When we as missionaries visit our partnering churches on “home” assignment, people are enthralled by our stories, and we’re often lauded for all we’ve given up. But there’s a potential dark side to our sacrifice — one that we must talk about openly if we hope to avoid the mistakes of those who’ve gone before us.
The problems were there right from the beginning. As William Carey, the “father of modern missions” prepared to set out for India, he promised his wife that if she refused to accompany him, he would rip their eight-year-old firstborn son from her care and take him along, alone. Dorothy capitulated. After one of her younger sons died in India a year later, Dorothy began to suffer from paranoid delusions.[1]
Although a colleague sought medical help for his struggle with depression, William avoided seeking medical advice for his wife and instead confined her during her outbursts. Not surprisingly, this only seemed to aggravate her condition. She would die of a fever fourteen years after first arriving in India.[2]
More than two hundred years later, we’re still struggling to understand how to care for both our ministries and our families. Not long ago, I spoke with an elderly man who had been a missionary. He told wistful stories of how he brought his wife and children to the mission field, and then neglected them “for the sake of the gospel.”
“Did I do the right thing?” he asked. “I wonder sometimes. I told myself that I was doing it for God’s kingdom, but now I’m divorced and one of my daughters detests Jesus.”
I’m sure you, like me, have heard similar stories many times. Are we missionaries doomed to have bad relationships with our families? Is that the price of following Jesus?
THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY
Our human relationships impact our relationship with God more than we realize. We tend to project a variety of traits onto God — traits outside of the ones He shares in His word — based on our relationships with other people, especially our fathers. We may project our parent-child experiences onto God the Father, both the good and the bad. The results can be devastating. If our fathers have abused, manipulated, or abandoned us, we find it easier to read manipulation and abandonment into our experience with God.
This also impacts how we interpret our calling. Abandoning and neglecting our families becomes part of the “sacrifice” of becoming missionaries. We don’t like it, but we do it in the name of obedience, while misguided missionaries and churches cheer us on.
Soon, cognitive biases come into play.
- Sunk cost. We have spent so long believing something is true that the cost of rejecting it (and potentially rejecting our own past decisions and behaviours) becomes too high to consider.
- Confirmation bias. We most notice verses that appear to substantiate our beliefs while overlooking those that disprove them.
This isn’t intentional; these are natural biases we all possess, but we must combat them if we want to live in the fulness of grace and truth.
BIBLE VERSES THAT APPEAR TO JUSTIFY ABANDONMENT AND NEGLECT
We may use a few Bible verses to justify abandonment and neglect. And yet — is there more going on here than meets the eye?
1. Leaving Everything Behind
Peter exclaimed, “See, we have left everything and followed you!”
Jesus responded, “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).
But what did Peter mean when he said he’d left everything? Peter had given up everything, and yet he went back home. He went back to his mother-in-law’s house when she was sick, and asked Jesus to heal her — and Jesus did (see Luke 4:38-39).
Incidentally, tradition holds that Peter lived in Capernaum. Jesus visited and stayed in Capernaum frequently. Could it be possible that He stayed at the houses of Peter and his relatives? In any case, Jesus frequently passed through Capernaum; Peter likely saw his family often.
2. Leaving the Dead
When a prospective disciple came to Jesus asking for deferred discipleship so he could bury his father, Jesus responded, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60, NIV).
What if Jesus’ statement was not about skipping a funeral, but about challenging us to not delay following Him in favour of some abstract eventuality? If we’ve done any sort of fundraising, chances are good that we’ve encountered people who decline to donate because they’re saving up money, or perhaps they’re hoping to have a baby sometime soon.
Of course, it’s their prerogative whether they want to give or save their money. However, our futures have no guarantees. What if Jesus’ statement is really asking us not to put our potential usefulness for the kingdom of God on hold while we wait for an abstract possibility that may not happen for many years?
3. Hating our Families
Later on, Jesus turned to the crowds following Him and said, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
Let’s keep in mind that this passage is directed not only to missionaries but to all people who call themselves followers of Christ. It’s a call to follow Jesus wholeheartedly, not just out of idle curiosity. It’s explaining the requirement to love Jesus above every other person.
This has nothing to do with hate. After all, the Bible tells us the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Instead, this has everything to do with the magnitude of love we have for Jesus. This does not mean that we are indifferent to our families; this does not mean that we are indifferent to their suffering or their pain. This does not mean that we abandon or neglect them. This means that we subject our love and care of our families to our love of Christ.
We obey Christ, yes, but we make sure we provide for our families as well. We may have to get creative in how we go about it. Providing for our families may require us to give up some of our dreams or forgo some of the ministries we would have engaged in if we were single. But we trust that God will use our limitations to showcase His glory, and we don’t treat our families as an impediment or a grudging afterthought.
