The Grief We Won't Name

There's a story I've recently read that hits home. It is so similar to what we now find our missionary friends doing, deconverting themselves from the Christian community. It was posted amongst other Protestant missionaries within the last week in a group I belonged to, and it stung because we've had friends, friends that we have fought alongside with, shared our life with, grieved with, celebrated victories with, served the community with. Yet today they themselves would say: I am no longer a Christian.

It's sad. Something Reagan and I are both grieving, both wondering what we can do. And at the same time, we can only extend our hand of love and be willing to listen. But there's a limited boundary to which God would only permit if time allowed it.

This is the story about Andrew Jasko.

Andrew Jasko went to India as a young missionary from Wheaton College, convinced that Hindus were enslaved to demons through their worship of false gods. Years later, after finding his Christian experience hollow and his prayers unanswered, he encountered the Hindu and Buddhist traditions directly through altered states of consciousness and found them coherent, healing, and transformative in ways Christianity never was. Today he is a practicing Hindu, and the church's response to his journey has been to dismiss, diagnose, and distance.

And that response has revealed something devastating about who we are as missionaries.

When Andrew posted his story in a progressive Christian group, the responses were remarkably consistent. They all had an exit strategy. A way to avoid actually being with him.

One commenter invoked 1 John 2:19: he was never really one of us. Case closed. Don't have to grieve what was never real.

Another labeled his encounters demonic. That way the problem isn't our formation. It's his deception. Don't have to ask hard questions.

A third offered pastoral concern and testing frameworks. Very kind. But from a safe distance. Don't have to walk with him through the rubble of his disillusionment.

And an older missionary, after decades of work overseas, said all religions are equally worthless. Which is functionally checking out. Don't have to reckon with why his found something ours apparently couldn't offer.

None of them wept with those who weep. None of them said: "I'm sorry. Something we did broke you. And I want to understand what that was like."

That's what love demands. Not agreement. Not doctrinal correction. Just the willingness to grieve together the failure.

Andrew didn't leave Christianity because he was deceived or because demons seduced him. He left because Christianity, as he experienced it, was insufficient.

He experienced unanswered prayers. He was filled with fear, sexual repression, and low self-esteem. He encountered spiritual practices in Hinduism that produced healing, clarity, and empowerment. And then he watched the church respond to his questions not with grace, but with dismissal.

What he needed was someone to say: "Your experience of Christianity was hollow. That breaks my heart. Tell me what that was like. I believe your hunger is real, even if you've followed it in a direction I can't follow. And I want to sit with you in that until we understand what went wrong."

That would have been love. That would have been covenantal presence. That would have been the gospel embodied rather than just proclaimed.

Instead, he got proof-texted. He got diagnosed. He got left alone.

Of course he found elsewhere what the church refused to offer: someone who would listen to his pain and offer him coherence.

Here's what we're missing as missionaries: we treat spiritual bondage as a problem of correct doctrine and demon identification. But bondage isn't primarily intellectual. It's covenantal.

Humans are covenantally structured beings. We're made in the image of a covenantal God. That means we're wired for identity, loyalty, blessing, and covering. We need someone or something to bind us together at the deepest level. To be the center that holds us.

When Christianity failed to do that for Andrew, it wasn't because the doctrine was wrong. It was because no one embodied the covenant to him. No one stood with him in such a way that he could experience Christ as the binding center of his life. No one loved him enough to walk through his disillusionment with him and show him there was something on the other side.

So he found it elsewhere. In a religious framework that did offer coherence. In practices that did produce healing. In spiritual guides who did take his questions seriously.

The tragedy is that this happens constantly in Southeast Asia. Missionaries arrive with correct doctrine. But they don't embody covenantal presence.

The tragedy is that this happens constantly in Southeast Asia. Missionaries arrive with correct doctrine. But they don't embody covenantal presence. They diagnose bondage without understanding its covenantal structure. They offer Christ to people without offering themselves as living examples of what that covenant actually produces.

It's much easier and cleaner this way.

