Tourists for God, Criminals at Home: The Missionary Double Standard

“If anyone asks, we’re tourists.”

This is the line given to me when I went on my first - and only - overseas mission trip. Russia did not want us evangelizing in their country, in fact, their laws forbade it to protect Orthodoxy (and their culture).

I was fifteen. My grandparents had gone many times before, and this time we traveled through Revival Fires Ministries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, evangelicals flooded into Russia. With pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church - and due to opportunistic, and sometimes greedy, Western missionaries - Russia passed the 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations. On paper, it created a secular state while elevating traditional religions’ – Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism. In practice, it was a fence: keep Western evangelicals out.

To get around this law, missionaries entered under false pretenses – tourists or humanitarians. Since our trip included a cruise ship down the Volga River, our official reason was “tourism.”

Yes, we toured between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Though most of our time was spent handing out Bibles on the streets, in orphanages, and in nursing homes. We also slipped them in mailboxes as we canvassed the neighborhoods. I still remember walking up to a group of grown men, Bible in hand. One grabbed my wrist and held it in the air, jeering to his friends. My grandpa rushed over, shooing him off with a sharp, “Nyet! Nyet!”

Back home in America, many Christians post online and talk in church circles about “illegals” coming here. They say:

“If only they had come here legally.  

If only they would do the right paperwork.

If only they weren’t draining our resources.

If only they hadn’t lied….”

So, let us ask: Is it wrong to tell a lie or hide the truth to save your family? To make a living so that your children may not starve? To overstay a Visa when laws shift the ground out from under you?

I would argue it is far more right to cross a border “illegally” to protect your family than it is to cross one under false pretenses just to evangelize – or more honestly, to colonize.

When the same people who lied to enter other countries “for God” are the very ones screaming at desperate families doing the same to survive, we have a hypocrisy problem. God is not on your side when you break laws in the name of power, while denying compassion to the oppressed.

It’s time to pick up that mirror and to face the lies you tell yourselves and others in the name of God.

It is time for empathy and compassion to rule the day. And it is time to stop lying - because believing God is on your side does not make it so.

Me on the deck of the ship.

Russian orphanage handing out Bibles and toys.

Passing out Bibles in the neighborhoods.

Stacks of Russian Bibles.