For many years, the work advanced but slowly. One denomination after another embarked in the undertaking; and now, American missionaries are seen in almost every land and every clime.
Missionaries must not calculate on the least comfort but what they find in one another and their work.
The first Western attempt to save Africa from itself was in the late 19th century. It was led by Christian missionaries who claimed to be seeking to end poverty, disease and the slave trade.
My parents were missionaries - I was born in the States but I grew up in Brazil.
Sometimes it's hard for us to believe, really believe, that God cares and wants good things for us and doesn't just want us to go off and give everything up and become missionaries in Burundi.
Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.
The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can't predict who will or won't be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel.
People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.
Missionary work essentially is a priesthood responsibility, and all of us who hold the priesthood are the Lord's authorized servants on the earth and are missionaries at all times and in all places - and we always will be.
A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists.
