Corey Pigg became a missionary straight out of high school. Six years, 32 countries, and two cults later, he quit and made a podcast about it.
Pigg hosts Failed Missionary with two other lapsed missionaries: Emily Worrall, the co-creator of Barbie Savior, the Instagram account poking fun at humanitarians with a savior complex, and Jamie Wright, the author of The Very Worst Missionary.
They believe that missionary work, which has traditionally involved Americans and Europeans traveling to the global south to spread Christianity by building churches, schools, and hospitals, has become a money-making enterprise that is doing a lot more damage than good.
“It’s estimated that over 1.5 million people from the U.S. participate in a short-term mission trips every year, and… they spend approximately $2 billion,” says Pigg at the end of the first episode. He adds that after Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1999, U.S. missionaries spent an average of $30,000 per home they rebuilt, which locals could have built for $3,000. He also says that having American missionaries do things like paint orphanages or build schools takes jobs away from locals who need them.
Like a lot of young people who start a podcast, Pigg did it to process his own experience, but it seems to have hit a nerve: Failed Missionary now reaches 35,000 people in 151 countries. Here’s an excerpt of Episode One.
Jamie Wright: My favorite missionary bullshit lie is that God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called. You can say if you just want to justify going wherever you want, doing whatever you want, and needing absolutely no qualifying skills or reason to be there. You can just show up anywhere in the world, volunteer, do anything you want, and people will be like “Go ye! God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called.”
Like, they will literally congratulate you for being unequipped and unqualified.
Five minutes into standing in a room with other missionaries and I was like, “Wait a minute, clearly we are all ill-equipped and unqualified. How is God going to fix this? How is God going to make the electrician from Alabama capable of running an orphanage in Peru? How is God going to make the teacher from New York that doesn’t speak Spanish equipped to adopt fifteen kids in six months?” I was like, “Wait a minute, there are a hundred of us here, [and] we’re not equipped or qualified to do anything.”
Emily Worrall: We wouldn’t apply that mentality to flying a plane. Like, “Oh, I’m just going to hop in this plane and fly it because God told me to.” So why do we apply it to people’s lives? It’s ridiculous.
JW: We also wouldn’t apply it to any other nationality coming into our country.
EW: No, absolutely not.
JW: If a group of Africans knocked on my door and were like, “I’ve never painted a house before but I’m here to paint your house,” I’d be like, “Get the fuck out. No you’re not!” We would never permit that. We would never be like, “You’re just a stranger from Nambia and you want to hold my babies? Go for it! Come on in! Did you bring candy?” The standard is so opposite of what we actually expect for our own lives.
Corey Pigg: Yeah, I noticed that to be true for myself as well, now that you say it. What led you into the mission?
EW: So I first went on a mission trip when I was 17 and I think that I wanted something meaningful in my life — which is the reason for most people going on mission trips. Of course, it’s a bit selfish. And I came to Uganda for two weeks which did absolutely nothing except make me feel important. Then I got addicted and continued coming back and back and back until I moved here.
CP: So Jamie, what got you into missions?
JW: I think a similar story. I think most missionaries have the same story. Like, “I did it once and I thought God wanted me to do it forever.” But my first mission trip was as an adult leader taking high school students to Central America. So I was a youth leader, you know like the… “C’mon guys, quit making out behind the dump site, come serve Jesus.” I thought that it was just this amazing thing. And we did hang out with Costa Rican teenagers and did cool stuff — we went to rain forests and we went swimming in hot springs underneath volcanoes. When my husband and I decided to keep doing missionary work I think we thought that if we make this big change and gave up our lives and moved somewhere for God, he would fix our problems. He didn’t.
CP: So the ironic thing for me is that I never wanted to convert anybody. I genuinely loved sitting with the world’s pain and offering love and wanting to “help people.” However vague that seems to me now. But I’m wondering like, for you two, what were your original thoughts, motives, or intentions?
JW: Salvation aspirations, like “I’m going to save people” kind of stuff.
CP: Emily didn’t you tell me that you were inspired by Invisible Children at one point in time?
