by Jamie Wright
Praise for The Very Worst Missionary
“Jamie is the only Christian writer I know who doesn’t filter her thoughts and words through an ‘appropriateness meter,’ so her memoir is original, hilarious, and believable. Jamie shows that a woman can be full of contradictions, full of fire, and full of faith—all at same time. If you find yourself losing your religion, read this brilliant book before you bail. It’s possible to be thinking, honest, inclusive, relevant, compelling, compassionate and Christian—Jamie’s proof.”
—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising
“This book is one of the smartest, funniest, and truest books on faith I’ve ever read. The Very Worst Missionary will draw you in and keep you thinking. It will remind you that, even when you think you’re at your worst, you’re not alone.”
—Rachel Held Evans, New York Times bestselling author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Searching for Sunday
“This book might make you clutch your pearls, or laugh out loud, or angry. It might break your heart. Maybe all of the above. But at least you won’t remain unmoved by Jamie’s profound, wise, and funny-as-hell story. Jamie’s love for the church is ferocious and refining, and we desperately need to read and heed this book.”
—Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist and Out of Sorts
“Think of The Very Worst Missionary as the literary lovechild of Mother Teresa and Sarah Silverman—a crass-and-light-filled narrative that will have you laughing one minute and looking in the mirror the next. We need this book in the very worst way.”
—Matthew Paul Turner, author of Churched and When God Made You
“If you’ve lived and worked abroad, I predict you will nod your head in recognition as Jamie takes on the sacred cows of Christian missions with honesty, humor, and not a religious platitude in sight.”
—Tara Livesay, director of Heartline Ministries, Haiti
“Jamie had me howling with laughter and cringing with recognition at her earnest and yet misguided endeavor to save the world. Equal parts memoir and scathing but self-deprecating critique, The Very Worst Missionary shows how even our best intentions can go awry and how we can find our way again.”
—Kristen Howerton, author of Rage Against the Minivan
“Rip-roaringly funny, brutally honest, and so very endearing…an absolute joy to read from first page to last.”
—Nish Weiseth, author of Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World
“We’ve traveled with Jamie into red-light districts in Asia, where we’ve seen how she’s been able to use her voice to advocate for the most vulnerable. In The Very Worst Missionary, she hosts a conversation that globally minded people of faith absolutely need.”
—Matt and Laura Parker, founders of The Exodus Road
“Gritty, funny, and thoughtful…all the things faith should be but rarely is. I love Jamie’s story, her voice, and the way she looks at the world. After you read this, I’m confident you will, too.”
—Jeff Goins, author of The Art of Work
“Jamie writes with eloquence, humility, and snark (no doubt a spiritual gift). Everyone should read this brave book.”
—Emily Worrall, co-creator of Barbie Savior
“I’ve never seen a fellow Christian write with such courage, authenticity, and balance. You will come away feeling that your hurts and frustrations have been validated, and motivated to love bigger.”
—Benjamin L. Corey, author of Unafraid
“Jamie brings the wit of Joan Rivers, the pen of Mary Carr, and the spirit of a prophet. This is one of those rare religious books that makes you feel okay with who you are while inspiring you to want to be better.”
—Caleb Wilde, author of Confessions of a Funeral Director
“Jamie gives us permission to admit just how screwed up we really are and accept how much God loves us anyway. One of the best, most refreshing books I’ve read in a very long time.”
—Zack Hunt, writer, blogger, and preacher
Copyright © 2017 by Jamie L. Wright
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780451496539
Ebook ISBN 9780451496546
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Cover photography: Claudia Below/plainpicture
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Jen Hatmaker
Introduction
Part 1: The Odd Early Years
Chapter 1: The Very Worst Missionary
Chapter 2: Jew-ISH
Chapter 3: Tough
Chapter 4: A Butt-Hair-Milkshake Love Story
Chapter 5: I’m Not Done
Part 2: An Unconventional Faith
Chapter 6: Good Christian
Chapter 7: Years of Plenty
Chapter 8: Bad Christian
Chapter 9: Get Real
Chapter 10: Adventure Us
Part 3: What in the Actual Hell
Chapter 11: Raise Your Hand
Chapter 12: Surprise
Chapter 13: The Butterfly Eater
Chapter 14: The Very Worst Year
Chapter 15: Friday-Night Lights
Part 4: Fix It, Jesus
Chapter 16: The Scales Fall
Chapter 17: Natural-Born Blogger
Chapter 18: Practical Magic
Chapter 19: Stuck with Knives
Chapter 20: Do Your Best
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Steve.
Thank you for the office.
And, also, for everything else.
And for Stephen, Dylan, and Jamison.
Sorry about dragging you off to live in a foreign country.
