(note: This is a thought experiment in progress. Even I don't agree with all the ideas herein all the time. Please email me at: apegrrl@
rattlebrain.com
with comments or suggestions.)

Missionaria Protectiva

Community Building Projects

The real project of the Missionaria Protectiva would be to provide the missionary zeal and the soul-strength to heal our wounded world and counter the spread of our crippled culture. The colonialist churches of previous centuries have shown us a way to have a dramatic influence on local cultures in fairly short order. The approach I imagine is to have North American and Western European groups sponsor "green missionaries" who could take "religious" literature and teachings, as well as humanitarian medical and eco-rational development aid, to countries with high levels of intact biodiversity (particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America).

Admittedly, there may be a lot of resistance, both from local people we attempt to influence and from corrupt local governments and other powers-that-be, if such missionaries make their mission explicit. But there are some ways to circumvent such resistance. First, have literacy promotion be an explicit goal of the missionaries. The tools we use to do this would be pamphlets, written in the locally-encouraged language(s) of literacy (e.g. it may make sense to use Bahasa Aceh in addition to Bahasa Indonesia to improve support amongst separartists in Aceh; side-by-side versions of French and Lingala may be most appropriate in Congo). The pamphlets would consist mostly of locally practical advice for promoting public health and eco-rational development (i.e. how to get safe drinking water, how to avoid malaria and prevent HIV infection, how to improve food yields through mixed-plantings and using locally-adapted cultivars). Interspersed with this would be some philosophical statements consistent with our mission, supported by quotes from the locally respected religious texts (from the Koran in Aceh, from the New Testament in Congo, from the Vedas in India). [Note: I've learned that much useful work on this has been published in the Religions of the World and Ecology series from Harvard University Press and the Forum on Religion and Ecology. There are wonderful articles about the interconnections between religious traditions and environmentalism in the November/December 2002 issue of E magazine.]

What this would require is advance research into local language, customs, ecology and religion, plus research into eco-rational development and public health options that would be locally appropriate. Only once this foundational work is done should the missionaries begin taking their message(s) out into the world.

Even then, getting out into the field for missionary work may not be easy. Whenever possible, missionaries should enter an area as participants in the work of some other agency. They could take jobs with humanitarian aid agencies already established in their area. What we don't want to do is set up outpost missions that would always be populated with or led by outsiders. We need to find local leaders, who can build local support for the MP in locally appropriate contexts. Unlike the missionaries of old, we must make sure that all the work we do appears locally grown. We only provide the seeds.

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