The most recommended books about missionaries

There are lots of stories about spies, and there are great histories about American missionaries.

But Sutton brings them together in a refreshing way, revealing the moral and political conundrums that arose once the United States turned to (mostly) men of faith to do undercover wartime work, from showering North Africa with propaganda and rescuing Doolittle’s downed raiders from China to stealing secrets and plotting assassinations.

Part of what I love about this novel is that its basic premise–an English pastor is sent to a distant planet to preach the Christian gospel to aliens–sounds so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it feeling real. But Faber does a wonderful job of taking the glamor out of space travel and foreign worlds.

The atmosphere of this novel is all empty cafeterias and unpleasant humidity–I love the banality of it all! In its portrait of a loving but strained marriage (with the husband getting excited over aliens and the wife struggling to hold it together on a dying Earth), the novel is dryly funny while also being genuinely moving.

In 124 chronologically arranged short chapters, the editor presents exciting, entertaining, and educational accounts of the real-life adventures of those who blazed the pathway to the West.

The places mentioned in the stories were especially exciting for me since I had recently taken two trips to different parts of the West and could see or envision exactly the environment the various eyewitnesses talked about.

The chapters are relatively short (typically two to four pages), so it made excellent reading material for spare moments when long reading sessions were not possible.

As a young girl, I loved missionary stories about women like Gladys Aylward who left their comfortable homes and traveled to remote countries to tell people about Jesus.

In 1930, Gladys traveled across Siberia by train to a remote town in northwest China. There, as an independent missionary, she shared God’s love and stood up against time-honored traditions that were harming young girls. This book is full of adventure, and doesn’t shrink from stomach-wrenching details.

I’ll never forget the vivid descriptions of foot-binding, and how Gladys fearlessly confronted and corrected this painful procedure, no doubt impacting lives forever.

The story at the heart of this novel is based on an island off the coast of Maine that was settled in the mid-1800s by former slaves, some with native American DNA. There, they built a self-contained community without conflict until eugenicists and developers took over.

They were evicted, their homes burned, the dead exhumed and trashed, and several were committed to an asylum for supposedly feeble-minded. The story is, of course, disturbing; however, it is a fascinating anthropological journey, questioning the meaning of family and community and what it means to survive against the odds.

Another master class in superlative writing – the opening scene alone, describing a storm that batters the island, is reason enough to read Harding’s pitch-perfect prose.

No wonder the novel has been short-listed for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Diaz, too, inspires me. 

I love Amazonia because it brings together the jungle setting that I feel adds a lot of danger and stress to the characters as well as a scientific puzzle.

I love survival stories when the protagonists are “tough” and these US Rangers meet their match. It also features a furry sidekick and who doesn’t love that? 

I’ve been going through a spiritual crisis for a while because of my son’s health and my own health. I decided to read religious books published before the 1950s, books whose theologies were free from American priorities. I wanted to understand suffering and endurance and read many books by Asian Christians, imprisoned martyrs, and missionaries.

Evidence Not Seen has tons of suffering and perseverance. The human soul needs books about heroes or people who triumph – especially for a spiritual, personal, or religious cause.

I knew little about the war’s effects on people in New Guinea and next to nothing about how the Japanese mistreated the white, native, and foreign communities on the island. Darlene Deibler Rose was a young missionary there, and her account is just plain harrowing. 

I kept thinking, “I could not endure any of this. Wow, some folks definitely have it worse than I do.”

You probably know Eric Liddell’s story from the film Chariots of Fire—or, at least the first part of his story, leading up to his triumph in the 1924 Olympics in Paris. In many ways, however, Liddell’s following twenty years—mostly spent as a missionary in China—were even more impressive. Hamilton’s book takes Liddell’s story through those two decades and into his final, and fatal, five years of quiet, stoic heroism and leadership in a Japanese internment camp.

At first, I was scared by the thickness of the book. More than 600 pages? I didn’t think I would have the patience and time to finish it. My book club chose the book as a reading challenge for everyone. A challenge indeed. But a colorful one.

I remember carrying the book with me everywhere I went. As I finally reached the last page of this riveting family saga set in Africa, I felt older and wiser. Wow, I actually finished the thick novel. It was a great achievement.

I was never bored or tired. I did not want the story to end. It could have been 6000 pages and I still would have thrown myself into this epic story.

Reforming the World sees Ian Tyrrell, the master practitioner of transnational approaches to US history, at the peak of his powers. After tackling the world temperance movement, and US-Australian environmental connections, Tyrrell here turns to the “soft power” of Christian missionaries and evangelicals as they proselytized around the world and hoped to remake it in their image. You cannot fail to be gripped by the idiosyncratic personal histories of Tyrrell’s protagonists which he captures with characteristic attention to detail, humanity, and clear-eyed analysis. This is an important story in its own right, but what’s important is the way in which it sets the scene for US power in the twentieth century.