 |
| On Wednesday, the Taliban released twelve of the 21 missionaries held hostage for six weeks in Afghanistan. Yonhap/Reuters |
With Taliban's release of Korean Christian hostages, caution for missionaries
Aid groups working abroad are rethinking their operations in the wake of the six-week ordeal.
from the August 31, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"To work in dangerous areas you need ... deep networks, and deep knowledge," says Jerome Larchu, a director of the Paris-based Médicins du Monde (Doctors of the World), which has volunteers in 55 countries. "You bring in skilled people, lots of locals – and only then do you send people in."
In February Médecins du Monde pulled its team out of Darfur for security reasons. But the doctors felt their mission wasn't over. This summer they put scouts into Sudan for eight weeks to travel, talk with locals, and assess risk – before going back in.
If missionaries or aid workers do not have the proper help and concept, "it is a problem for us," says Mr. Larchu. "I think anyone has a right to proselytize if they want to. But to locals, an NGO is an NGO; they don't know who we are. They don't make a lot of distinctions. They don't know who is legitimate. So NGOs are interdependent, whether we realize it or not. We have to gain local trust together."
Koreans followed 19th-century model
Broadly speaking, the Koreans in Afghanistan operated on a 19th-century missionary model that has evolved considerably in the US, says David Heim, editor of The Christian Century, a magazine in Chicago. "American churches going out to the world and converting people has been critiqued for a century, and most have learned from the criticism," notes Mr. Heim. "The South Korean churches seem to be in that older independent evangelical model of going off alone. Today relatively few mainline American churches do this. Most send small teams that partner with indigenous churches and local believers. It's more collaborative."
In the 1950s and '60s, mainline Protestants in the West began to help various independence movements in developing nations, and to work in social-justice causes abroad – but only where invited, and in an equal partnership with locals.
By the 1980s and 1990s, a rise in evangelicalism brought more fervor among Christians to go to new areas – including states in the former Soviet Union and Central Asia.
RSS feed
