Spreading Gospel, shattering myths

When Vickie Stewart began saving souls on the streets of Brazil, skin color was among her greatest assets. Combining a mocha complexion with fluent Portuguese, she passed herself off as a local long enough to draw people in.

"I would come up and say: 'Would you like to come to Bible study?'" said Stewart, a black Baltimorean who returns to Brazil on Wednesday for a three-year tour as a Southern Baptist missionary. "They automatically thought I was Brazilian. It was really easy to connect."

Once upon a time, the face of the American missionary was almost exclusively white. Today, as many as 10,000 long-term U.S. missionaries are minorities, according to Doug McConnell, dean of the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. The majority are Korean-Americans, followed by blacks, Latinos and other Asian-Americans.

Scholars say a more diverse mission corps has clear advantages, including the ability to penetrate foreign cultures faster. Whether it is Latinos operating in North Africa or Koreans living in northeast China, minorities can often blend in more easily than whites. In addition, minorities are more likely to have linguistic skills.

Several factors have driven the increase in minority participation. A growing black and Latino middle class can better afford to fund individual missionaries. Racially integrated churches and seminaries are also generating more ethnic candidates.

Then there are the Koreans.

Of the minority U.S. missionaries overseas, more than 5,000 are Korean-American. Evangelized largely by Presbyterians in South Korea beginning in the late 19th century, many Koreans developed a deep commitment to spreading the faith.

"Korean missionaries are everywhere," McConnell said. "I've traveled in 75-plus countries and I've never been in a country where there weren't Korean missionaries."

Some of the most ethnically diverse missions are run not by denominational churches, but by private organizations. They include Youth With A Mission, an interdenominational group with 11,000 full-time missionary staff, more than 40 percent from the developing world. YWAM also fields more than 30,000 short-term missionaries who serve from two weeks to two years.

U.S. missionaries do a wide variety of work overseas, ranging from evangelization, community development and health-care training to construction of schools, hospitals and churches.

The Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board has more long-term U.S. missionaries - 5,400 - overseas than any other evangelical organization. But the mission board has been slower to shed its white middle-class image than some other groups.

For nearly a century, until 1972, the mission board sent no minorities abroad. And it was not until the past decade that the mission board began to permit foreign-born people to serve overseas.

"We started late," said Larry Cox, vice president of the mission board's mobilization office.

Since the 1970s, the mission board has made gains that officials say better reflect the slowly emerging diversity of the Southern Baptist Convention. The convention has 16 million members and is the largest U.S. evangelical denomination. About 85 percent of its churches remain predominantly white.

Today, the board maintains about 30 blacks, 56 Latinos and 227 Asian-Americans in long-term missions abroad.

As with other denominations, the Baptists' most active ethnic mission group has been Korean. In North America, Korean-Americans proved themselves by founding 750 Southern Baptist churches.

In 1989, the mission board sent its first Korean-American, Jacob Shin, a pastor from Rockville, Md., overseas to work with some of the 600,000 Koreans living in Japan. About 150 Baptist missionaries were already there, but most were white and struggling to master one Asian language, Japanese.

"It is almost impossible for them to learn two languages," said Shin, who speaks fluent Korean. Shin spent a decade in Tokyo, where he founded the nation's first Korean Baptist church with a congregation of 120.

Dan Moon, who spent years as a go-between for Korean churches and the mission board, credits more open thinking at the top for the growth in minorities and a less hierarchical approach to mission work. No longer does the mission board recruit exclusively from Baptist seminaries, he said. In addition, the operation has shifted away from what Moon described as a paternalistic mode.

"The missionary often positioned himself as playing 'Santa Claus,' while the nationals were recipients," Moon said. "Today, that is getting to be broken by a young, creative, dynamic Southern Baptist leadership." While the mission board has attracted Korean-Americans with relative ease, recruiting blacks has been tougher.

Black churches have had a tradition of sending missionaries overseas since before the Civil War. But with so many problems affecting the urban black community today, persuading people to leave home to help foreigners can be difficult.

David Cornelius, a former missionary in Nigeria, spent more than a decade recruiting blacks for the Baptist mission board. "When I first came to this job, I had to beg, borrow and steal to get churches to let me come in and talk about this," Cornelius said. Among the challenges: persuading blacks to trust a traditionally white, Southern institution.

Vickie Stewart joined the Southern Baptists for practical reasons that reflect the denomination's evolving diversity: She wanted to improve her Spanish.

Stewart, 41, grew up in a small, red-brick house across from Memorial Stadium in and attended Ebenezer Baptist Church, a black Baptist congregation.

An elementary-school friendship with a Chinese classmate sparked an interest in foreign cultures. In the early 1980s, Stewart warmed to mission work after watching a documentary about an African missionary in America.

"I just felt like something was saying: 'Vickie, you can do this'," said Stewart, sitting arm-in-arm on a couch with her father, Perry, 73, and her mother, Charlotte, 71.

Stewart stumbled into the Southern Baptist church while working with Latinos at a mission for the homeless in Lancaster, Pa. To polish her Spanish, she joined a Latino parish, which happened to be part of the Southern Baptist Convention. Stewart moved to Texas to attend a seminary, where she met a Baptist mission board recruiter from Brazil who encouraged her to serve there.

Since 2001, she has spent most of her time studying Portuguese and working in Curitiba, a city of 1.8 million near the country's southern coast. Stewart organized Bible studies and taught the urban poor - among them trash pickers, thieves, drug addicts and prostitutes - to become evangelists themselves. She says the work is trying, but she beams when she talks about it. Stewart counts among her successes several teenagers who came to her Bible study and then started their own.

"They didn't need me anymore," she said.