Dangerous Territory Read online

  “Amy’s is a story of a life broken open and remade: imperfectly, beautifully. We need more brave stories like hers.”

  Micha Boyett, author of Found: A Story of Questions, Grace & Everyday Prayer

  “Peterson’s thoughtful and vulnerable exploration of her missionary experiences urges us to peel away the layers. To learn, finally, what it is to rest in our own Belovedness.”

  Addie Zierman, author of Night Driving and When We Were on Fire

  “People are both hungry to hear stories of what God is up to all over the world and uneasy at how these stories have traditionally been told. This is why Dangerous Territory is a must-read for anyone, like myself, who longs to be a part of the global story of God’s coming kingdom. Here, Peterson unpacks the layers of the traditional missionary narrative in ways that are subversive, profound, and ultimately hopeful.”

  D. L. Mayfield, author of Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith

  “Amy Peterson describes how the idealized Christianity of her youth was confronted by a complicated world. Faith and doubt are revealed to be conversation partners, and God’s love and presence is found in the midst of both. Her writing is vulnerable and beautiful, and she is a good companion for Christians in search of an earthy, ordinary faith.”

  Michael Cosper, founder and director of Harbor Media

  “Do not read this book if you are content with safe categories, messiah complexes, or serving God as a way to serve yourself. Do read this book if you want to wrestle with a God who works outside our boxes and humbles us in the process. By sharing so freely from her own life, Peterson gives us the opportunity to invite His work into ours. Simultaneously devastating and comforting, Dangerous Territory calls us beyond our simplistic notions of commitment to God to a place of full surrender.”

  Hannah Anderson, author of Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

  “We all love a good story. You know, where the practically perfect hero overcomes obstacles to accomplish a great feat, but is terribly maligned in the process, yet is vindicated in the end, and everyone lives happily ever after. But this is not that story. Amy Peterson’s Dangerous Territory is too honest to indulge the hero façade and too authentic to avoid the unresolved questions. But real stories are like that. If you want to read a real story, a well-told story, a story where shallow Christian missionary triumphalism is replaced by the messy, unresolved, and sometimes tragic life of faith, then read this story. In Dangerous Territory we set aside our adolescent faith with its tidy answers and clean endings, and we take up an adult faith; a faith with real risk, real loss, real questions, and God’s presence on the other side of pain.”

  Scott Bessenecker, author and interim director of missions, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

  “There is a disarming determination in these pages not to let Christian faith go until its blessings are known and felt.”

  Wesley Hill, author of Spiritual Friendship and Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, Trinity School for Ministry

  “Missionary work is wrapped in mystique. It may be vilified as the remnants of colonialism and imperialism, or held up as the highest calling the Christian can obtain. The reality is that it is life—messy, real life. In this book Amy Peterson opens up her messy, ordinary, and beautiful life to let us see what it meant for her to go from a young woman wrapped in the mythology of missionary heroes, through dark days of disillusionment, into a deeper, more grounded understanding of faith and calling. Along the way, she mixes in history, analysis, and thoughtful reflection. This genre-bending book is a delightful addition to memoirs of mission that gives us a personal and honest picture of a missionary life on the way.”

  Brian M. Howell, Professor of Anthropology, Wheaton College

  Dangerous Territory: My Misguided Quest to Save the World

  © 2017 by Amy Peterson

  All rights reserved.

  Discovery House is affiliated with Our Daily Bread Ministries, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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  Scripture quotations on pages 43, 170, 177, and 191 are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotation on page 74 is from the HOLY BIBLE: EASY-TO-READ VERSION © 2001 by World Bible Translation Center, Inc. and is used by permission.

  Scripture quotations on pages 75, 121, 182, 192, and 212 are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

  Scripture quotation on page 112 is from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

  Scripture quotation on page 194 is from the Amplified® Bible, copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

  Excerpt from “Journey of the Magi” from Collected Poems, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Permission to quote “The Greatest” by Chan Marshall/Cat Power (2006) granted by Mattitude Music LLC.

  Permission to quote “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” (2004) granted by Joanna Newsom.

