Missions as Market Expansion

Altogether there must have been about 300 different (often competing) foreign denominations (or otherwise distinctive foreign groupings) of Christians in China when I arrived there in 1948. It was the “free enterprise” business model applied to religion…

So a major offence of the contemporary foreign missionary enterprise is that it operates on the same principles of ambition and expansionism that businesses do. The motivation is not profit but power. And the self satisfaction derived from expansion into new territories. It is of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. Independent and denominational missions in China were all setting up branches and extending their territory, just like Ford and GM or Coke and Pepsi have done all over the world. So when the Communists came on the scene with their altruistic message of “love your neighbor as yourself” (at that time – once they gained control they became just as selfish as any before them) it exposed the colonial, carnal aspects of foreign mission operations.

-Bob Finley, Reformation in Foreign Missions, 41-42.