Christian missionaries in Muslim Lands...Sharing or conquering?
When we met Anthony Weston, he was a Christian missionary operating in Muslim-majority communities in Malawi. His wife and 6 year old daughter had just been the victims of a sexual assault and mutilation which had left the daughter dead and the wife lying in hospital.
Both Anthony and his wife had been preaching the gospel, under cover, and 'bringing Muslims to Jesus'.
Anthony's desire to tell his story was a cry for much-needed assistance, but the core of his testimony was a message of quiet forgiveness which overwhelms me to this day.
His participation in a world-wide wrangle between self-described Christian and Muslim forces begs a
number of questions as does the role of the Californian missionary organisation that he was affililiated to but answers to these are complex.
We had been filming for just a few months, starting with the missionary organisations's training base in California, then following the missionary leaders spreading the gospel of Christ through wholly or partly Muslim areas of East Africa.
Our film project was centred around an attempt to better understand the nature of the US missionary movement, a vast but often somewhat secretive force, many times the size of the US's other international representations, be they diplomatic or armed.
Through the personal stories of 4 Christian missionaries, how their paths lead up to the events in Malawi and their response to the events themselves, the film shows the forces contributing to the violence Anthony Weston and his family sustained, the corrupting role of power and hierarchy in religious organisations, Christian or Muslim, but also the desire to connect and share, pretty universally present in all the missionaries we met.
Through this small story, we hope to offer an insight into the problems attached to the rapid rise in expansionist Christian militancy, and its most notable, modern manifestation : the half-million strong US missionary movement.
