Missionaries’ Children and the Bible: A Critical Response to Some Theological and Missiological Views

Abstract

This article scrutinizes some biblical texts playing an important role in motivating missionaries to separate from their children on a young age so that they were able to receive proper school education. The children received this schooling on a place far away and often also in another country. Thorough analysis demonstrates that the meaning of these texts was almost always different from the sense many missionaries and mission organizations extracted from them. Mirabile dictu these biblical pericopes were very seldom discussed within missiological academic literature.