Missionary Appreciation

There was news this morning that a former missionary to Haiti had died. She had belonged to the early wave of Christians who came to Haiti in the 1940s and 1950s, and stayed for decades. While her husband went around the country preaching, teaching, baptizing, she raised their four children, and at times played the role of music director for the church, finding and translating songs into Creole or French, teaching them to the choir. (“O vini Sent Espri, nan tan nwa nou-ou  / Rampli lespri nou ak amou e pwisan ou / Aji nan ke nou, chanje nou prie-e / O vini Sent Espri, bay legliz yon revey!  « Come Holy Spirit, revive the Church today ».) 

While the US was struggling with civil rights and racial integration, these missionaries, without fanfare, were raising children who played soccer everyday with Haitian friends and visited their homes.  

In this day of questioning the role and impact of “ex-pats” in Haiti, we must recognize the missionaries who came early, and in the space of one or two generations, successfully made of the Gospel a common story here, an everyday experience. 

They came and established seminaries and led Bible studies that taught the importance of rejecting voodoo beliefs and practices, of holiness, of the importance of the nuclear family. None of my grand-parents had learned those lessons early in life, but my parents and many in their generation did, largely through the work of those early Protestant missionaries, and Haiti continues to be blessed for it.  

Surely, there are criticisms to be leveled, errors of arrogance or ignorance to be addressed, but they cannot define early missionary work in Haiti. Instead, that work should be appreciated for what it is : a good first prototype to be refined, and refined again, to the memory of those who came before, the benefit of the Haitian people, and the glory of God.