It honestly seemed like a good idea at the time.
Jamie teases me good-naturedly about my annoying optimism. It is the actual worst. I’ll readily admit to being the dumb girl who thinks the arsonist holding the gasoline can was probably just on his way to help a stranded driver. Jamie grew up Jew-ish and then not; I grew up with flannel boards about Noah and the Ark in Southern Baptist Sunday school. We took two different paths to Jesus but both set out to save the world with our well-intentioned zest for evangelism. We both tried really, really hard to follow the church rules and protect our good standing. We each did the things and said the words and took the trips and prayed the prayers.
And that cynic and this optimist found ourselves in the same disillusioned spiritual space.
I think that is why: 1) Jamie and I are super close—like, real-life-talk-nearly-every-day friends, and 2) I devoured this book in one sitting, oscillating between violent laughter and a settle-in-your-bones relief at being so understood. The reason you love Jamie (or are about to) is because she says exactly what the rest of us are thinking, but we’re too afraid to upset the apple cart. T
he spiritual garbage we pander to or justify or even perpetuate can’t escape Jamie’s direct line of questioning. She lays it bare, exposing our subculture where it is harmful instead of helpful, fake instead of genuine, full of crap instead of full of Jesus.
I love my girl not just because of her saucy mouth and outrageous snark but because this broken-down world and our busted-up human hearts deserve better than a list of rules and a church that emphasizes fitting in over true belonging. When Jamie talks about Jesus, I can’t think of a better way to put it than this: I recognize Him. That is the Jesus I know, the one that the Bible describes, the one I love enough to hand over my entire life. When everything about the church and church people crumbles around me, when there doesn’t feel like a safe spot on planet Earth, Jesus still feels safe to me. Jamie and I follow the same Jesus, and in that way, this book is profoundly nurturing. You might cry tears of relief as I did.
A note of high praise to Jamie: even in the midst of dismantling, she honors the church where she found Jesus and all the folks thriving in that spiritual environment. She avoids taking easy shots at motives, character, or sincerity. I think this matters. Conventional Christian spaces have their place in her story, and she describes them with humor and generosity. But the straight-up gift of God on Jamie’s life is that she has eyes to see what hundreds of thousands of us need outside those tidy walls—a faith for the rest of us. She is a voice for the outlier, and we’re famished for what she has to say.
I trust Jamie for many reasons, but at the core of it, I know without any doubt that she is always, always telling the truth. Increasingly, this matters. I can no longer bear hearing one thing coming out of a leader’s mouth while the evidence makes plain another reality. I’m hypersensitive to agendas, party lines, Christianese, and power. I have no room for talking points, blacklisting, spiritual manipulation, or authoritarianism. Spare me your shame-based gospel, judgment, thinly veiled hatred, and arrogance. That used to be my banquet table, and it left me starved. I need truth and vulnerability, and I need my leaders to call something broken when it is instead of dousing it with spiritual sugar to help it go down. I need fearlessness, which is increasingly rare. When possible, I need spicy messaging, and I’m here to deliver some good news to you, reader: you shall receive that in spades herein.
This is a book for the rest of us. There are so many of us, dear ones. Be encouraged. This growing band of ragamuffins and scalawags and ne’er-do-wells and good-hearted rebels are finding a new space, finding a new voice, finding Jesus despite all odds, thriving spiritually in places declared unfit with people labeled unworthy, and it is a beautiful mess. You are so welcome here. You are incredibly loved by Jesus, and in Jamie, you will find a trustworthy guide to lead you through the pits of loss, failure, sadness, all the way to redemption.
All the way home.
Jen Hatmaker
Author of For the Love and the New York Times bestseller Of Mess and Moxie
Sorry.
I just need to get this apology out of the way before you dive into this book with any sort of expectations and end up feeling disappointed because you were somehow misled to believe this would be a good book. Or a meaningful book. Or a helpful book. If we’re lucky, it will have a couple of decent readable parts, and that would be a nice surprise for both of us. But if you read this thing and it ends up taking a literary dump on your soul, feel free to run straight to the Internet and leave a sad little one-star review that says, “This book sucks.”
Fair warning: If you do that, the reasonable people who leave good reviews (because they’re nice and cool and extremely good-looking) will be like, “Hey, chump, it says it sucks on, like, the very first page! What kind of monster gives a one-star review to a book that delivers exactly what it promised?!” And then you’ll look like an asshole. So if you hate this book, the only way for you to come out on top would be for you to leave a five-star review agreeing that I was absolutely right about my book sucking and that you’re just grateful I told you right at the beginning. I mean, that’s what an honest, fair, generally decent human being would do. But hey, you do you.
Anyway.