BIBLE VERSES THAT EXPLICITLY TEACH AGAINST ABANDONMENT AND NEGLECT
There are also quite a few areas of the Bible that actively disprove the idea that we should abandon or neglect our families.
1. Jesus’s Behaviour
When Jesus was on the cross, dying, He gave His apostle John the responsibility of taking care of His mother (John 19:26-27). This was the oldest son’s job in Jewish culture, and Jesus had passed it on to John. The implication is that Jesus had been fulfilling His familial duty up until that point.[3] No one can take care of our spouses and children the way we can. They still depend on us, not just financially but emotionally and spiritually. Following in Jesus’ footsteps, we cannot ignore or dismiss their needs.
2. Paul’s Admonitions
In the act of becoming spouses and parents, we sign on to a set of obligations: the obligation to care for, to cherish, to protect, and to nurture our loved ones. These precious people have been entrusted to us—by God. We are their family. No one else can care for them the way we can.
The apostle Paul remarked on this in one of his letters to the Corinthian church:
I want you to walk free from worry about these things. A man who is not married can give all his time to please our [Lord]. But a man who is married will have to give more of his time to the things of this world in order to please his wife. It is the same for a woman who is not married, or for a young maiden. They are able to give all their time to our [Lord], to keep their body and spirit holy and pleasing to him. But a married woman will have to give more of her time to the things of this world in order to please her husband. (1 Corinthians 7:33-34, First Nations Version)
The Bible does not make these responsibilities optional. It takes for granted as a foundational assumption that once we are married, we are obligated to please our spouses.
Paul later goes on to say, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). Dare we go out to proclaim the gospel as missionaries while simultaneously denying our faith and embracing a status “worse than an unbeliever”?
3. Teaching on Corban
Looking at the apostle Paul’s biblical teachings on marriage and family, it’s clear that God expects us to attend to our families and spouses with great care. If we use our calling as missionaries to avoid doing this, we are engaging in the practice of Corban: treating our obligations to our family as having instead been donated to God. The Pharisees engaged in this practice, and Jesus castigated them for “invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down” (Mark 7:11-13). Jesus would castigate us, too.
MESSENGER AND MESSAGE
In the West, we’ve grown accustomed to our mentalities of taxidermy and classification. We feel that we can separate and categorize different actions and behaviours. For example: how I treat the church is different than how I treat my family.
In the Majority World, however, this does not hold. The Majority World sees people and relationships much more holistically. The people we’re witnessing to watch our interactions with our family, and this becomes part of our witness. I can’t tell you how many times our Japanese friends and acquaintances have exclaimed in surprise when my husband Peter gets up after a meal to clean the dishes.
I continue to be startled by the number of Japanese women who come up to me privately and whisper the question, “Do you and Peter ever fight?” Of course we do, and I tell them so. But the harmony in our relationship seems to have a significant impact on the people around us.
Over our past fifteen years of ministry in Japan, we’ve come to realize:
The messenger is part of the message.
What we do with, and to, our marriages and families matters. Jesus told us this Himself: “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Our love for our families as well as the family of God is one of the strongest witnesses we can have. As my Japanese language teacher recently said to me, “We Japanese are not convinced by arguments. We are convinced by how we feel.” If they are not attracted by our love, they will certainly not be attracted by our logic.
THE FINAL QUESTION
Dorothy Carey has been derided as “weak-minded” and “deplorably unsuited” to be William Carey’s wife,[4] but we do the world of missions a great disservice if we disregard William’s coercive tactics, abuse, and neglect towards her. These things mattered — to Dorothy, and to God.
I suppose the only question that remains is: do they matter to us, too?
NOTES
Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptures are taken from the NASB.
[1] This might have been attributable to adult cerebral malaria (which can cause cognitive impairment, dementia, and neuropsychiatric symptoms) as easily as to a mental illness. Malaria is most prevalent in children up to 5 years of age. The son who died was 5 years old. Cerebral malaria is contractable by adults who have not built up an immunity to it, including those who have recently moved between continents. (See https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1471-4922(25)00040-6)
[2] Simonetta Carr. 2022. ‘Dorothy Cary and Her Struggle with Mental Illness,’ Place for Truth, https://placefortruth.org/dorothy-carey-and-her-struggle-with-mental-illness/#_ftn5 [accessed 29 August 2026]
[3] A nuanced look at how we can take care of our parents while engaging in mission is a discussion for another day.
[4] Carr 2022: Dorothy’s Legacy.
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Originally from Canada, Valerie Limmer lives in Okinawa, Japan, where she’s served as a missionary with her husband since 2011, partnering with the local church to focus on outreach and discipleship. Their Japanese pastor calls them “bridge-makers,” facilitating relationships with the community. Valerie is the author of Captive Set Free: How to Find Freedom Through Forgiving and On the Potter’s Wheel, a memoir of disability on the mission field. To learn more about her work or to read more of her articles, visit peterandvalerie.com/OurBlog.
