First published on 1 September 2007, updated on 1 March 2010
Is it ever OK to live a lie in order to tell the Truth?
Yesterday, 19 South Korean missionaries who had been held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan were freed after a 6 week ordeal. If you haven’t been following the story, and the controversy around the reported $ 2 million ransom paid, then read the New York Times article here or the Reuters report here.
This has brought to bear a HUGE issue that has been bubbling away just below the surface for many years. The Emerging Church has not quite wanted to touch this topic publicly, although many coffee shop discussions have spoken about it. The issue is now in stark relief. As part of the negotiations between the South Korean government and the Taliban, the Koreans promised to send no more missionaries to Afghanistan (South Korea has more missionaries abroad than any country other than the USA). I am guessing that not every church in Korea was complicit with that decision, but it is nevertheless a binding international public promise. (Read a Korean newspaper report on this issue).
Will the church comply? Those churches that have no intention of stopping sending missionaries surely have a duty to the truth to immediately come public and say, “We will not stop. We don’t agree with the decision.”
The issue that lies at the heart of this situation is the conflict between telling the truth and spreading the Truth.
More recently, in 2010, we have seen the case of some American church workers who went to Haiti to help in the aftermath of their terrible earthquake. But they tried to help by attempting to smuggle 30 or so children out of the country. They initially claimed that these children were orphans. It later emerged that many were not, but that their parents had consented to them being taken away by the church workers in order to live better lives in the USA. Besides the cultural imperialism going on in this story, there is an underlying current of dishonesty and lying that appeared to pervade the situation.
Doing good, but being deceitful in order to do so! Is that ever OK?