I realize this is probably weird, since most authors don’t start their books off with an apology, so bear with me. This is just a thing I do—I’m a compulsive preapologizer. Like, if I invite you to my house for dinner, I will spend the day cleaning and scrubbing and shoving crap into drawers until the whole house shines like a new penny and then, when you arrive, I will apologize as you walk through the door, “Hi, come on in! Sorry about the mess.”
I cannot help it. It’s, like, my solemn duty to warn you about my potential inadequacy in advance, because only after I’ve sufficiently lowered your expectations and opened the wine can we all sit back, relax, and have a nice time. The riskier the situation, the more apologetic I feel, and inviting you into a book about my life and faith and failure feels a lot riskier than letting you taste my lasagna or use my toilet.
I think anyone who has experienced a major personal or theological shift can understand exactly why book writing freaks me the fuck out. It’s because our beliefs tend to change over time, so much that in many ways I’m not even the same person I was when I first fell in love with Jesus. I mean, if I met 1998 Christian me, with her gold-cross necklace and her mom bob and her cheap, cheesy platitudes today? I’d probably give her the finger.
That’s the inherent problem with writing a book centered on life and faith. It’s that, in the end, my own perception of God is subjective and insufficient and ever changing. I’m still in the middle of this process and I will undoubtedly continue to change, but this book won’t be changing with me. In ten years this is all just gonna be a big fat public record of how dumb I was when I wrote it, so I might as well just get the apologies out of the way right now.
The other problem is that two people never remember a single event the exact same way; this is a scientific fact I’ve observed personally many times in over twenty years of marriage. But the reality of writing a memoir is this: All of the people in this book really exist and all of this stuff really happened. These pages are filled with true stories and fake names, shared memories and personal perceptions, deeply felt convictions and loosely held ideas, and there’s a strong likelihood that I will get some of it wrong, historically or theologically or both.
But I like people who tell me the truth and I try to be someone who tells the truth, even (maybe especially) when it’s unflattering, because I believe the honest truth is like an invitation into another person’s soul. Lies hide us, secrets isolate us, partial truths confine us, but through the most blatant and bare honesty we are fully known, genuinely connected, and utterly freed. I’m here to tell the whole truth, no matter how scary that seems.
I once went to a circus and watched a group of acrobats fly and flip and snatch one another out of the air with nothing but their half-naked bodies and chalky bare hands. The performance was beautiful and terrifying, and their demonstration of skill, strength, and grace had everyone in the audience gasping and squirming. At the end of the routine, the flyers dropped, one by one, into a safety net below, and nobody was shocked or disappointed that it was there to catch them. The net didn’t detract from the artistry of their act, it didn’t take away from their athletic prowess, and neither did it guarantee their well-being—but it did free them to fly higher, to risk bigger, to try something braver.
I think that’s a pretty good approach to life. Sometimes a safety net is simply an acknowledgment of our capacity to make mistakes. Sometimes we slip. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we misjudge. Sometimes we write a book that sucks ass. The safety net is there to make us brave enough to step out in the first place. It’s there to remind us that even if we completely bomb, it’ll be okay, and we’ll probably even live through it.
It’s arrogance that puffs us up and says, “I’ve got this. I know what I’m doing.
” But humility casts a net. Humility sees us in all of our imperfection, stretches a wide net beneath us, and gently urges us to move out over whatever terrible abyss we’re facing.
For me, writing this book is my own half-naked high-wire act, and it feels kind of crazy, but I’m doing it anyway.
So this is me preapologizing for all the parts I get wrong.
This is me weaving a little safety net to make me brave.
This is me inching out over the abyss, despite fear, to share the story of living out faith, despite failure.
Come on in. Sorry about the mess.
The year I turned thirty-two, I took a deep breath and marched boldly into full-time ministry as a missionary to Costa Rica. I wasn’t alone in this soul-saving, world-changing, God-pleasing endeavor—my husband, Steve, and our three sons (thirteen, nine, and seven at the time) were also in on this adventure. People often assume that our kids must be oh so grateful to have been given the gift of worldly perspective during their early years, so allow me to dispel that fantasy. Today, as young adults, our children all agree we pretty much ruined their lives by dragging them off to a faraway land, saddling them with a second language, and forcing upon them a great variety of new people, places, and cultures. But, in their defense, our life overseas was kind of a shit show.
Steve and I intentionally gave up every ounce of stability we’d enjoyed in the United States, said good-bye to our community, and took a massive financial hit to chase a dream of being a small part of something big. We were acting on what we’d been taught: that the world needs missionaries to find the lost, feed the hungry, heal the sick, and free the enslaved. And, for a minute, it honestly seemed that simple.