The Missionary Killed by Islamist Terror Helping orphans in Burkina Faso, but then al Qaeda struck.By Thomas S. Kidd
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-missionary-killed-by-islamist-terror-1453419371
The selfless work of missionaries was poignantly illustrated by the terrorist murder on Jan. 15 of 45-year-old Michael Riddering, an orphanage director in West Africa.
Riddering and his wife, Amy, left Hollywood, Fla., in 2011 to minister to impoverished children and widows in the landlocked nation of Burkina Faso. Unicef estimates that in the country of 17 million people, almost one million are orphans. The Ridderings, who brought their young daughter with them to the town of Yako, adopted two Burkinabe children; the orphanage cared for about 400 more.
Riddering was visiting Ouagadougou, the capital about 70 miles from Yako, late last week. He was meeting with a Burkinabe pastor in the Cappuccino Café when al Qaeda terrorists attacked the restaurant and two nearby hotels. More than two-dozen people, including Riddering and six Canadians in the country on short-term missions, were killed.
In addition to operating the orphanage Les Ailes de Refuge for the Christian mission organization Sheltering Wings, Riddering had also opened a women’s crisis center and ran a school, according to the Miami Herald.
Over the past few decades, conservative Christians have embarked on missionary work that combines the traditional spreading of God’s word with efforts to address modern ills. These missionaries have joined global efforts to battle the AIDS epidemic, to intervene against sex trafficking and the modern slave trade, and to aid religious refugees fleeing places like Syria and North Korea.
Sometimes the work puts missionaries’ lives at risk. Of course, the history of the Christian church is filled with stories of martyrs, beginning with the stoning of St. Stephen in the Bible’s Book of Acts. Countless Christians over two millennia have died for proclaiming the gospel in hostile environments, or as they served outcasts in places where few others wished to go.
We have just passed a key anniversary in the history of modern martyrs. Sixty years ago, in January 1956, Jim Elliot and four other missionaries were killed by Waorani Indians in Ecuador. As Elliot wrote in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose.” That ideal—giving up one’s life to serve God—is the fundamental explanation for why Jim Elliot, Mike Riddering and other Christian workers do what they do.
Missionaries have always had their critics. Some have accused them of being tools of empire and Western power. In some places and times, the accusations had merit, as with the missionaries who accompanied the Spanish conquistadors subjugating native peoples of the Americas. But just as often, missionaries clashed with imperial authorities over the abuse and enslavement of colonized people.
More recently, critics have argued that missionaries are imposing their gospel on non-Christians, or that their work is simply a waste of time. Both of these critiques came up in the firestorm over Dr. Kent Brantly, an American physician-missionary who contracted Ebola in Liberia in 2014 and eventually recovered.
A writer at Slate complained about such missionaries, saying, “It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?” Sniping also came from the right, with columnist Ann Coulter calling Dr. Brantly’s work “idiotic” and an example of “Christian narcissism.” Why go to the “disease-ridden cesspools” of Africa, she asked, when America has its own problems.
Yet Christians continue to accept the risks of missions to remote places. In October, Roberta Edwards, who operated the SonLight Children’s Home in Haiti, was murdered near the foster-care facility and food pantry. Her sponsoring organization, the Estes Church of Christ in Henderson, Tenn., said Edwards had been “dedicated to bringing hope to the hopeless. She knew that she worked in a dangerous setting, but had committed herself to care for children in Haiti despite these risks.”
Last weekend, following the deadly terror attack in Ouagadougou, suspected Islamist extremists in the Burkino Faso town of Baraboule abducted Australian medical missionaries Ken and Jocelyn Elliott. The Elliotts had worked in the area for more than 40 years, and their hospital in Djibo is the only such clinic there. At press time, their fate was unknown.
To critics, these missionary efforts may seem futile, or even reckless. And in earthly terms, maybe they are. But the missionaries might reply that they simply aspire to the divine commendation found in the Gospel of Matthew: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
Mr. Kidd, a history professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is the author, with Barry Hankins, of “Baptists in America: A History” (Oxford University Press, 2015).
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