2024-08-09
A Baptist missionary reflects on her time in Ethiopia in this debut memoir.
When Lindholm and her husband, Ray, first traveled to the Menz region of Ethiopia in 1967, she claims, “No foreigners had ever lived there and no person who left ever returned by choice.” Despite this grim description of Ethiopia’s “back hill country,” the Lindholms would come to treasure their small community of fellow Christian believers over the course of the next decade. In this memoir, which takes place in the waning years of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign prior to a Communist coup, the author offers an in-depth look at the lives of white missionaries in an African nation. Lindholm’s relationship with the then-powerful Orthodox Church in Ethiopia is a central theme. On the one hand, the Lindholms found collaborative avenues with priests and deacons; for example, they used the authority of the priests and Emperor Selassie to convince local Christians to reject notions that an Amharic translation of the Bible was not a “foreigners’ Bible” different from the traditionalGe’ezversion. Alternately, as an evangelical Protestant, the author frequently references social and theological tensions between “born-again believers” and Orthodox leadership. For readers interested in missionary history, the book offers a compelling case study of post-1945 global evangelicalism. The Lindholms’ emphasis on mobility marked a novel approach to mission work in the early 1970s that utilized non-permanent structures like tents and offered a range of medical, veterinary, and skills training services to draw in potential converts. Those outside of the evangelical tradition may find it difficult to reconcile the notion of sending Western missionaries to convert an African nation that has long taken pride in its Christian heritage. Readers who are of the Baptist faith, however, may be drawn to the author’s perspective on a pivotal era in African missionary history. The book’s occasional descriptions of Africa as a place of “darkness” that “time had forgotten” reflect antiquated Western ideas of a continent plagued by racist stereotypes.
The appeal of this historically compelling memoir may be limited to those who share its evangelical perspective.
