Growing up with an iPhone, I’d never encountered a language barrier before. The advantage of traveling in a digital world was that if all else failed, either Google Translate or ChatGPT could always find me a bathroom, directions, or a meal. But here I was in the middle of rural Romania, without food, money, a phone, or a Romanian interpreter, and my mission team hadn’t eaten in almost a day.

I had never planned to participate in missions at all. Growing up in Washington State, I didn’t meet a practicing Christian my age until I was 14, and my own disconnected relationship with church didn’t inspire confidence that I would meet more. Missions was a foreign concept, something I only briefly experienced during a short-term trip to Haiti in high school, where we worked with an orphanage like the one my adopted sister had come from. A brief analysis of the book When Helping Hurts in preparation for the trip made me doubt our ability to truly help, and our time spent with the kids in the orphanage only made me feel more guilty about the sense of abandonment I knew they would feel when we left. In the end, I concluded that missions did more harm than good and was best left to sociologists or anthropologists, not people like me.

Missions and Surrender

Fast forward and Covid canceled my senior year of high school, leading me to take a gap year as I waited for colleges to return to in-person education. My days were spent delivering food before coming home to an apartment of friends each night, where we would boast about how smart we were to defer our enrollments instead of wading through online classes. The days blurred, friends moved back in with their families, and in that sea of impatience and purposelessness, my mom approached me about an opportunity to explore missions work in Eastern Europe.

Despite my resistance to missions, and to enduring the question “So, Rome, why did you go to Rome-ania?” for the rest of my life, I reluctantly applied to a Spring Mission Bible School there. Dracula’s castle had never been on my bucket list, but between pandemic travel options and a frustrating sense that this was where I was supposed to be, a month later I found myself starving in that small shop in Middle-of-Nowhere Romania.

The sheer insanity of it all set in as I attempted to mime that we wanted to trade for food by waving around some tomato sauce and pointing to some loaves of bread. I had never wanted to come here. I didn’t see how throwing some Germans, a Brit, and an American into a backwater village would somehow fulfill the Great Commission. And I definitely did not expect my hopeless gesticulating to land us some lunch. But to my surprise, the woman behind the counter grabbed one of the loaves of bread, pushed it toward me, and refused to accept our tomato sauce, our only semi-tradable good, in exchange. We watched in awe, as she handed us a large salami, and in dismay, as she refused our offer to pray for her before we stepped back out into an icy rainstorm.

To me, this only confirmed my suspicions. Our “mission work” was achieving nothing. The locals may have been hospitable, but our efforts were awkward, unwanted, and ineffective. In response to that feeling of helplessness, I turned around, deciding I wasn’t going to stand outside with a Romanian New Testament burning a hole in my pocket, and shuffled apologetically back into the store, where I placed the book on the counter and managed my best attempt at “Jesus loves you” before making for the door. To my surprise, she burst out talking and halted my exit by offering me a coffee. This was followed by another and another, and my soaking, bewildered team stumbled back inside to see what was happening, now with warm hands and revitalized caffeine addictions. After an attempt at a conversation, she thanked us, and set the Bible in her purse with a smile as we walked back out into the rain.

Since returning from Romania and completing four years at a Christian college, I’ve encountered many people with views like mine from that rainy day. I’ve seen missions dismissed as a thing of the past, as an instrument of violence, as a waste of time and money. I’ve listened to the exhausted stories of burnt-out missionary kids and heard testimonies of the disconnect experienced by families on the field.

But since that day in the shop, I’ve only wanted to learn more about God’s work across the world. I’ve met missionaries in thriving ministries showing hospitality, battling human trafficking, and providing education to the poorest people in the most desolate of places. When foreigners in Mexico City or single moms in Quito needed help, it was missionaries who provided food, lodging, and protection. When kids in the Amazon or rural Romania needed a way out of a life of poverty, it was missionaries who left their homes to extend one to the least of these.

Why Missions?

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the question was settled, at least outside the walls of the church. Missions were antiquated, destructive, and ethnocentric. Since entering the world of mission work and experiencing the lifeblood of organizations such as Urbana and Lausanne, that question has been resurrected for me, despite its complicated answers. I write this article from an apartment in Quito, Ecuador, fresh from a visit to another museum recounting the horrors of the Spanish conquest and the Church’s active involvement in the enslavement of a continent. Yet I write from the home of a hospitable Ecuadorian pastor, one who would not trade the gospel, the same one puppeted by the conquistadors centuries ago, for the world.

One of the reasons I’m here now is because of a talk I heard at the Fourth Lausanne Congress last September. Held in South Korea, it welcomed delegates and volunteers from more than 190 countries, and focused on catalyzing collaboration to better fulfill the Great Commission. There, I worked alongside a volunteer team representing more than 10 nationalities to help manage the conference, and I got to learn under some of the leaders pioneering modern missions.

One of those pioneers, Sarah Breuel, is a Brazilian missionary who serves in Italy as a house church leader. She also serves on the Lausanne Movement’s Board of Directors and as the former Director of Revive Europe, two organizations dedicated to world evangelization. In Korea, her talk focused on the relationship between revival and repentance and included charges to each continent. She blessed North American Christians, pointing out that many of the global delegates in that room were the fruit of the North American missionary movement.

She then argued that the secular belief that our missions movements had just aided colonialism was crippling our boldness and our zeal, demanding that we come fully to the table.1 Her eyes burned into me, and I recognized my need to repent of any lingering cynicism.

Missions Today

Missions, despite the narrative, really have been a force for good in the world. The thousands of leaders standing with me that night are evidence that the gospel and the people who carried it with them are forces for good in their communities. From missionary doctors like Albert Schweitzer (also a renowned theologian and Nobel Peace Prize winner)2 to academics like Matteo Ricci, who pioneered ethical cross-cultural interaction,3 much of the world’s medical and social development has come from the efforts of missionaries. The lifeblood of the global Church today is not a shadow cast by the ghosts of colonialism, but light in a dark world, fighting to protect women and girls in Kenya,4 against human trafficking in Thailand,5 and for the rights of indigenous peoples across South America.6

To my readers who remain unconvinced about the goodness of missions, I recommend exploring Jehu Hancils and John Dickson, two authors who have argued well for the inherent goodness of Christian mission through history. To my fellow young adults, missions offer you the most humbling, most fulfilling, most abundant life you could dream of. In a global world, reaching the unreached doesn’t require a degree or even a second language, and our cities are filled with parents, engineers, business owners, and refugees from a hundred countries who are all desperately hungry for the hope of the gospel. To my readers skeptical of Gen Z, and our faithfulness in the 21st century, we need your example. We need to see boldness and zeal modeled and lived out, that we would rise up to be women and men who come fully to the table.

I never used to believe that one bold act or one Bible set on a counter could change the world. But God has changed my cynicism into surrender, and I’m beginning to doubt my unbelief.