For about forty years, Bishop David Perrin says, the same question has followed him from country to country: where are the African Americans, and do they care about us? The honest answer is that Black Christians do care, and many already go. What is thin is long-term, vocational presence. Perrin traces that gap to three historical forces: agencies and denominations that once refused Black candidates, a civil rights struggle that claimed the church’s attention at home, and the way churches choose to spend money. A gap in presence is not proof of a gap in love.
That distinction carries the whole argument. A count of long-term missionaries tells you who stayed. It says nothing about who prayed, gave, went for a week, or wanted to go and was turned away. Those questions have different histories.
What claim is the question actually making?
The question bundles two claims. The first is descriptive: there are few African Americans in long-term foreign missions. Perrin and Lisa Fields both accept this. Fields mentions a friend serving full time overseas who notices how few African Americans are out there with him. Perrin built a national conference around the same observation.
The second claim is an inference: few Black missionaries means Black Christians do not care about the world. Fields named the version people actually wonder about. Perhaps the issue is desire. Perhaps so much is happening to African Americans in the United States that, as she put it, “we might not see a need to go overseas.”
Perrin answered with history instead of a judgment about desire. He called it “a challenging historical kind of question,” and that framing matters. A question about desire looks inward, at the heart. A historical question looks at doors, budgets and decades. If the cause is historical, the numbers describe what was possible for people more than what they wanted.
His own story shows why the two claims must be pulled apart. Perrin says that early in a pastorate of some forty years he was “mentally committed” to the Great Commission but not committed to going. When a member of his church, Gail Peters, wanted to do mission work in Jamaica, the church paid for her trip. She came back telling him he had to go. His answer, by his own account, was to offer to pay for her to go. Here was a pastor who cared enough to fund missions and still had not gone himself. Care and presence were already separate things in one man’s life.
He eventually went to Guyana with other members of his church and describes being overwhelmed by the need for ministerial training there, with few pastors who had more than a Sunday school education. He says he offered God his life for Guyana, and that the answer he received was to go home and mobilize his brothers and sisters for missions. That is Perrin’s report of his own calling, and it set the direction of his work since.
How short is “short term”?
Perrin’s most useful correction is about vocabulary. In mission circles, he explains, a short-term assignment can run from one to two years. Then he adds the qualifier that changes the picture: “generally when we say it as African Americans, we mean one to 10 days.”
So when an African American church says it does missions, it often means trips of a week or so to Jamaica, other Caribbean islands, or Africa. Perrin insists there is a lot of that happening, more than most people realize. He says plainly that “the big challenge is not that African Americans are not involved in mission endeavors.” What is missing at scale is vocational mission work: people who move and stay.
That reframes the original question. A ten-day team often leaves before anyone learns its members’ names. A host pastor can receive several such teams and still ask where the African Americans are. The love was real. The presence was brief.
Perrin does not treat this as simple failure. He points to what he calls “a real strong African American movement” in missions whose approach centers on raising up, equipping and empowering local people to do the work themselves. He calls that a great strategy for mission involvement today. Then he adds that it is one strategy among others, because “God has always sent people from everywhere to everywhere.”
He grounds that in the New Testament pattern, where Paul is sent to the Gentiles and Peter to his own people, a division of labor Paul himself describes in Galatians 2:7-8. Local leadership matters, and so does sending. Jesus framed the commission in wide terms: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The text describes witness moving outward from Jerusalem. Nothing in it reserves that outward movement for one ethnic group.
What closed the door in the first place?
Perrin’s first force is the most direct. He says there was a real movement among African Americans to go on mission, and it ran into the segregated, racist period of American history. In his account, government sending agencies and denominations, at times working with governments, opposed African Americans going. His summary is blunt: “there were many African Americans that wanted to go, but because of racist tendencies within the country could not go.”
He offers one example and says there were others like it: a woman he refers to as Bethune Cook, who he says wanted to go on mission, was denied, and went on to establish a school that carries her name. The details in the conversation are thin, and Perrin does not develop the other cases. The example at least suggests that some who were refused put their sense of calling to work at home, though one story cannot show how often that happened.
This is where a careful reader has to separate a faith from the institutions that claimed to represent it. The agencies Perrin describes spoke Christian language while blocking Christian obedience. The command to go to all nations stayed the same. The people who controlled the sending were the problem. A Black believer reading that history has no reason to conclude that missions belonged to someone else. The exclusion contradicted the commission it claimed to serve.
The exclusion also left an image behind. Perrin says his conference began because the word missionary had become “synonymous with white Anglo-Saxon.” Overseas, when people heard missionaries were coming, they expected white faces. So the question asked abroad carries a second question inside it: whether the missionary category has room for African Americans at all.
Why didn’t the door reopen when segregation ended?
