As soon as the curse is announced (see Elijah 1), God commands Elijah to hide in the Kerith ravine (1 Kings 17 v. 3) where He provides for Elijah in a mundane way through the brook, and in a miraculous way by sending ravens with meat twice a day.
The Western missionary enterprise has been financed just as Elijah's was, in both mundane and miraculous ways. Most of the time, God supplies for missionaries the same way he provides for most people, through paid employment. For most Western missionaries, the money has been earned by a group of supporters and the task of the missionary is to recruit enough people who are willing to give a proportion of their earnings or pension to pay their costs. As Latin Americans discover when this model is imposed on them by Western mission agencies, this depends on lots of things being in place: a church culture that understands and accepts the model, many Christians in stable paid employment and an economic environment that is not prone to too many catastrophic changes. In a context where it is shameful to beg, asking a church to give you money to be a missionary can be excruciating.
The message of the miraculous delivery ravens is twofold. First, God is our provider. Whether we are prophet or policeman, missionary or manager, it is God who provides. But the second point is that God of the universe can use any means to supply his children. In this case, his provision involves God’s control over the natural world.
And lest we think that these things only happened in Bible times, consider this story told by Dr. Pauline Hamilton, a missionary to China and Taiwan with the Chinese Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship) in her autobiography, A Different Drum. Left on her own in Nanjing in the late 1930s, Pauline found herself very short of food and able to buy only some weevil-infested flour. “Lord,” she prayed, “give me three sunny days.” The sun duly shone for three days, the weevils left the flour and Pauline had her sustenance.
Of course, to be allowed to witness these acts of divine provision, you have first to be in dire straits, and many missionaries from the West today (and I was in this category) are safely padded from such extreme need by the funds they have to have guaranteed before they are allowed even to step foot on a plane. They thus disqualify themselves from the privilege of seeing God act in such direct and dramatic ways.
There was no need for ravens for me, as I saw God’s hand in the generous provision of a group of about 30 supporters together with my sending church. I would sometimes say to my friends in Colombia, “I have supporters who give me £5 a month, and supporters who give me £100 a month; they don’t know each other and they never meet but each month I always have exactly what I need.” And more, I could have added. And that was true and I am thankful for it. But it is also true that I was a missionary sent from the fifth largest economy in the world at a time of economic recovery after the 2008 crash. I didn’t become a missionary until I was in my late thirties so my supporting friends tended to be well-established in their careers with surplus cash that could be made available to me. As the daughter of missionaries, I was well known in certain church circles, and I was operating in a context where people understood that the missionaries needed to be funded and had been doing that for decades. I was blessed but I was also middle class and privileged.
What about the missionaries from South America and other parts of the majority world, who have finally raised enough to go to a European country, when their home currency suddenly devalues drastically? What about those unfortunates who had set off on a sufficiency of promises when their supporters lose their jobs in a local economic upheaval, or whose churches split and neither side wants to continue their support? What about the lovely people who are sure they are called to mission but whose church has never sent a missionary before, whose members are poor and will never be able to send a missionary abroad if they have to raise the equivalent of Western missionary salaries? Many of these people never make it to “the mission field” and nagging questions remain about the model of mission that depends on an individual recruiting and maintaining a circle of donors big enough to sustain a life of mission.
Padded as I was, I have had some lovely experiences of provision. God seems to delight in making sure I am shod (once a pair of £130 Doc Martens came into my possession as a gift and I am currently being kept very cosy by a pair of slippers a former colleague gave me when I laughingly complained that working from home in the lockdown meant that my slippers were wearing out).
I have also had some experiences of financial provision that touched me very much. In my first year back in Scotland after Colombia I had two part time jobs which kept me afloat financially for several months. Then one came to an end and I limped on, with just a couple of days work a week. I was beginning to do anxious sums in my head when, one Sunday, someone in my church said, “I feel the Lord is telling me to give you this.” He handed me a cheque for about the equivalent of half a month’s expenditure. In other words, just what I was lacking.
Don’t feel left out if a raven has never brought you meat or you have never had the joy of that cheque in the post or the unexplained entry in your bank account. Too often we forget the place of grace in the work that we have. Did you get a good education? It’s not likely you paid for it (all) yourself. Did you parents encourage you to do your homework? Or even more usefully, teach you integrity, punctuality and conscientiousness? Did you “happen” to spot the advert for your current job just when you needed to move on? Was the interviewer sympathetic?
Even if we are doing a job we hate or living on Universal Credit, we are being provided for by our heavenly Father as much as Elijah was.