EW: Oh God, yes. Well, we all were. So the reason I came to Uganda in the first place is because I watched the Invisible Children documentary in group at church and I was like “I’m going to go to Uganda and help these kids — because at 17 I could totally do that — completely unaware that the documentary was just not representing the situation on the ground at all.
CP: Would you say you have more of a humanitarian aid outlook on it than a missionary perspective?
EW: Definitely. Yeah, I related more with the humanitarian outlook. But of course it was influenced with my Christian beliefs at the time.
CP: So for both of you, how long was it into your missionary journeys that you realized things weren’t what they were sold to be?
JW: It was like five minutes, I think.
(all laugh)
EW: Like five years.
CP: Five years for me as well. So Jamie, how was it only five minutes?
JW: When I was in language school with about a hundred other wannabe missionaries going all over the world — all these people that wanted to learn Spanish so that they can go save people, or change the world, or whatever. I looked around at this group of wannabe world-changers, all standing together and thought, “Holy shit, these are a lot of weirdos. There’s a lot of really weird people. And surely, we all can’t possibly be called by God.” I looked around and I was like, this is not okay, some of these people should not be allowed to travel — at all. So it was a big eye-opener for me.
CP: Do either of you have any thoughts on the damaging effects of short-term missions? And it could be both for the participant and for the people on the receiving end.
JW: So much more than thoughts. Honestly, short-term missions are such a joke. It’s such a terrible, terrible thing that we’re doing both to the people that we’re sending and to the people that we’re sending them to. We tell people that they’re doing good and that they’re making a difference, when in fact they are perpetuating harm among communities, and patronizing people, and stealing jobs, and hurting economies, and hurting families and disenfranchising parents. I mean, it’s just broken on so many levels. And then we pat these short-term missionaries on the back and tell them we’re so grateful for their service and what they’ve done — it’s absurd.
And then the lies that we tell ourselves to make it seem okay, like that if we send our teenagers to poor countries then we’re showing them poverty and it’s going to make their lives better and make them more appreciative of what they have. It’s just not true. It’s just simply not true.
EW: I have lots of issues with short-term missions, but one of the biggest is the damage it causes. You have people come in and they’re intoxicated with this new environment and there’s so much poverty around them that they’ve never seen before because they’ve never left their own backyards. They feel like they can help and they make all these empty promises and then they leave and forget. They put their pictures on the wall and pat themselves on the back, and it creates a real systemic issue. Especially where I live, which is in East Africa, where it’s now normal for Christians to come over for a few weeks and just give out candy and money and whatever and then peace out. It’s not helping anyone except themselves.
CP: Missionaries come over to give candy?
JW: That was huge in Costa Rica too.
EW: Yeah, and there’s even an organization, I was told by a friend, that throws little bags filled with candy and whatnot out the window when they’re driving and calls them blessing bags.
CP: (laughs) No, you’ve got to be lying.
EW: I mean, I didn’t witness this myself, but it came from a reliable source.
JW: Oh, I totally believe that!
EW: I know, that’s the thing, it’s completely believable.
CP: What is the purpose of candy? I don’t get it.
JW: Well, you don’t want to show up in a poor community empty-handed. So you bring them used clothes and candy. It’s just a weird feel-good thing when the kids come running.
EW: I mean, I’ve even seen people give out bras in the village before, like they bring bras over from America and distribute them. It’s just this mentality that these people have nothing.
JW: There’s a church in my community that collects bras. There’s a weird sense that people literally think there’s no shopping malls in Africa. They think there’s not a market, or a store, or a place where people make clothes or shoes. Sometimes when you’re driving around with them they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, a car lot! Oh my gosh, a Burger King!” And you’re just like, “Uh-huh… These things exist outside of the U.S.”
The concept that actual civilization is happening in other countries — especially in countries we perceive as being completely impoverished and needy — is so far beyond their scope.
And bringing all of our used clothes over in garbage bags and leaving them on the doorsteps of impoverished people, is ruining small businesses — we’re putting seamstresses and cobblers out of business.
EW: Yeah, and it’s all to the detriment of the infrastructure of the countries we’re claiming to help. Especially in Uganda, they had a clothing business and then it just went under because it was much cheaper to buy the clothes shipped over from Goodwill than buy the ones that were made here. It’s completely destroyed the entire textile economy.
