Don Carson's talk at Grace Baptist Mission's 150th anniversary was broadcast by BBC Radio 4's Sunday Worship.
For many people, the thought of missionary work sounds, at best, painfully old-fashioned.
It conjures up mental images of black-and-white photographs, now curled and yellowed. Of intense, well-meaning men and women in dated dress imposing their stern Victorian values on the free spirits of foreign shores. Worse, to many contemporaries missionary endeavour is not merely old-fashioned, but positively mischievous. For missionaries are necessarily intolerant people. They invade cultures not their own and, by pushing Jesus and the gospel, they announce that they think their religion and culture are superior to the local one — and that, surely, is the very essence of intolerance.
