When Jesus sent His disciples out two by two, they cast out unclean spirits, and they called for people to repent of their sins.
They were excited when they returned to Him with the world’s first Christian missionary stories.
Missionary stories aren’t in vogue any more. My favorite one, written by Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India at the beginning of the twentieth century, attempts to tell Things As They Are.
She says that writing about sharing the Gospel with Hindus in India is like trying to draw smoke. She struggles in her attempt to paint the real picture of a spiritual battle because it is unseen. She can’t quite capture the victories either, because so often, those too remain unseen.
However, the account remains vivid, creative, deep, convicting, and terrible.
In it, she tells of the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ over unclean spirits and the call for people everywhere to repent of their sins and embrace that Gospel.
Just imagine if Amy or the twelve disciples lived in 2025.
Anything they might label an unclean spirit is denied, medicated, labeled differently, or celebrated as diversity. The uncleanness that makes it an unclean spirit isn’t cast out. Instead, it is left to fester. The Gospel is drained of its power, just smoke and mirrors.
The call to repentance is silenced by the altruistic sounding mantra of not trying to change anyone else’s mind, culture, values, or sincerely held beliefs. Even the suggestion of repentance smacks of a savior complex to modern ears.
The missionary stories themselves would be labeled racist, hate-filled, biggoted nonsense in our world today.
And so, they are not being told.
Today’s Amy Carmichael rescues children from pagan temple prostitution and gives them the hope of the Gospel but cannot tell you because the word ‘pagan’ is offensive.
Today’s disciples are calling for people to repent, but you won’t hear about it unless the news covers sidewalk preachers as nutcases or assassination victims as hateful.
Our children are not being told the stories that matter. Instead, they’re being shielded from them and spoonfed the world’s lies that it is hateful to urge someone to repent, judgmental to say that someone has an unclean spirit, and prideful to insist that faith in Christ is the only way to heaven.
“We go because we believe our Master told us to go. He said, ‘all the world,’ and ‘every creature’…These orders are so explicit that there is no room to question what they mean,” Carmichael writes.
Missionary work isn’t just for the few. The Great Commission is for every Christian: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus said.
So, where are the stories? We need to hear from those who are going out in faith, following Jesus to become fishers of men.
“We are told to modify things,” Carmichael wrote, even in her day, “not to write too vividly, never to harrow sensitive hearts. Friends, we cannot modify the truth. We cannot write vividly enough; and as for harrowing hearts, oh! That we could do it!”
Sarah Dixon Young 