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By contrast, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals—many of whom do belong to mainline churches—are supporting a missionary movement that since 1953 has tripled its number of workers abroad to more than 30,000. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical denomination with 200,000 members, supports 40% more workers than does the United Methodist Church, which has 9.5 million adherents. The overseas staffs of conservative churches care as deeply as others about improving the lives of the people they work among, but their primary goal is to turn them into born-again Christians. The most important change in Protestant missionary strategy in the past ten years has been to identify and seek to contact some 16,000 tribes and social groups around the world that have been beyond the reach of Christianity.
Alan Foster, 35, and his wife Vickie, 29, live with their three children in Campamento Chimora, a frontier settlement hacked out of Bolivia's hellish rain forest. Foster, whose father was an evangelist, was sent by the New Tribes Mission to work with the Yuqui Indians. He is about to join a "contact team" that hopes to find three elusive Yuqui groups deep in the jungle. Such teams are often attacked by the tribesmen they are trying to reach. But for all the dangers of their task, the Fosters have developed a close rapport with Indians at the station. Says Vickie Foster: "They get so close to us, they become like family."
The burgeoning evangelical groups often post missionaries to foreign countries without waiting to be invited, while N.C.C. missionary boards stress close collaboration with Third World churches. Nonetheless, the conservatives are becoming far more sophisticated in anthropology and far more respectful of the peoples and cultures of other nations than they used to be. In Bolivia, evangelical missionaries even steeled themselves not to object to the custom of the Ayoré tribesmen of killing their firstborn and burying old people alive.
All missionaries, liberal or conservative, Catholic or Protestant, agree that one key goal is to develop self-sufficient indigenous churches, if only because they never know when political conditions will force foreign-born clerics to leave forever. Says the Rev. Joseph Kelly, an American missionary with the Holy Ghost Fathers who has worked in Tanzania and Kenya for 31 years: "Unlike people in the business world, who want to make themselves indispensable, the task of the missionary is to make himself unnecessary."
In contrast to their predecessors, the new missionaries agree that as much as possible, the preaching of the Gospel should be shorn of Western cultural trappings and adapted to the civilization of the people to whom it is offered. Instead of Christianizing Africa, so the policy runs, missionaries should help to Africanize