Training back home gives you a head start. It teaches you theology, strategy, even some cultural sensitivity. But it cannot grant wisdom that only experience and repentance provide. You can arrive knowing the doctrine. You can't arrive knowing what it costs to embody it. You can't know in advance where your own covenantal structures will break under pressure. You can't anticipate where you will fail the people you're supposed to shepherd.

So missionaries do what's cleanest: they stick with doctrine. They diagnose and teach. They maintain distance. They avoid the vulnerability that real presence requires.

But that distance is fatal. Because people don't encounter the living God through correct theology. They encounter Him through people willing to grieve, repent, and be transformed alongside them.

If we truly believed God is sovereign, we would grieve differently.

We wouldn't respond to Andrew's apostasy by declaring him never-really-a-believer. That denies God's sovereignty over his journey. It assumes God lost him, rather than asking: what is God doing in this? Why did God allow this man to encounter these frameworks? Why did God permit him to find healing in Hinduism while Christianity produced only fear?

A truly sovereign God orchestrates even the journeys that look like apostasy. And if we believed that, we would ask different questions. Not "how do we prove he was never saved?" but "what is God revealing to us about our failure through this man's experience?"

Sovereignty demands accountability. It demands that we ask: where did we fail to embody the covenant? Where did we prioritize doctrine over presence? Where did we refuse to grieve with someone in their pain?

Andrew's story isn't evidence that he was deceived. It's evidence that we failed to love him well enough to keep him. And if God is sovereign, that failure is pedagogical. It's meant to teach us something.

This is what I want to say to every missionary in Southeast Asia working amongst people bound by alternative spiritual frameworks: the answer isn't better theology. It isn't sharper demon identification. It isn't more aggressive evangelism.

The answer is love.

Real love. The kind that grieves together. The kind that acknowledges a person's pain without immediately reasserting doctrine over it. The kind that says: "Your hunger is real. Your disillusionment is valid. Something failed you. And I want to understand what, and whether it was Christianity or our version of it."

But here's what would have actually broken through to Andrew: not just acknowledgment. Repentance. Real repentance. The kind that costs our reputation.

Someone would have had to say: "I failed you. We failed you. And I'm willing to be wrong about this publicly. I'm willing to let you see me grieve over what we did to you. I'm willing to ask for your forgiveness. Not because I'm trying to win you back. But because you deserve to encounter someone who actually embodies what Christ teaches about repentance and restitution."

That's the secret sauce. Repentance and restitution at the cost of our reputation.

Most of us won't do it. It's too vulnerable. It costs too much. It means being seen as weak or confused or having failed at our core mission. So we stick with doctrine. We maintain the appearance of certainty. We protect the institution.

But that's exactly what Hinduism doesn't ask for. That's exactly what the spiritual guides Andrew encountered offered: acceptance without demand, healing without judgment, presence without the need to defend their institutional reputation.

If someone had offered him that from within Christianity. If someone had been willing to stand before him broken, repentant, and asking for grace. If someone had said: "I don't have all the answers. I failed you. Will you forgive me?" Everything might have shifted.

Because that's the experience Hinduism ultimately can't provide: being truly known and truly loved by someone who carries the presence of Christ. Someone willing to lose their reputation for the sake of genuine covenant.

What breaks my heart about Andrew's story is not that he became a Hindu. It's that the church never once grieved with him about why.

We never said: we're sorry. We failed you. Your experience of Christianity was hollow and that's on us. Your hunger is real and valid even if you've followed it in a direction we can't follow. We love you. And we want to understand.

If we had said that, everything might have been different. Not because we would have argued him out of Hinduism, but because we would have offered him something his new framework ultimately can't: the experience of being truly known and truly loved by someone who carries the presence of Christ. Someone willing to repent at the cost of their own reputation.

That's what Southeast Asian missionaries need to understand. That's what we all need to understand.

The people we lose to other religions aren't lost because they're deceived or demonized. They're lost because we failed to love them. We failed to grieve with them. We failed to acknowledge our own failure. And we failed to offer them the embodied covenant that only Christ can provide through a people willing to walk with them in their pain.

Until we name that grief and own that failure, we'll keep losing people like Andrew. And we'll keep responding with doctrine instead of repentance.

God is sovereign over this too. And what He's trying to teach us is simple: love is the answer. Love is always the answer.