In 2003, young college graduate Amy Peterson went to teach English and share the gospel in a Southeast Asian country where evangelism was prohibited. While she loved the region and its people, a series of missteps put several of the young women she evangelized in danger. Concealing the location and changing the names of people she worked with for security reasons, Peterson recounts her experiences and the crisis of faith that followed in Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World (Discovery House, Feb.).
Why did you decide to work as a missionary overseas?
Growing up I had read missionary biographies that were written for children, and I had been really inspired by the adventurous stories. The churches I grew up in had a fair number of restrictions on what women could do–women couldn’t be pastors, but women could be missionaries. I was looking for adventure, I wanted to be one of the greatest servants of God, and I also just sincerely wanted to be faithful with the privileges I’d been given.
How did your difficult experience abroad change you and your faith?
It made me doubt a lot of the most foundational things that I believed in, like whether or not God was truly love, if I had really heard the call of God to go overseas, if I had done more harm than good, if God was aware of the suffering going on in the world, and why wasn’t God doing something about that. As I wrestled through those questions, it made me a person who is less likely to raise their hand with the right answers all the time. When I was younger I thought that certainty was what faith was. I’m more likely to listen, and it made me quieter.
What helped you recover your faith?
After a year or so of real struggle and doubt I read something that [American writer and theologian] Frederick Buechner wrote, that in the life of faith you can wake up every morning and decide, do I believe today? Some mornings you will wake up and you will not be able to answer yes, and some mornings you’ll wake up and you will be able to answer yes. And both of those are normal parts of the life of faith.
In the book, you talk about the problem with the missionary narrative. What is it and what concerns you most about it?
What I call the missionary narrative is this idea that missionaries are God’s Special Forces or they are somehow more spiritual than the rest of us. One of the first American missionaries was David Brainerd [1718-1747] who attempted to evangelize Native Americans for three years; when he died [preacher and theologian] Jonathan Edwards edited his journals in such a way that they presented a really compelling and dramatic narrative. A whole generation of people read that book [and] decided to become missionaries because of it. Even back then there was this sort of hero complex, white savior narrative that was attaching itself to the missionary story. That’s what’s really dangerous, and that story became the way most missionary stories are told.
How would you like to see overseas missions changing?
I would like to see us be more careful in the way we talk about missions. In fact, I’m not sure that missionary is even a useful word—I would rather have someone be more specific: if you’re going to be an evangelist then say that, if you’re going to be a doctor, then say that. And I would like missionaries to be able to feel free to be more honest about the realities of what their work is like.