Perrin’s second force is the civil rights era. Once the struggle for equality, voting and the rights of citizenship began, he says, the church turned its attention to those issues “and kind of never got out of that way.” He explains why: the struggle never ended. He points to incidents still happening today and says these are the things pastors have turned their hearts to.
Perrin treats that turn as a reason, and he stops short of calling it a fault. A generation of Black pastors faced urgent needs in their own communities, and those needs did not go away. Mission energy was absorbed by the work in front of them.
The third force is money, and here Perrin is most pointed. He rejects the idea that the problem is poverty: “It’s not that we don’t have money, it’s how we choose to use money and churches choose to use money.” He calls it a mixed bag. The issue is how congregations do ministry and where they direct their giving, which makes funding a problem that has to be solved before missionaries can reach the field.
This bears directly on the long-term gap. A ten-day trip is a single expense with a visible result. A career missionary needs steady support for years, often while doing quiet work that never shows up in a church bulletin. Fields noted that fundraising is a challenge for many missionaries of any background. Perrin’s point is that the challenge falls hardest where budgets are built around what a congregation sees at home. He also names a counterexample: Pastor John Jenkins, whose church, Perrin says, he thinks gives over a million dollars a year to missions. The pattern can change when churches choose differently.
Isn’t the need at home reason enough to stay?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. If injustice continues in American communities, a church might reasonably decide its calling is local. Why treat a short supply of overseas missionaries as a problem at all?
Perrin answers by refusing to set home against the world. He agrees that the United States needs missionaries too. Asked whether other countries now send missionaries here, he says there is a lot of truth to it. He describes visiting Europe and finding beautiful cathedrals that had become empty museums, then returning home to see similar patterns of thought taking hold in America. He says some ministers have been trained in ways that leave them not believing the gospel. His conclusion is direct: “we need missionaries.”
So the line between home and abroad is less clean than the objection assumes. Perrin pictures a church that both receives missionaries and sends them, because the nations are in both places. A congregation can love its own neighborhood fully and still let its care reach past the city limits.
A second objection targets missions itself. Fields raised the criticism that short-term teams can do more harm than good, especially with projects like building houses. Perrin says he has heard that critique and takes it seriously. His conference trains groups in seven standards of excellence for short-term missions and is launching a certification program, so the sending team and the receiving team can align their aims until “there’s really a mutual benefit and nobody’s getting exploited.” That answer concedes the problem is real and treats better preparation as the cure.
Who is asking African Americans to come now?
Here Perrin’s report turns hopeful, and it rests on his own travels. He says the mission field “is really wide open and very receptive to African Americans coming and sharing the gospel.” In his view, the countries once called the third world have become upholders of the faith, and they now look at the West with alarm at what it has abandoned. Those churches, he says, are excited to receive African Americans and want them to share resources, talents and knowledge.
He is honest about the limits. Opposition comes, he says, when missionaries try to reach unreached peoples who hold other faiths, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or animism. That is the same kind of conversation about differences in belief a Christian would have in America. Welcome from existing churches does not make the whole field easy. He also notes unexpected openings, including gospel music drawing young people in Japan and much of Europe.
Fields asked whether African Americans might be better equipped for cross-cultural work because they already live between two worlds. Perrin answers carefully. He claims an advantage specifically in African and diaspora settings, such as Brazil, because, he says, white racism is real throughout the world and African Americans understand a good deal of that oppression. In marketplaces, he says, he often stays silent, because until he speaks he looks like everyone around him. Once he opens his mouth, he jokes, it is clear he is a Galilean. The reference is to Peter in the courtyard, where bystanders said, “Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee” (Matthew 26:73). The old word “bewrayeth” means gives away. Resemblance opens a door, and speech reveals the outsider. Kinship is real, and so is difference.
Perrin also declines to pretend African Americans think alike about this. What breaks his heart, he says, is how little connection he sees between African Americans and Africans elsewhere, so that a crisis in Nigeria, Senegal or Benin does not register as a crisis among family. He describes some African Americans who reject being called Black or African, and states his own view plainly: “I’m proud to be African.” He goes further and suggests that weak identification has meant too little pressure on American leaders during massacres and genocides abroad. These are Perrin’s perceptions from decades of ministry, offered as grief. Nothing in the conversation measures how widespread that disconnection is or tests his link to American foreign policy. What his observation does show is that care for the global church does not follow automatically from race. It depends on whether people see that church as their own.
What would close the gap?
If Perrin is right, guilt will not close the gap. Structures that make long stays possible will. His conference is built around exactly those barriers. It teaches children the history of African Americans in missions and shows them that a doctor, an engineer or a farmer can still be used by God on the field. Adults get practical help with the questions that stop people from staying: raising support, educating children overseas, learning languages, and facing danger.
The history Perrin describes explains why the answer to the question he hears abroad has so often been that almost no one stayed. It does not require that answer to last. The people who once controlled the door are not the ones holding it now, and the churches on the other side are asking African Americans to come and stay.