Excerpt from chapter in Strangers At Home
By Ruth Van Reken
I knew something was different when I saw the lipstick. “Mommy, is Aunt Susie a Christian?” I asked in a whisper while following my parents down the gangplank from the S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam to the firm cement of the New York pier.
My mother continued smiling and waving at the woman who waved so energetically back at us from that sea of welcoming faces below.
“Of course she is,” mom replied from the side of her mouth. Her eyes remained fixed ahead with the smile still in place. “Why on earth are you asking?”
“But, mom,” I struggled to keep from getting separated as our fellow passengers pushed past us, also trying to hasten reunions with waiting relatives, “look at her. She’s got bright red lipstick on and she’s wearing dangly earrings. She couldn’t be a Christian. Christians don’t do those things.”
And thus, for me as an eight-year-old missionary kid (MK), the religious culture shock of returning “home” had begun.
In addition to the common challenges virtually all third culture kids (TCKs) deal with when they enter, or reenter, their home countries, some TCKs also face additional challenges specifically related to their role as missionary kids. While my particular example of religious culture shock may seem extreme in these waning days of the twentieth century, most MKs can cite a similar moment. It is when they first realize that how they learned to express the principles of their faith as TCKs seems totally different from the way fellow believers in their home country express it.
To properly understand these and other challenges specific for the reentering missionary TCK, we must first look at the missionary community itself. Paradoxically, many of the religious reentry challenges are the flip side of some of the greatest blessings MKs may experience in that community. Faith wouldn’t seem so shallow at home if they hadn’t seen it so powerfully lived out by missionaries all around them. On the other hand, some challenges arise from the particular idiosyncracies of any given group of missionaries. I wouldn’t have worried about lipstick and earrings if those around me hadn’t condemned them. So what are some of the characteristics of the missionary “third culture?”
For some people, the very word “missionary” is anathema. “How can anyone go try and convince another person what to believe? That’s terrible.” And missions and missionaries are summarily dismissed with no further attempt to understand who they are, what their world is like, or even what drives them to do what they do.
For me, “missionary” is a word and world which are part of my very identity. Its impact on me began years before my birth. “Resht, Iran” completed the space for “Place of Birth” on my father’s passport. Yet his passport proudly proclaimed “The United States of America” across its properly green cover. In that same space for declaring birthplace, my American passport reads “Kano, Nigeria,” while my daughter’s boldly states “Monrovia, Liberia.” I have cousins born in Kuwait, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Iran, and Sudan. A great-aunt spent three years in a Japanese internment camp after forty years as a missionary in China. Whether these members of my family were teachers, doctors, nurses, administrators, or preachers, all have been involved in mission work of some kind. This missionary world is the cocoon from which the very shape of my life has emerged.
I, and countless other adult missionary kids, grew up in perhaps the epitome of what John and Ruth Hill Useem meant when they coined the term “third culture”–the world expatriates develop that is rooted in the home culture, lived out in the host culture, but, in the end, neither fully one nor the other. It has developed a life and system of its own. Drs. Useem called this an “interstitial culture”–a world between worlds.
As a child, my specific third culture community of missionary expatriates defined its physical borders by the trim privet hedges growing in careful rows around the perimeters of our mission station. Within those friendly confines, we lived in houses made from sun-dried mud bricks which had been plastered with cement and covered with galvanized tin roofs. Each house fell into careful conformity with the next one. Yellow walls, dark green trim. One after another these buildings popped up across the entire landscape of our station: yellow and green monuments standing sturdy among the nim, flame-of-the-forest, and frangi-pangi trees scattered across the usually dry, barren, brown earth.
Each path connecting our look-alike houses had white-washed stones lining its sides so we could find our way home even on the darkest, streetlight-less nights. Carefully watered hibiscus bushes, zinnias, and morning-glories bloomed around each house, creating the only distinctively differentiating looks between us all. All non-parental adults in the community were my “aunties” and “uncles” and their children were my friends–closer than the cousins I barely remembered in the States.