  ISBN: 978-1-62707-638-8

  First eBook edition in January 2017

  For Rosemary and Owen,

  for Veronica,

  and for you:

  bright with hope,

  bruised reed,

  beloved.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One: Sent

  1. I Can’t Tell You This Country’s Name

  Interlude: A Brief History of the Missionary Narrative

  2. Backpackers and Wanderlust

  3. Expats Will Change the World

  4. Do Not Easily Leave

  Interlude: A Brief History of Short-Term Missions

  5. The Strictest American

  6. Locusts and Miracles

  7. Long Walks on the Beach

  8. The Backstreet Boys and Salvation

  9. Christmas Parties

  10. Solos at Karaoke

  11. Headless in Thailand

  Interlude: A Brief History of Women in Missions

  12. Further Out

  13. Deeper In

  14. The Impossibility of Self-Care

  15. H
igh Places (Mistakes Were Made)

  Part Two: Stripped

  16. Home

  17. “The Police Were Following Him”

  18. Instant Messages

  19. Saying Thank You in the Dark

  20. Due to Curriculum Changes

  21. Choosing Cambodia

  22. Why Are We Here?

  Interlude: Imagining Other Ways of Doing Missions

  23. The Spirit of Christmas Past, and Other Ghosts

  24. The Killing Fields

  Part Three: Surrendered

  25. A Whittled Arrow, Hidden

  26. Falling in Love

  27. Being the Beloved

  28. Fireflies and Honey

  29. Gethsemane

  Interlude: The Missionary

  30. Speaking Faith as a Second Language

  Epilogue: No Longer at Ease

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Memoir

  Memory offers us a partial and imperfect view of the past, one that is often self-serving. In writing about events that took place over a decade ago, I have tried to be honest, relying heavily on my journals. But even journals provide no guarantee of an accurate depiction, as they too offer only my perspective—no one else’s. In this book, I have changed most of the names, and in a case or two I have conflated a few friends into a single character for the sake of simplicity in the storyline, but other than that, all of these stories are true: this is the world as best as I can remember it.

  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces

  that even their virtues were being burned away.

  Flannery O’Connor

  All this was a long time ago, I remember,

  And I would do it again, but set down

  This set down

  This: were we led all that way for

  Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

  We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

  But had thought they were different; this Birth was

  Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

  We returned to our place, these Kingdoms,

  But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

  With an alien people clutching their gods.

  I should be glad of another death.

  from “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot

  Introduction

  Dear Young Reader,

  This book was written for people like you, young men and women who want their lives to make a difference. The complaint of many young people today is, “I’m so bored.” One thing we can promise you: If you give your life fully to Jesus Christ, you will never lack for adventure! . . .

  You’re probably being pushed by somebody to take some kind of dare. Okay, we dare you, too. We dare you to pray, “Lord, make my life count,” and see what happens!

  from Heaven’s Heroes: Real Life Stories from History’s Greatest Missionaries by David Shibley (1989)

  Dear Reader,

  I wanted to be extraordinary, the greatest, truest kind of Christian, one whose life counted—not one who raised 2.5 children behind a white picket fence in American suburbia. I wanted to be one of heaven’s heroes.

  But after two years in Southeast Asia, I moved to the foothills of Southern California. I took an office job and spent my weekends hiking in the San Gabriels or lying on Newport Beach. My fiancé gave me a CD by Cat Power, and I listened to Chan Marshall’s lush melodies and haunting piano over and over as I drove down the Orange Freeway to work.

  Once I wanted to be the greatest

  No wind or waterfall could stall me

  And then came the rush of the flood

  The stars at night turned deep to dust

  Melt me down.

  I didn’t cry anymore when I listened, just watched the sun move across the foothills and felt something shift inside me, something soften and relax, like exhaling after holding my breath for years and years.

  This is the story of how I was melted down.

  part one

  Sent

  Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.

  William Carey

  1

  I Can’t Tell You This Country’s Name

  I longed to be a martyr, to be one of that “noble army.” . . . I longed to do something. I had a strong desire to be a missionary, to give myself up to some holy work, and I had a firm belief that such a calling would be mine.

