Perhaps that’s why our Lord in His infinite mercy would reveal to me that all these Americans going overseas was a huge mistake. That our activities in foreign cultures were hurting the cause of Christ more than helping it. And that the foreign missionary operations of our churches were in dire need of reformation.

My eyes were opened when I went to China in 1948. I had no strategy for missionary work there. All I knew was that our Lord had said, "Go." So I went, and there I was. Along with 6000 others who had blindly "gone to the field" with no idea that our presence would hurt the cause of Christ far more than we would help it.

Now before I go any further, let me make it clear that God certainly used the pioneer missionaries who went to China a century earlier. There was surely a time for them to go there and sow the seeds of the gospel. I do not want to minimize the importance of what they did. But just as surely as there was a time to go, there was also a time to withdraw. And we failed to see it. I think perhaps that’s why God allowed the Communists to force us out.

At the time I arrived the Marxists/Maoists were taking over China with religious fervor. No Russians were involved. Had the Russians been there, Communism would be known as "the foreigners' religion." Chinese wouldn’t work for it. Wouldn’t die for it. Communist missionaries were all Chinese.

Then how did they become Communists? Nine out of ten of the top leaders who took over China were converted to Communist ideology while away from home as foreign students in Europe and America. When they went home they lived as simply as the poorest peasants in order to gain a following by the masses. And so doing they took over the country. Then put out all the Christian missionaries.

Not only that, they discredited the Christian faith by pointing out that most foreign missionaries were fabulously rich compared to the average Chinese. So where did we rich foreigners get all of our money? They said we were spies sent by the CIA. And the people believed it. How would they know otherwise?

Then and there I knew we would have to find a different way to do foreign missionary work if we hoped to compete with Communists for the minds of men. Our presence in China was a great boost for the Communist cause because we were ripe material for their propaganda machine. They could appeal to patriotic Chinese citizens who felt their country should be protected from what they called "cultural imperialism" and "institutional colonialism."

But would I dare say anything about this problem when I returned to America? After all, most of us evangelicals lionized our foreign missionaries. To even suggest there might be a flaw in the way they worked would bring down the wrath of all who prayed for and supported them.

I kept quiet for seven years, concentrating on the ministry of International Students, Inc. which I started in 1953. We went about our work, reaching foreign students for Christ and sending them home as missionaries among their own people. But among the foreign scholars were many Christian leaders who had come to the USA for graduate study. Some of them expressed concern about the harm that was being done to the cause of Christ in their countries by the continued presence of missionaries from America. Yet we said nothing.

Leaders of other organizations who knew what was happening also kept quiet. Around 1955 I was invited to share at a meeting of IVCF staff workers. Requesting that I not be repeated publicly, I shared some of the things I had observed about the problem of missionary colonialism. When I finished, the head man of InterVarsity, C. Stacey Woods, confidentially disclosed that he was coming to the same conclusions. He quoted a Christian physician from India as saying that one of the greatest hindrances to the cause of Christ there was the presence of American missionaries. He also stated that he had heard several Christian leaders in Europe say that they were praying that God would deliver them from the adverse presence of American missionaries in their midst. But Stacey dared not say these things publicly.