My faith story: I was raised in an atheist family in New York. My family was and continues to be very scornful of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Personally, I always had a more tolerant understanding of religion than the rest of my family, but was still fairly dismissive of anyone who took faith in God seriously.
In my mid twenties, while living in Hawaii (a place with an enormous Buddhist tradition, but also a lot of historical Christian missionary influence, some of a dubious nature) I became more and more interested in religion, and undertook to study it carefully and extensively. I read quite a bit about Judaism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. I actually audited an Eastern Philosophy class at the local university here, and went to Buddhist temples in my area (as well as churches and a synagogue). At the end it was clear to me that the Bible, hands down, was Truth. After a secular upbringing, a post-graduate degree at a secular institution, and a lifetime of secular humanist indoctrination, this came as a bit of a shock, to say the least.
My family was and continues to be scandalized by my conversion. They are definitely in the camp of God/Jesus is a fairy tale, no thinking person would believe such nonsense, it's caused the world terrible problems, missionaries are evil people who have ruined countless cultures over the centuries. My mom wouldn't speak to me for two years after I told her I had been baptized. It's ok--there really is quite a lot of awful stuff that has happened in the name of Jesus, and I can understand that if a person has never had any other perspective than that, it would be a devastating thing for one's daughter to join in with such an ideology.
All that to say...I understand where people are coming from who think it's kind of a BS thing to be a missionary.
Obviously I don't agree. I do believe that Jesus was the son of God and that He was murdered and resurrected, and that He really said the things in the New Testament. And one of the things He said was to go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
This is a very compelling thing to me. I've also done a lot of research into missionary work, mistakes that have been made over the years, and how it can be done ethically. I realize there are some who would say that it cannot be done ethically. I respectfully disagree.
How my husband and I can go about obeying Jesus' Great Commission is a matter of prayer and reflection. I appreciate those who have offered some counsel/ideas. We do have two very small children to think about, but those children won't be tiny forever. We will continue to seek God's will in our lives. One thing that seems clear from the many thoughtful responses offered here is that there are many ways to skin a cat for this sort of thing, and I appreciate the encouragement to "think outside the box" and also not jump into a radically different lifestyle half cocked.