Ironically, we weren’t the only mission compound that looked like this. Throughout the country, we knew we’d found “us” when that yellow house with dark green trim began to rise up over the horizon as we drove down a rutty road to the remotest station.
Reflecting on the orderliness of my childhood world now, it seems rather quaint, even a little silly. But that’s one of the paradoxes. Undoubtedly, this much uniformity in our mission stifled the artistically creative side for some of its members and most likely increased our culture shock when returning to a wider world at home. On the other hand, that very uniformity and orderliness gave me a deep sense of security and belonging throughout my childhood. There were some things you could always count on. It felt familiar and safe–like the feeling I had during the short rainy seasons when I curled up under my covers, listening to the staccato of the raindrops beating on our wonderful tin roof as I fell asleep. No matter the storm, I was inside and protected.
Unlike many other TCKs who have moved from pillar to post at least every two years throughout life, I basically lived in one city among the same group of people from birth until I made my permanent return to the States at age thirteen. This gave me a strong sense of “home” even during the two years I went away to boarding school. Each furlough left me anxious to go home–meaning Nigeria. This type of stability in an overseas post is likely much more common for missionary kids than for TCKs from the foreign service or military sponsorships. Historically, missionaries went overseas and settled in a particular place for life. The idea of living in community isn’t something I can only imagine. I’ve done it. The mission system was my extended family in every way. I knew my tribe and where I fit in it.
No culture, however, has external uniformity alone. To be a functioning community, a group must also share deeper values and belief systems. Every culture develops its customs and mores based on that underlying value system. For example, Mary Ellen Wertsch demonstrates clearly in her book, Military Brats, the “warrior mentality” underlying many of the social norms for those in the military subcultures. Contrary to modern opinion, there is no such thing as a value-free culture. Ultimately, the only question among any group of people is, “Whose values or principles will shape this culture’s expression?” Someone’s always does.
A missionary community is no different in this respect than any other. The only difference is that the values and beliefs which drive their community are perhaps more objectively defined than in a secular community. Values which drive the mores of a non-missionary group may be equally powerful, but so poorly defined they go unnoticed. The religious community has its creeds, doctrines, and the principles by which they are to live, clearly laid out. “Thou shalt. . .” “Thou shalt not. . .” All behavior is measured according to those tenets of faith.
Therein lies one of the major reasons for religious culture shock when MKs return to their home countries. Even shared core values will be lived out differently from one culture to another. For example, believers around the world may agree with the Biblical principle of dressing modestly, but the way people define or express “modesty” can differ dramatically. One culture thinks nothing of seeing a woman in the store wearing a halter top and very short shorts. Another culture would throw that woman in jail for indecent exposure. It considers any woman immodest who shows bare skin in public besides her eyes and hands.
How, then, do you figure out what is faith and what is culture? Or how does a group of people from one culture, living in another, decide on the culturally appropriate standards for practicing the principles of their faith?
See remainder of the chapter in Strangers At Home for the answer to this question and other thoughts.
Posted on mkPLANET with permission- with comments by singpolyma, Dana
Visit Ruth Van Reken’s Homepage
By Hannibal Books
By Joyce M. Bowers, Editor (Colorado Springs, CO: ACSI, 1998) 510 pp.
By Global Coach Center
After two years in Russia, my family took a summer off to visit family, friends, and churches back in the States. One part of that summer was spent at the biennial Campus Crusade for Christ conference held in Colorado. I was carted off to childcare/youth group while my parents attended seminars and hob-nobbed with their missionary buddies. I like to joke about how awkward missionary kids are, and in some ways this awkwardness was accentuated at places like CCC conferences. With the very best of intentions, the CCC leadership chose to keep the missionary kids and the “regular” state-side American staff kids in separate youth groups. The goal was to allow the missionary kids specialized attention that focused on their specific needs, but looking back it felt like they were just affirming our fears that we were weird, socially inept, not normal enough to be around born-and-bred American teens, and only fit for the missionary ghetto. 