  Ann Martin Hinderer, missionary to West Africa

  Far too large a proportion of people [who are applying for missionary work] are seriously pathological.

  a member of the Committee for Women’s Work, 1915

  I gravitated toward her because she was the only one in the room who looked like me: too young to be there, the confidence of the clueless tossed like a mantle over her shoulders, dreamy idealism shining in her eyes. Both blond and twenty-two years old, Rebekah and I stood out in the group of grad students gathered for the welcome dinner for our low-residency master’s program. Most of the others were older and experienced, having just returned from a year or more of teaching English in Asia. They clustered in knots, the group with greasy hair and flowy clothes using exotic words like mabu dofu and joudza, the scrubbed and modestly buttoned-up ones diligently discussing textbooks and area churches.

  Watching them, I remembered what I’d overheard in the campus bookstore that morning. The manager, training a new sales clerk, had warned her: “Watch out for those folk in class this month. They’re a little kooky.” Kooky might not have been the word I’d have chosen, but as I sat down next to Rebekah, I wondered if this was my future: Would I become one of the strange ones? They didn’t glow with holiness the way I expected missionaries to: instead, they seemed like they might have chosen to live overseas because they never quite fit in America.

  “Hey,” said Adam, laying his paper plate of pizza on the table next to me. “Can I sit here?”

  We were three skinny new kids, fresh-faced, wide-eyed and shivering in the air-conditioning of the basement classroom, fingering garlic bread and cans of Coke. We weren’t cowering, exactly. We were watching, trying to figure out what moving to Asia to teach English was going to be like, how it was going to change us. We chewed pizza slowly and observed.

  * * *

  I had developed a set of answers I gave when people asked what I was doing after college.

  When my women’s lit professor Dr. Matthews asked, I gave the short answer. “I’m moving to Southeast Asia to teach English as a Second Language at a university,” I said. “I’ll also be doing a master’s program in intercultural studies.”

  This answer was good, especially for my academic friends. It sounded legitimate. And it neatly avoided the word missionary.

  Despite my sincere and passionate desire to change the world for God, I hated that term—missionary—for all the connotations and baggage trailing behind it. I dreaded being aligned with the long history of abuse that educated westerners commonly associated with “missions”—destruction of indigenous cultures in the name of Christ, introduction of foreign diseases, wars in the name of evangelism. If I had told Dr. Matthews that I was going to be a missionary, she would have thought of Nathan Price. The patriarch in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, Price stood for the culturally blind failures of modern missions. He tried to baptize new Congolese converts in a river filled with crocodiles. He proclaimed “Tata Jesus is bangala!” thinking he was saying, “Jesus is beloved,” when in fact the phrase meant “Jesus is poisonwood.” Despite being corrected many times, Price repeated the phrase until his death.

  I knew enough to recognize that Nathan Price did not represent all missionaries, and there were many I admired. But I also knew enough to be embarrassed
. I knew that the British had used “protecting missionaries” as an excuse for imperial expansion in India and China. I knew that some of the early Franciscan missionaries had been unequivocally committed to Spanish imperialism, even condoning the violence and forced conversions of the Conquest. I knew that in the Americas, Christian evangelism was nearly without exception the primary logic used by “reformers” who set up boarding schools for native children, forcing them away from their homes and traditions.

  It wasn’t just that I feared what Dr. Matthews and others would think of me. I was terrified that I might accidentally live into this horrific, ethnocentric, imperialistic tradition.

  I didn’t even use the word missionary in my second standard answer. This one was for my parents’ friends and people at church in Arkansas. When, over donuts and coffee in the foyer on Sunday mornings, they asked what I would be doing after college, I’d say that I was going to teach English in Southeast Asia. “Oh, like for missions?” they’d ask, southern drawls drawing out the words.

  “Well, yeah, but the country isn’t open to missionaries. I’m just going to be a Christian English teacher,” I’d reply. I liked to say that I was going to live my life with God in a foreign country. I planned to be a Christian in my new home, teach ESL there to the best of my ability, and practice loving God and loving the people around me. In fact, I chose my sending organization because they described their goals in this way—they didn’t use the word missions either.

  I couldn’t have explained to people at church my reservations about becoming one of the photographs pinned on the church missions board. I couldn’t have explained that I was relieved to be going to a “closed” country, where evangelism was technically forbidden, because in some unspoken way I wasn’t fully convinced that the Message I was bringing was strong to save, or that it was even truly true. I disliked the idea of cold evangelism, so I was glad to be teaching in a place where my main goal could be simpler, just to be a faithful presence and to provide a desired service—language lessons.