Missionary Kids

This is a guest column by Rick Ostrander, provost at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of North American Protestants traveled to foreign countries to spread Christianity. Their zeal to evangelize the world had profound, and sometimes unforeseen, consequences for their offspring, known in common parlance as “missionary kids.” The shelves of books reflecting on their experience—from many different angles—are overflowing, and new ones continue to appear. Among those published in the last five years or so, two by children of Southeast Asia missionaries offer accounts that complement each other nicely. One is a memoir by a daughter of Mainline Protestant missionaries, the other a novel by a son of evangelical missionaries.

Catherine Frerichs, professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, grew up as the daughter of American Lutheran missionaries in Papua New Guinea. Her book, Desires of the Heart, explores her parents’ decision to work in Papua New Guinea and chronicles her experience in missionary boarding schools there and in Australia.

As a girl, Frerichs attended Katharine Lehmann School in Wau, New Guinea, established in 1951. The missionary boarding school was a rather recent phenomenon for Lutheran missionaries. It emerged from two primary impulses—first, the sense that the missionary wife was too busy with obligations in the field to be distracted by schooling the children; and second, an implicit sense of ethnic superiority, which suggested that missionary children needed to grow up around other white kids rather than the native culture. Previously, school-aged MKs typically were left with relatives in the states, which often meant that years would go by before they saw their parents again.

As Frerichs recalls it, the kids dominated the culture at Katharine Lehmann School: “The school was ours, we thought, much more than the staff’s, many of whom had not been there as long as the older children … . We lived by our own rules much more than was good for us.”

Nevertheless, Frerichs is generally positive about her experience. She gained a sense of confidence in new settings and an ability to live simply in any situation. As a “third culture kid,” she reflects:

Knowing that hundreds of people have grown up in cultures other than their own, in a great variety of experiences, … I can see connections with my own experiences. I feel freer to step back and acknowledge the advantages of my upbringing, and I can also be honest about its shortcomings. So doing, I find a peace that is more meaningful than being told that my parents were doing God’s will.

Nevertheless, Frerichs’ awareness of the psychic costs of family separation that afflicted both children and parents led her to read her parents’ letters in order to understand the motivation behind their sacrifice. Frerichs’ father, Albert, a Nebraska Lutheran pastor of German heritage, was motivated by “the desire of his heart” to pursue God’s calling to the mission field, as he explained to his mother (who remained unequivocally opposed to his decision). Frerichs’ mother, Sylvia, had been raised with a commitment to education and a love for classical music. She desired to “live in as beautiful a way as I have vision for and am able.” Despite the physical and emotional hardships, Frerichs concludes, her mother was able to achieve her goal of a robust, beautiful life more fully in New Guinea than she would have in a typical middle-class American community.

A very different account of missionary kid life is provided by Bill Svelmoe, associate professor of history at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Svelmoe grew up as the son of evangelical missionaries on Mindanao in the Philippines and attended Faith Academy, a large missionary boarding school in Manila. His novel Spirits Eat Ripe Papaya is set in Ilusan, a compound of the Bible Translation Mission (Wycliffe, thinly disguised) on Mindanao Island that serves as both a base for missionary translators and a boarding school for missionary kids. The protagonist, Philip Andrews, is a conservative evangelical pastor’s son who was expelled from the Bible Institute of San Diego (a fictional stand-in for Biola University) and who is now doing a one-year term as a middle school teacher at Ilusan.

Svelmoe’s novel is both an exploration of missionary boarding school life and a satirical portrait of the quirky evangelical subculture (think Franky Schaeffer in a good mood). The missionaries of Ilusan watch the 1970s evangelistic end-times film A Thief in the Night, which Philip describes as “a train wreck, but fun in that ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing’ sort of way.” Later, Ilusan is visited by a pair of ex-Satanist charlatans (readers steeped in conservative American evangelicalism will immediately think of Mike Warnke).

For all his exasperation with evangelical foibles, Philip experiences genuine community and spiritual growth at Ilusan. The children are playful and endearing, and the missionaries—with the exception of one particularly nasty conservative father, who preaches from the King James Version and beats his children—welcome Philip as part of the community. During a Christmas service, Philip is asked to help distribute communion and utters the words, “the blood of Christ shed for you” to his colleagues. Svelmoe writes: “The more he said it, the more he almost dared believe it, that somehow there might be a connection between the life of the man who lived so long ago and the lives of the community that passed before him.”

While there are differences in genre and tone between Frerichs and Svelmoe, both books ultimately wrestle with the same question: Is the emotional cost to missionary families, not to mention the vast investment of lives and resources, really worth it? And both authors end up answering in the affirmative—kind of.

In 1999, Frerichs traveled back to New Guinea to see what had become of her parents’ ministry. There she found indigenous local churches and a native-led Lutheran church that was responsible for most of the education that occurred in the province. She discovered that in his later years, her father had learned to trust the local tribesmen as Christian leaders and had allowed his own role to recede into the background. When Frerichs visits a New Guinea university, one female Christian student tells her, ” ‘We have chosen the Christian God … . Why would you think the Christian God is any more your God than ours?’ ” Frerichs writes, “I reminded myself of what Susanna had previously told me. Everyone there was a third-generation Christian to whom missionaries were ancient history, a fact of life.”

Similarly, at one point in Svelmoe’s novel, Philip Andrews takes a plane ride to the Filipino jungle, where he encounters a well-educated, culturally sensitive, pipe-smoking Bible translator named Samuel and his wife, Virginia, who engages in witty, good-natured banter with the native women. Philip attends a lively indigenous outdoor Christian service filled with robust native singing, charismatic prayers, and an hour-long sermon during which men walk to the perimeter to take bathroom breaks. Remarks Samuel to Philip, “There are times when I think that God has left the West and settled here in the jungle. And why shouldn’t he? These people need him, and brother, they believe in that other dimension like you do in your books and science.”

If Philip Jenkins and others are correct about the demographic shift of Christianity from the West to the developing world, then perhaps the missionary movement led by Europeans and Americans performed a crucial, albeit transitional role in that transformation. Yet the triumph clearly came with a cost to those families most involved in taking the gospel to new lands. Despite their differences, therefore, both of these books express a profound sense of ambivalence about the missionary experience.

In middle life, Frerichs, faced with the death of her brother and a divorce, resolved to abandon her religious faith. She discovered, however, that “my faith is not like a coat that I can take off at will and hang in a closet … . I couldn’t reason it away. It continues as it has since my childhood, an indissoluble part of who I am.” Yet her Christianity is clearly not the same kind that led her father into the jungles of New Guinea. Of her family members’ graves, which inhabit a small cemetery in Nebraska, she remarks, “I am not sure enough about an afterlife to say with conviction that we will all eventually be reunited.”

Ironically, Svelmoe’s novel, despite its cheerful satire, ends on a more somber note than Frerichs’ memoir. Philip begins a courtship with a beautiful young librarian at Ilusan, and, despite his best intentions, eventually they sleep together. The librarian, overcome with guilt, publicly confesses, and Philip is forced to leave the compound in shame and scandal, a victim of the moral intensity of the missionary community for whom sexual promiscuity is the unpardonable sin.

For both Frerichs and Svelmoe, it seems, their appreciation of the benefits of third culture life is mixed with a vague sense of loss and regret—perhaps what one should expect from the complex lives of missionary kids.

—Rick Ostrander