I’ve only known one probable murderer in my life, and he was an evangelical missionary. I grew up calling him “uncle.” Children of missionaries—missionary kids or MKs, as we are commonly known in the evangelical world—are usually told to refer to the adult missionaries in their orbits as uncles and aunts.
This particular uncle wasn’t just any old missionary, either. He was a highly celebrated one, a charismatic speaker with the numbers of converts to prove it. He supposedly led big revivals and baptized hundreds, although since then, I’ve heard multiple people question his self-reported spiritual exploits. Many more in the missionary community questioned his claim that it was thieves who killed his wife on an isolated road late one night. They knew he was having an affair with another married missionary, giving him a possible motive, and his story had some discrepancies, starting with the couple’s inexplicable nighttime drive, something most people there tried to avoid due to poor road conditions.
His case never faced any legal process or scrutiny—Americans who commit crimes overseas often benefit from jurisdictional gaps—so I can’t say he was guilty and thus won’t identify him here. What I can say is he left the country where he served to avoid possible prosecution, with the help of his mission organization, which apparently kept the information related to his departure to itself. He went on to further ministry, at least for a time. According to an MK-turned-missionary I interviewed for The Missionary Kids, he showed back up on the mission field, in another country, with a short-term missionary team, and once again made highly exaggerated claims of leading large numbers of people to Christ.
Most American evangelicals would be shocked to hear that a missionary could be a murderer or even a charlatan. American Christians have celebrated missionaries ever since they first started going out to places like China, India, and Nigeria in the nineteenth century.
As a collective, they are still lionized in white evangelical America, and the missionary endeavor continues to be seen as the highest form of Christian calling in that culture. If you want to grow up to be a saint, you surrender to a call to missions. Do a quick poll of white evangelicals, and most of them will be able to tell you of a time when the missionaries came to speak at their church and how formative that was. The stories of persecuted Christians in distant lands. The photos of poverty-stricken villagers receiving blankets and Bibles. The miraculous accounts of Muslims dreaming of Jesus during Ramadan (that’s a newer missionary story, one that has become familiar post-9/11).
Your white evangelical friends will probably tell you how much they looked up to these most lauded of Christians. Maybe they were challenged to do more for God with their own lives and in their own communities. Maybe they went on a short-term mission trip with their church. Maybe they put part of their allowance in the offering plate to help or had a prayer calendar of missionary birthdays. Or maybe they quickly dismissed the idea that they could ever belong to this spiritual league and moved on with their morally inferior American lives, happy to be represented by and associated with Christians of such stellar devotion.
In the minds of many, missionaries were—and remain—on a whole other level. I’ve heard my parents literally introduced as “Super Christians” and regularly saw people in two hemispheres fawn over them as if they were Bono. In Kenya, where I grew up, the missionaries were always the special guests, always revered, always celebrated, always sought out and deferred to. In America, congregations ate up their photographs and stories and hung on their every word.
These days, even as scandals in white evangelicalism pile up like logs on a bonfire, even as many believers become disillusioned and despondent over the sorry state of the evangelical church in America, missionaries continue to be admired. Missionaries have even earned the respect of secular journalists, such as the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, who has written extensively and glowingly about the missionaries he has encountered in his travels abroad.
In white evangelicalism in the United States, particularly in the last several years, things are shaking loose and tiles are falling off the walls. The walls themselves are crumbling. The old songs sound off-key, and the platitudes no longer provide comfort. The triumphalist narratives are wearing thin, or never rang true—particularly the narrative of Evangelicals vs. The World, in which scrappy, uncompromising, born-again Christians battle for the soul of a morally imperiled nation and humanity writ large. In which the Christian side is always righteous, always superior, always wise, always certain. In which American Christians are called by God himself to fight for cultural and political dominance as a means to save the world from itself.
For many disillusioned evangelicals—especially after witnessing so many of their brothers and sisters in Christ dismiss abuse, ignore racism, abandon democracy, and condone a dangerous, narcissistic president—a lot of what they grew up believing just doesn’t hold much water anymore. Or rather, it just doesn’t hold much Jesus anymore.
But they still have their missionary heroes. The mission field has long been the rugged frontier in a grand evangelical narrative, the ultimate proof of the American church’s virtue, rightness, and importance. So perhaps it’s not surprising that missions may also be the “final frontier” in that narrative’s dismantling, as journalist Rebecca Hopkins put it to me. All missionaries are very human and unavoidably flawed, as is the system in which they operate.
Even in this internet age, geographical distance can still conceal that fact from American Christians. Few missionary newsletters reveal the uninspiring side of things. Few mission boards even privately report when and why missionaries are sent home, even if it’s for abuse. Few indigenous partners, who often depend on American missionaries financially and are in many cases culturally conditioned to defer to them, have the desire or opportunity to criticize the system.
But mission boards, church leaders, indigenous partners, and missionaries themselves can’t hide from missionary kids. MKs live the complex reality of missions: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the brutal, the wondrous and the woeful, the bullish and the bullshit. We are the beneficiaries of its rewards and the victims of its pain.
If missionaries are the evangelical rock stars, we are the roadies, of sorts—although we’re along for the ride involuntarily, and perhaps not performing much actual labor. Then again, we’re definitely carrying the baggage. Many of us grew up feeling it was on us to help make the stars look good: show up, do your job, don’t complain, don’t screw up.
And thus American evangelicals, while they probably have all heard a missionary sermon or two, have not often heard the voices of MKs, any more than the average rock fan has heard the roadies sing. They probably saw us, though, as our parents often brought us on stage to participate in Sunday evening services or weekend missions conferences or at least had us stand and wave to the congregation, sometimes wearing clothing inspired by the local cultures where our parents served. Sometimes we spoke to children’s Sunday School classes or stood around after the service to field questions, such as whether we rode an elephant to school or had access to a toilet (my friend’s renegade brother reportedly responded to the latter question with “No, we just hold it until we return to America”). We were intriguing points of interest, exotic and enigmatic characters, but not the main draw.
But like the roadies of rock, MKs are an essential source if you want to understand the business. MKs are both close and distant enough to see the truth. We have a unique view of not just the mission field but the culture that undergirds it.
And that is what this book is ultimately about. American evangelical missions are the product of the American church and have served its cultural needs in addition to serving the spiritual and physical ones of people around the world. White American evangelicals have elevated foreign missions to heights rarely, if ever, seen elsewhere in Christian history or Christian life and inspired our parents to serve the broader evangelical cause in ways most other American Christians only preach. We grew up in far-flung, international settings, but most often within carefully transplanted evangelical enclaves. By virtue of our parents’ exceptional commitment, we lived in the hardest core of a hardcore religious culture.
And these days, many of us can clearly see that its dysfunctions don’t stop at the water’s edge. These days, after lifetimes of watching and waiting behind the scenes, many of us are ready to talk.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of The Missionary Kids.
