One of the amazing things about tribes such as the Ayoreo is they only recently made "friendly contact" with the outside world in the mid-1940s. So, despite the unbelievably huge transformations the Ayoreo people have undergone in the last seven decades, there are still a few elderly people around who were born before the Ayoreo even knew of anything beyond their own territory. These people are walking history-- a memory of a time long gone that will never return. They live their life in mourning. 

Last weekend I met one of these people. He shuffled along, leaning heavily on a thick staff, and his eyes shone from behind the hard, cracked skin of his face. He had a lot to say, and all I had to do was listen. This man was 9 years old when 5 North American missionaries were killed by his tribe. He says he did not see it happen, but remembers the people in his village talking about it later. These 5 men were the first missionaries to try to contact the Ayoreo, whose story, from the foreign missionaries´ perspective, is told in the book God Planted Five Seeds, which I happened to read almost by accident when I found it on the bookshelf while house sitting for friends in the US last year. I never thought I would meet someone who was there. 

What was so interesting was to hear the perspective of someone who was there on the other side. What did he think? "They were just adventurers," he says. "They did not speak our language, and really did not have any idea who we were or what we were like or what we were thinking, but they just walked right in." He says there was quite a fight within the community, between those who just wanted to kill them and those that wanted to wait and see why they were there. It wasn´t that they just like to kill outsiders, but that up until that point that´s all outsiders ever did to them, so they were afraid. 

But after killings, he remembers that the people felt a great sadness about what they had done. This is what drove him to go look for the other missionaries that came after the first ones. He ended up being one of the young people who helped teach the missionaries their laguage, and acted as a guide, taking missionaries into uncontacted communities and helping them share the gospel and plant churches. He claims to have had a hand in planting almost all the first Ayoreo churches. 

Looking back 50 years after the work he did with the missionaries, he has a few things to say. The missionaries left, but he and the rest of is people are still there. "Looking back at how we used to live and the way we live now, if I had to choose one as being better than the other, I would say the our life before was much better," he tells me. Looking around me at the mud huts stuck inbetween 2 motels (pay by the hour) and a shady bar in a part of town that taxis won´t go at night and at the young people sitting around listlessly, bored, uneducated, unemployed, and drug-addicted, I can´t say that I blame him. "And if I had to say why our people ended up this why, I would say that it is the missionaries´ fault." "Why is that?" I ask. "Because, they came here and never bothered to learn how we walk. All they wanted was to teach us to walk like them. The problem is, once they started their churches, they decided their work was done and they left, but they never showed us how to live in this new world that they convinced us to become a part of, abandoning our own way of life. That is when all our problems started. Before, people in our community did not steal, they did not lie, they did not kill. They did not get drunk." 

Of course we know that all humans are sinful and that surely these things took place before, but we can take this to mean that he has seen a drastic rise in these problems in his community since they "left the jungle," as they say. And this is an indictment that the North American Church needs to wake up and listen to. To hear someone say, "We had very few social problems and we survived just fine, then the Gospel came along with the West and globalization and now all we have is violence and depression" should be a cause for us to mourn and repent. Unfortunately, this story is not unique. How many of our churches in the USA just ignore the issue of our colonial past, not willing to recognize that the very land our church stands on is stolen? How many of us refuse to confront our present colonial church which often continues to insist to people around the world that being Christian means looking like us? 

As my friends at George Fox Seminary say, our church´s default method of mission is attractional, propositional, and colonial, when we need to be moving forward to do mission in a way that is missional, relational, and incarnational. This is what we are struggling to do in Bolivia, and the only way we see that indigenous church, such as the Ayoreo, can begin to thrive and flourish. But this is not just a cross-cultural missions model, it is the way missions should be done. Period. Even with your next door neighbor. It seems like many people in the States are beginning to realize this, but in places like Bolivia now we have a whole generation of Bolivians that were taught the colonial gospel and now are trying to replicate that among the tribes in their own country even while the North American missionaries are starting to change. But the only way to start to effectively reach out with the Gospel and to help those who have misunderstood it is to begin to live it ourselves.