Many took their initial cross-cultural training in Cuernavaca, Mexico, from Father Ivan Illich, who in 1964 founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation. In 1967 Illich published an article titled The Seamy Side of Charity, in which he accused the North American mission volunteers of indoctrinating the poor into capitalism, of propping up decaying church structures, and of creating dependency by replacing potential local lay leadership with foreign personnel. The North American missioner was a colonial latchkey chaplain just as guilty of American imperialism as the military advisors being sent under the United States Alliance for Progress. Illichs critiques found a voice in the emerging liberation theologies that attacked dependency as a key reason why Latin America remained poor while North America grew rich during the twentieth century. Although many Roman Catholic missionaries left Latin America disillusioned by the

During the 1960s and 1970s, Missionary, Go Home! became a popular rallying cry around the world. Nonwestern churches amid nationalist struggles condemned missionary racism, paternalism, and colonialism. By the early 1970s, Councils of Churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were calling for a moratorium on the sending of western missionaries and money, so that young churches could develop their own ways of doing things without western control. The result of these internal criticisms of missions was serious soul-searching on the part of mainline western denominations, and a decline in the sending of western missionaries from the affected denominations. As harsh as were the condemnations of missionary Christianity, they

The long-term impact of the tumultuous 1960s was to decrease the number of missionaries from western mainline Catholic and Protestant churches. Older denominational structures and mission institutions such as schools,

Postcolonial theologies of mission partnership emerged in older western churches. Even as they withdrew their missionaries, the mission wings of state churches in Europe began funneling large amounts of money into development projects in the Third World. By the 1960s, the sun was setting The Politics of Missions 93 on the large European denominational mission station, but the era of the non-governmental organization was just beginning. Scholarly criticisms of Christian missions How do twenty-first-century people judge the actions of the cross-cultural pioneers of earlier generations, especially when missionaries and firstgeneration converts held strong beliefs in the worthiness of their own cause? Many westerners in the twenty-first century, especially highly educated secular elites, assume that missionaries, by virtue of their religious convictions, were hegemonic fanatics. Even the acts of teaching people