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"Josh" is a new missionary, but not a foolish one. "I would never do anything stupid like blatant preaching on the street or going up to someone I don't know and handing out literature," he says. But at age 24 and after only eight months on the job, he occasionally gets antsy. "I'm impatient by nature," he says, "so maybe expectations are a problem." The son of missions workers with the Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, he grew up abroad, but a palm-bedecked Arab capital is his first solo long-term posting. He strolls its working-class neighborhoods on errands for his day job as a youth worker with its small Christian community and wonders whom he will talk to today. He enjoys sharing Christ with cabbies, in part because their English is better than his beginner's Arabic. He points out three young men in a carpentry shop as part of his target audience: "They're my age," he says. "The younger generation is influenced much more by the West, and they're searching." Josh has his up moments, as when a neighborhood boy complimented him, saying, "You're a good Muslim ... I mean Christian." And there are times when he feels "overwhelmed. I'm just one person--what can I do to help?" But each morning he is reminded of why he is here. The muezzin's first call to prayer rings out at 4 a.m. And pray Josh does. "I pray for the people responding," he says. "I pray that as they go to mosque, Jesus would somehow be revealed to them. I pray against that call--that it would not affect their souls." He prays he may help lift "this totally oppressive spiritual atmosphere."
In the broadest theological sense, Josh and other emissaries of Christ are answering Jesus' call in the Gospel According to Matthew, known as the Great Commission: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Since the Middle Ages, missionaries--revered by some, reviled by others--have been among history's great cross-cultural pollinators.
In the past century, as mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. adopted a social gospel that stressed aiding the poor over preaching to the unenlightened, evangelizing at its purest fell to Evangelicals. Rare is the conservative Protestant church that doesn't send its teens off on short-term mission trips or play host to a stream of missionaries on home leave, their stories full of exotic places and changed hearts. Although they would never admit it, the returnees are Evangelicalism's paragons, making its philosophy of relentless outreach their lives' work. Says Beth Streeter, a Moraga, Calif., health-care consultant who left on a short mission trip to Egypt with her husband and two young children shortly after Sept. 11: "When you believe at your core that the love of Jesus Christ really is the best gift to humankind, you want to find ways and places for people to hear that for themselves. Sometimes it drives us places that can be awkward and uncomfortable."