MISSIONARIES ARE A DARING, DAUNTLESS BAND INSPIRED BY FAITH

WASHINGTON -- For the faithful of the Baptist missionary work in Peru, the
losses of Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter seemed to exemplify
tragedy in today's world. Two innocents--a dedicated missionary and her
child--killed pointlessly in the bitter war against the biblical scourge of
drugs.

It is important to discover, of course, what dictated the Peruvian Air
Force to so wantonly shoot down the missionaries' pontoon plane, apparently
mistaking it for one of the many drug flights in the region. It is equally
important to uncover, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether the CIA
operatives on the plane genuinely attempted, as they say, to stop the shooting.

But the untold story behind this tragic flight is the life's work of
unusual people such as Veronica Bowers and her husband. There they were on
those remote boundaries, trying to "save" the native peoples. Perhaps I
have a slightly different slant on their work from what I saw many years
ago when I was based in Peru as a foreign correspondent.

Many of my journalistic colleagues in those days would scoff at the
missionaries who were drawn spiritually to the Andean and Amazon regions
and especially to the forgotten Indian tribes. To those journalists, the
missionaries were innocent, even foolish, men and women who were at best
doing little harm and at worst destroying cultures they had no business
toying with.

I took a different position. As I got to know many of the missionaries in
the course of my life down there, I found them to be not only dedicated,
but also vibrant and uniquely inspired. I was awed by the almost
indescribable passion they brought to their work. They seemed truly
informed and inflamed by faith as they moved dauntlessly into impenetrable
jungles, yawning deserts and piranha-filled rivers that we correspondents
wisely eschewed.

Even if you did not share their faith, they were extraordinarily complex
human beings behind the popular portrait of simple, upright naifs that the
world preferred to see.

Veronica and James Bowers came from the Calvary Church in Muskegon, Mich.,
one of 1,400 churches affiliated with the General Association of Regular
Baptist Churches. Living on and working from a houseboat on the Amazon,
they traveled a 200-mile stretch of the river where they set up Bible study
groups, established churches and trained native preachers.

Their doctrinal position was described by church officers as fundamentalist
in the historical Protestant sense, "a solid, evangelical position." These
words would also describe the spiritual framework of most of the missionaries.

But the ones I knew best were from the Summer Institute of Linguistics and
its sister organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. They ventured into
the jungles to translate the Bible into otherwise forgotten Indian languages.

In 1971, in fact, I spent a week with them at their base camp in the
Ecuadorean Oriente, where over the years they had performed a remarkable
feat. They had actually gone into the "heart of darkness" to the Waorani
Indians, against all the odds, and had converted them to Christianity. The
Waorani, commonly called Aucas by a neighboring tribe, had first come to
light in the 1950s, when five young missionary men were killed by the
spear-wielding natives.

It was a worldwide story at the time, but by far the most interesting part
was the epilogue: Some of the missionaries' female family members had
returned to the Waorani territory and converted them, completely changing
their lives. It was that conversion that many of my colleagues derided.
Why, they would ask, should anyone in the world go out and try to change
anyone else--particularly through faith?

And this is where a more complicated truth arises. The Waorani had been so
traumatized in earlier years by the brutal expansionism of the oil
companies into the Oriente that they had lost many of their traditional
cultural norms and were even spearing their own families to death.

So the missionaries actually did save the Indians on several levels, just
as the Bible translators saved the richness and wealth of their remote
languages, which were dying out until the missionaries came. Today, the
Bible has been translated into more than 500 Indian languages in Latin
America. Thanks to 5,180 career missionary linguists involved, the majority
of the work in the Americas has been completed.

There are many other examples. The Roman Catholic Maryknoll brothers and
sisters did remarkable work in the high Andes of Bolivia and Peru, until
they mostly left in the 1970s. Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists
offer to many a more modern and egalitarian Christian faith, and in some of
the nations of Central America they now constitute 10 percent of the faithful.

So the death of Veronica Bowers did indeed represent more than the loss of
one individual. She was one of the fascinating, impassioned band at the
ends of the Earth, trying to influence the lives of very different people
through a faith they choose to share.