A fascinating memoir by Luis Bush. I grew up hearing about his concept, the 10/40 window, and found it interesting reading more about his life.

I really wanted to try and get into this book. I thought a spirituality book could have been something that I needed in my life. However, I think that this is not for me at all. I stopped reading after a few pages because I realized that this was not something for me. I am giving this a 4 stars because I think it was a great book, it was just not something that worked for me.

I’m quite a bit on the fence when it comes to missionary work. Yes, missionaries do good stuff for people living in poverty and such in far-flung places of the world, but I’ve always wished that they were a little less evangelical. I mean, can’t Christians be a little more like Alcoholics Anonymous — getting people to their cause through attraction rather than promotion? It seems to me to be very insensitive to go to, say, a Muslin or Hindu area of the world and expect to convert them all to Christianity. Will that need ever be sated? If all of us were Christian on Earth, would we have to go to the Moon and make new converts there?

That’s a way of saying that Luis Bush is a missionary, and his zeal shows forth in his book The Yes Effect. Bush coined the phrase “the 10/40 Window” to describe the latitudes and longitudes between Western Africa and South Asia where Christianity is hardly abundant, and this is coupled with severe poverty in that area of the world, so the two go hand in hand. Bush wants this portion of the world to convert to Christianity, which he feels may clean up their problems in one fell swoop. That’s not to say that his intentions are poor. As The Yes Effect makes a very good case for, poverty in one area of the world can cause problems in more affluent areas of the world. I felt my eyes were opened a bit at this.

Essentially, The Yes Effect is a guide to anyone who wants to lead their own mission — whether it’s in their own backyard or someplace else. I would say that it is successful in that it had me wanting to pull up my socks and do more for those who are less fortunate. The, however, unfortunate thing about the book is Bush feels compelled at times to do a fair bit of cheerleading and boast of his own accomplishments in this area. The Yes Effect is stronger when a more objective viewpoint takes center stage and Bush (and his co-writer Darcy Wiley) turns the platform over to other people’s stories.

Some of these stories, granted, are quite extreme. Bush talks about one minister who felt compelled to plant churches in one of the world’s garbage cities, which are slums literally made entirely of waste. Early on, Bush ties this sort of do-gooder-y narrative into the parable of the Good Samaritan, by unspooling a tale of a Chinese toddler who was run over by a truck in an alleyway, the 18 people caught on surveillance footage who walked right past her almost lifeless body, and the garbage lady who tried to save her from dying. In painting such violent pictures, Bush asks of ourselves, “What would you do?” It’s hard to not be moved by his portraits.

Granted, there are the usual tales of converts praying to God to save another person’s life to have that person healed and transformed. As I’ve noted elsewhere on Medium, I’m not a big fan of using God as your fairy godmother to grant you wishes necessarily. I get the sense from the book that Bush might be Catholic — he hails from South America, and what little I know of the Christian churches planted down there, I think that they’re mostly of Catholic background — but he is of an evangelical fervour. For instance, the somewhat creepy final chapter of the book is about reaching out to kids and implanting a love of Christ in them so they can go out and do their own missions work. What’s creepy is that Bush seems OK with recruiting youngsters as young as four-years-old to articulate Christ’s words and start serving God in the community. Guys, I don’t know about you, but when I was four, I couldn’t articulate and discern the word of scripture any more than I could figure out which person stole my Star Wars figurines at that age.

To that end, my judgment of The Yes Effect is that this is a terribly uneven book. I applaud a great deal of what it is trying to do to get Christians to be less self-absorbed and more interested in the plight of our global village — even if that interest starts somewhere at home — but what I don’t like about it is the constant bragging tone of the book and the underlying notion that the goal of Christianity is to not do good works (which, of course, goes against the point of our religion) but to convert other religions to our own. This makes me sigh heavily. I’m sure that it’s in the Bible somewhere that bringing people into the faith is the thing to do, but the truth for me is that this attitude smacks of cultural superiority. Why can’t the world’s religions just, you know, co-exist in peace and harmony without one religion trying to be triumphant over another?

That said, I realized after reading the book that I have a fair share of work to do. I need to go and write a few more letters for Amnesty International and get working on that metal health initiative at my church that has yet to take off the ground (through nobody’s fault, I may add, since my pastor was on sabbatical and a lot of the church’s big decisions have been pushed off to the fall months when he returns). The Yes Effect may do a world of good somewhere. I just wish it were better written and less concerned about making Christian converts around the world. I understand that there may be a reason to celebrate successes of some of these movements around the globe, but they all seem to be tied into making new Christians. (Heavy sigh.) Oh well, The Yes Effect at least tries at something. It will make you cognizant of how bad things really are for some people. If you don’t feel moved to change things in the world after reading this book, you absolutely don’t have a soul. Too bad that this book is just as interested in converting souls as much as it is changing them, alas.