Dr. Holly Berkley Fletcher grew up as a white American child in Kenya — in her words, “a doubting, struggling fearful Christian with bold, unwavering missionary parents.”
“I used to feel I was without a culture, without a true home, that I was a zebra without stripes, to use a traditional African metaphor,” she wrote on her website. “These days, I just embrace the ambiguity. It turns out we’re all oddballs when you get down to it.”
Fletcher has worked as an academic historian of American history and, for 19 years, as an Africa analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. Her third act is as a writer and essayist, an observer of American religion and of life in general. The author of “The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism” was a recent guest on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” hosted each week by Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 66-minte conversation here.
The research for Fletcher’s book included interviews with more than 80 other missionary kids and a survey of 200 others.
“Their experiences varied,” she told Catoe and Doong. “There were people like me who mostly had a happy childhood. Others had abusive situations or were raised in dangerous and traumatic situations. Some were still true believer white evangelicals; others had left Christianity altogether.”
One thing Fletcher picked up from her interviews with others who’d grown up in evangelical missionary settings is “a myth that white evangelicals tell themselves,” she said. “It’s this idea that American Christians are key to the world’s salvation,” that “they see themselves as the default Christianity. There are ideas about indispensability, about how good they are as people.”
Doong cited this frequently asked question: If we believe in equal partnerships, shouldn’t we be receiving people from other places?
The U.S. immigration system has structural barriers that can make that difficult, Fletcher said. “Other countries do send missionaries to the U.S., but they end up ministering to migrant populations,” she said.
There’s now “more awareness of the needs of missionary kids and a lot more support for them,” Fletcher said. In the people she interviewed, “I had hoped to see a shift, but I was dismayed to find this wasn’t the case. They still felt de-prioritized. They still felt this pressure to take care of themselves and not create complications because the calling was so important.”
“A universal experience that came through is the intense grief of leaving the mission field at the end of your childhood and returning to the U.S. to live your adult life,” she said. “There is a wholesale loss of self, and that came out clearly.”
She said she never felt the urge to re-enter the mission field after college. “You would think it would be a cosmopolitan upbringing, but it’s actually insular,” she said. “I think that’s why the grief [over leaving] is so intense, because there is no replicating that experience.”
Fletcher grew up in Kenya but didn’t learn much about it. The nation held its first multi-party election during her senior year in high school. “We did have to do drills as part of a contingency plan in case there were evacuations. That was it,” she said. Her own experience as the child of missionaries was part of “a bizarre world that was very self-assured and self-contained and not terribly open intellectually.”
“It’s a weird upbringing to be sure, and people [who have read the book] say they’re fascinated to learn about a world they didn’t know existed,” she said. “The other thing people have responded to is the missionary kid experience of feeling alienated, like you don’t belong where you are.”
“Most of us figure out ways to create deep bonds with people even if we don’t have much in common on the surface, and to find our people and our family in many different places,” she said.
“That’s a lot for a child or a young person to go through,” Doong said.
New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Julianna Sheridan, Administrator, Investments, The Board of Pensions
Rheannon Sicely, VP, Customer Experience & Change Mgt, Plan Operations, The Board of Pensions
Let us pray:
Heavenly Father, help us to go boldly into our local mission field as learners, servants and storytellers. Holy Spirit, show us where you are working and give us courage to share the life-giving message of Jesus Christ’s grace and forgiveness. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment