"Let me burn out for God!"

How missionary biographies set us up to fail.

This is part of a series about the effects of Radical Christianity on our expectation of what the faithful Christian life is supposed to look like. Read part 1 here.

A Chance to Die.

The Cross and the Switchblade.

Through Gates of Splendor.

The Hiding Place.

Trailblazer Books.

If you’re a millennial and you grew up evangelical, you can probably picture the covers of these bestselling books.

The great-grandfather of this genre of inspirational-devotional literature was published by Jonathan Edwards in 1749. The Life of David Brainerd was based on the diaries Brainerd kept while evangelizing indigenous tribes in what is now New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. With some generous editing and personal annotations Edwards offered Brainerd as a case study of what he believed true holiness looked like.

In Brainerd’s diary Edwards uncovered all the signs of true spirituality as he defined it. Complete resignation to God’s will. Speech and behavior characterized by a certain “sweetness.” Total humility. An unusual sense of calm, even in the face of death.

This intentional framing of Brainerd’s sacrificial service and utter disregard for his own wellbeing became Edwards’s most reprinted work. For the next 150 years it influenced the self-perception of thousands of American and European missionaries. The entire Western missions movement was built, in part, on this portrait of the missionary life as the ultimate road to holiness. Missionary training schools assigned it as required reading. Dozens of other prominent missionaries who have become the household names of evangelicalism explicitly reference The Life as the model of sacrifice and faithfulness to which they aspire. William Carey called it “almost a second Bible”, and Henry Martyn adopted as his life’s purpose a motto adapted from it: “Let me burn out for God!”¹

250-odd years later I was influenced by Brainerd, too.

A man who proclaimed the gospel to indigenous tribes for only three years, denied himself every material comfort, and died from tuberculosis at just 29 years old had been canonized as the closest thing Protestants have to saints. The mythos of his piety and higher levels of sanctification had filtered down into the biographies I grew up reading, like the books listed above.

My childhood was woven around these stories of significance and sacrifice. I wore them like the floral Laura Ashley dresses with shoulder pads and 80’s puffed sleeves that my mom saved for us to dress up in. I only dreamed that my fledgling faith could one day grow to fill them. These were my heroes, and I never questioned whether or not their lives were actually heroic.

As a child this veneration of the faithful was nothing but inspiring, but as an adult revisiting these childhood heroes, their stories have felt stilted and spurious. Like The Life, so many of these biographies leave out any mention of the protagonist’s doubt or moral failing and they largely follow the same narrative structure as classic fairytales and superhero stories. When these characteristics are combined in inspirational-devotional biographies and presented to impressionable young people within the larger framework of a religious worldview I’m beginning to recognize why they influenced me so powerfully.

For almost three centuries American Christians have been hungry to read a particular kind of biographical account, one we can get lost in, that inspires us with the possibilities of uncommon and inspirational piety. From The Life of David Brainerd to Kisses From Katie we have told Christian publishers that these are the stories we will buy, for ourselves, for our children, for our unbelieving neighbors. These are the kinds of stories that pastors and the leaders of mission agencies believe will inspire more people to commit their lives with disinterested benevolence to the cause of foreign missions.

But the stories we tell matter. How we tell them matters. What we leave out matters.

By painting these pictures of heroes to emulate, we set up a false expectation of radical response to God’s “call” instead of faithful obedience to the ordinary commands of Scripture. Almost without realizing it we begin to place certain “radical” Christians on a spiritual pedestal. And perhaps most concerning of all, we cause a lot of anxiety in young people who become constantly concerned with not missing out on or living up to their “calling”. As adults the result is cynicism, disillusionment, and that haunting feeling of failure I know too well.

But this is not the picture of faithfulness that Scripture paints. And the picture of faithfulness I do see in Scripture gives me so much hope. It feels like a burden lifted from my shoulders. Next week, we’ll take a look at that.

In pursuit of beauty,

1. For more about the impact of The Life on the Western missionary movement, this is an excellent article. Conforti, Joseph. “Jonathan Edwards’s Most Popular Work: ‘The Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture.” Church History 54, no. 2 (1985): 188–201. https://doi.org/10.2307/3167235, 195.