "this is the body of Christ, broken for you," but do they actually mean it's for me, or for the good-Christian-with-all-the-correct-evangelical-beliefs that they assume I am? But at GCN, I really believed they accepted me. And I may have cried a little bit. I also may have cried during the song "For Those Tears I Died."

A few other small things I want to mention: I had forgotten how American Christians have such huge misconceptions about "persecution in China." Had to set some of those myths straight. Also, I heard somebody asking people to pray for his husband to become a Christian. Ugh. (Background: My fiance is not a Christian, and I'm not okay with anyone treating that like a problem that needs to be solved.) And one of the speakers, Ling Lam, said we all have a God-shaped hole, and, well, you all know how I feel about that. (The rest of Ling Lam's talk was really really good though- it was about Jacob trying to get Isaac's blessing and how we pretend to be something we're not in order to gain approval.)

It was an environment where I could be honest about what I believed and what I didn't believe, and people wouldn't try to force me to change that. Even if they didn't agree with me, they understood what it is to be hurt and rejected by the church. And throughout the entire conference, the message of unconditional love and acceptance was preached- seriously, LGBTQ people know how to preach a better gospel than anything I've ever heard in church. But still, the Christianity of GCN Conference wasn't the Christianity I follow. There was way WAY too much talk of how God caused this or that thing to happen in someone's life, about how God "called" someone to do something, and just generally the kind of language people use when they believe in "a personal relationship with God." That's a concept that has caused me a lot of emotional trauma- honestly, I see it as all tied up with the anti-LGBTQ ideology I was taught, so it was a little jarring to hear LGBTQ Christians using those exact same words and concepts. Their experiences are different than mine (even though I'm also queer) so for them, it's possible to reject some of those teachings while keeping some others. And it can even be really healthy and good for them to say "no, I DO have a relationship with God" because of all the anti-LGBTQ Christians who told them they couldn't.

I wish I could go to church, I really do. If there was a church like GCN, I would totally go.

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Related: GCN Conference Was My First Time Not Being "Just An Ally"