By Les Thompson. Missionaries have been the backbone of God’s plan to tell others the Good Hews of God’s redemption since the days of Noah. We tend to think of missionaries as unusual – or, at best, special – at the very least, as different from ourselves. But in actuality missionaries down through the ages have simply been people who sensed a special call from God to leave their homelands and cross cultural boundaries, oceans and mountains to establish the Church of Jesus Christ in every corner of the world.
Non-Christians have lent missionary activity an air of comic opera: dowdy people under pith helmets dressed in wrinkled khakis, clumsily exporting our American ways of life rather than true religion. Hollywood jokingly portrays mis