In 1966 the military government ordered the foreign missionaries out of Burma. Anyone watching from outside might have written the obituary right there.
They were already standing on their own
Start before the expulsion, because the ending only makes sense if you know what came first.
The Karen did not wait to be handed independence. As early as 1912, Karen Christians founded their own Karen Baptist Missionary Society, wanting to stand on their own feet and run their own work. The next year, 1913, they organized the Karen Baptist Convention.
Read those dates again. Before the First World War, the Karen were already governing, funding and sending out their own. The old mission goal — churches that support themselves, govern themselves and spread themselves — was largely reached among the Karen while the founders' generation was still alive.
They were never meant to stay dependents, and they did not.
Then the doors closed
Burma's schools were nationalized in 1964 and 1965. In 1966 the military government ordered the foreign missionaries out — every one who had come after the country's independence in 1948, among them fifty-six American Baptists.
The workers packed and left. By the reckoning of the calendar, the last Western missionaries walked out of these churches before America's war in Vietnam was even in full swing.
Set out what that meant in practical terms. Foreign money: gone. Foreign teachers: gone. Foreign schools: nationalized. A young church, in a poor and closed country, left entirely to itself, in a place where the government had just demonstrated exactly how much power it was willing to use.
It grew
That is the part worth saying slowly.
With the missionaries gone, the Karen church did not shrink. It multiplied, and it kept multiplying for the next sixty years. Today Myanmar counts roughly 1.6 million Baptists in more than 4,700 churches, many of them Karen and other hill peoples.
For two full generations now, that church has carried the work with essentially no Western workers at all. It preaches, trains, ordains and sends on its own.
The reason it stood when the foreigners left is not mysterious. By 1966 it was no longer a foreign work. It had already become the Karen's own — half a century earlier, by their own decision.
The sentence we keep coming back to
A mission that only survives while the Westerners are present was never really planted. It was propped.
The Karen church was planted. When the props were pulled, it stood.
That distinction is not a criticism of the missionaries who were expelled, and we should be careful here. Judson gave his life to that country. Ann Judson died at thirty-six in its soil. The men and women put on boats in 1966 were not frauds; many had given decades. The point is not that Western workers are useless. The point is what they had built, and what they had built could survive their removal.
That is the highest compliment you can pay a missionary, and it is the one most of us are too impatient to earn.
What it should change about how you give
If the 1966 story is true, some ordinary assumptions about missions giving stop holding.
The first is that presence equals progress. It does not. The Karen church made more progress in the sixty years without foreign missionaries than in many of the years with them. Feet on the ground are a means, not a measure.
The second is that a work needs to be led to be helped. The churches across those hills mostly order themselves through their own associations and conventions, not under any Western board. That means an outsider who wants to help has exactly one honest posture available: come under the church that is already standing, at its invitation, and serve it.
The third is about time horizons. The 1912 decision is what made the 1966 survival possible. Fifty-four years separated them. Almost nothing in modern missions funding is built to think in those terms, and the Karen story is a standing argument that it should be.
What we are trying to build
If you want to know what this ministry is aiming at in every place we work, it is that — churches that would still be standing, and still growing, the day after every outsider goes home.
It is why the training runs twenty-four months rather than a fortnight, and why a man is assessed on what he can demonstrate rather than what he can recite. A short course produces someone who can repeat you. Formation produces someone who can carry on without you.
It is also why we would rather support a national pastor than send a Western family at many times the cost. Not because Western workers are unwelcome, but because the Karen already answered the question of who finishes the task in a place like that, and they answered it in 1966 without being asked.
The story is not finished. On the Thai side of that old border, their sons and daughters are still at it — training pastors, raising children in boarding schools, walking into hill villages that still have not heard. We get to hold a rope. That is honor enough.
James Bell is Founder and Director of ENDS, Lead Pastor of First Baptist Church of Fenton, Michigan, founder of the Pastors Connection Network, and author and creator of LiveWell by James Bell. He writes on world missions, national-pastor training, and the unfinished work of the Great Commission. More about the team.