Spirits Eat Ripe Papaya

Philip Andrews arrives on the mission field with outwardly impeccable credentials. Hes a preachers kid and a lifelong evangelical Protestant who has been recruited to teach the seventh and eighth grade children of missionaries in the Philippines. What none of the missionaries who welcome him to Ilusan know is that hes also been expelled from Bible college for his relationship with the daughter of a prominent evangelist. Despite his shoulder-length hair which causes him to be mistaken for both a woman and Jesus before hes been at the mission center for twenty-four hours Philips easy-going charm and skill at speaking evangelicalese soon win him a following especially among the school children. But is Philip a bad seed a wolf in sheeps clothing? Or is he an earnest seeker simply trying to find his way? Before this hilarious novel which one evangelical literary agent said would never be published reaches its shocking conclusion every missionary at Ilusan and Philip himself will have to answer that question. Bill Svelmoes novel Spirits Eat Fresh Papaya is a funny bittersweet perceptive and-yes-tender glimpse into the world of the all-too human saints who inhabit the far-flung outposts of the American evangelical subcultures foreign missions corps. --Larry Eskridge Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals Wheaton College Bill Svelmoe provides a good-natured and sensitive portrayal of the experience so common in a pluralistic world of finding that one no longer fully belongs to ones birthright community. That experience is especially poignant in a tight-knit fundamentalistic evangelical community on an intriguing tropical missionary compound. Svelmoe skillfully depicts how such a community can be genuinely attractive warm-hearted and embracing and yet have hard edges that can be psychologically fatal. --George Marsden author of Fundamentalism and American Culture. Svelmoes Philip Andrews is one of the most memorable and authentic characters to emerge in recent Christian fiction inviting the reader to follow the hilarious and moving struggle to fit his questioning faith into the rigid forms of missionary school piety. --Leonard J. Vander Zee author of Christ Baptism and the Lords Supper [Svelmoes] story is poignant compelling and timely. Ostensibly it tells the quirky tale of a young missionary stationed on a jungle compound in the Philippines; but really it is an incisive (and at times indicting) commentary on the life-giving freedoms and spirit-draining foibles of the evangelical subculture written by an insider who has experienced both extremes. --Debra Dochuk former associate director of the PEW Evangelical Scholars Program Bill Svelmoe is associate professor of history at Saint Marys College in Notre Dame Indiana. He grew up in the Philippines where his parents were evangelical Protestant missionaries on Mindanao Island. He is the author of A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions 1896-1945.