Growing up in-between

"Leave your country, your people and your father's household
and go to the land I will show you."  Genesis 12:1

Abram set out with a divinely-planned itinerary. He and Sarai didn't have any children to bring along at this stage, but the calling of Genesis 12 was a family affair, making the members of Abram's household aliens and strangers among the Egyptians, Canaanites and Philistines.¹

Fast-forward more than 4000 years, and God is continuing to send families in his name. Today's missionaries haven't been called out of the post-Babel peoples as the founding first family of Israel. But with the message of Jesus on their lips, they're Abraham's ancestors, the fruit of God's promise to bless all nations (Galatians 3:6-9). They're following Abraham's footsteps by tracking their own alternate routes on every earthly continent.

About a third of CMS Australia's missionaries are single men and women, within the long tradition of faithful single sojourners working in partnership with God's people — exemplified in Jesus himself, and the Apostle Paul, whom theologian Ted Ward calls the "nomad of nomads".² But the remaining two thirds are married people, and most of them have children.

Just a bunch of kids on the mission field
21-year-old Naomi Smith's earliest memories are of Japan. She's the eldest daughter of ex-CMS missionaries Grahame and Cathy Smith, and when she was two her parents packed up their Sydney home and moved to Osaka. Naomi returned to Australia in 2007 to begin university; her parents and three siblings came home at the start of this year.

I sat with her in the lounge room of her residential college in Sydney and she told me that she hadn't really seen herself as a missionary when she was growing up. "Dad was a staff worker at the university; it was his job. I actually found an old diary the other week, and I'd written: 'Daddy's telling people about Jesus'. So I was definitely aware of what my parents were doing, and I wasn't afraid to invite my friends to Sunday school. But I didn't think of myself as a missionary."

Like Naomi, Phillip King has recently returned to Sydney to study. And his words resonate with hers: "Mum and Dad were missionaries, not me." Phillip's parents, and his younger sister and brother, are still serving in Strasbourg, France. Saying goodbye to them was hard, but the 20-year-old is forging an independent identity at his university college. "One of the consequences of being an MK is having strangers recognise me. Every now and then, someone will come up and say, 'You're on my fridge!' or 'You're Paul and Sandra's son!' Neither of which I really mind, but it's nice just to be Phillip King at college."

Missionary kids (MKs) have had a stable presence on the international mission field for the last two centuries, but remained relatively unnoticed. Following a new focus on issues of family dynamics in Western Christian circles during the 1970s, the 1980s brought the MK into the spotlight of missiological thinking.³ Now there's a burgeoning field of study surrounding MKs' lives and experiences.

MKs come under the umbrella of 'Third Culture Kids', a term defined by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken in their seminal Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds as:

"a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background."⁴

Raised between home and host cultures, MKs share common experiences with military kids, embassy kids, and kids whose parents work in international business. Highly mobile, they look down from their plane seats at country borders that seem a little indeterminate, because they can be so easily crossed.

Skipping across national borders
In her second year living and studying in Melbourne, Hannah [not her real name] is still getting used to operating according to the implicit rules that govern social interaction in Australia — or rather, the laxness of those rules.

Hannah was only a baby when she first boarded a plane for the Middle East. She went to a local school and grew up thinking of herself as "the white kid who lived in the Middle East". When she was 14, she moved to an international boarding school in Germany. Then after graduating in 2007, Hannah moved back to Australia — where she had only ever lived for nine or ten months at a stretch.

Hannah has found that the boundaries for relationships are much less distinct here. Everyday exchanges involve an entirely different language of non-verbal signals, in which she has had to become fluent.

"What's appropriate here in the West isn't so in the East," she reflects. "Here it's very comfortable and normal to have guy friends over. But when a man visits a single woman in her home in the Middle East, the woman must leave her door open — not necessarily because she's worried about his behaviour, but as a symbol to show her neighbours that she has an appropriate relationship with him."

Back in Australia for a couple of years, Naomi is also sorting through cultural differences. "Japan is an incredibly polite society. It's not a jump-right-in-and-discuss culture — it's all about testing the water, being careful not to offend. In Japan, it's expected that you'll only accept a piece of cake once it's been offered to you three times. Australians are much more forthright and casual."

"Japanese culture is very rule-based. I've picked up an orderliness from Japanese culture, I think. But it's hard to know how much that's my personality and how much that's the cultural influence. It's hard to tell where you end, and where your culture begins."

Naomi often finds herself befriending the Asian students in her classes, because she's used to quiet, polite Asian customs. "I'm not used to dealing with very outgoing people. In social circles in Japan my role was usually to help bring people out of themselves a little bit, and I can take on that same role here."

In fact, the increasingly multiethnic nature of Australia's population means that MKs can find themselves more and more at home down under. According to the 2006 census, almost 20% of Sydney's population is of Asian descent.

As Pollock and Van Reken point out, the TCK experience is a "microcosm of what is fast becoming normal throughout the world" through globalisation. Living amidst cultural diversity "is already, or soon will be, the rule rather than the exception — even for those who never physically leave their home country."⁵

Doing church in a different time-zone
Naomi's Japanese church was small, close-knit and conservative, with a mostly older congregation; her siblings were usually her only peers. Likewise, the church Phillip attended in Strasbourg had a much older congregation than those he has been to in Australia. Back in Oz, Naomi and Phillip have been lapping up the opportunities to receive solid Bible teaching and to meet with other young Christians.

"When I first came back to Australia, I went for a drive along a major highway," Phillip told me. "And I was struck by how many churches there were along the road.  There are a lot of churches in France, but they're more museums than anything else."

Phillip knows that being a Christian in Sydney means swimming against the cultural tide, but he says that Christians in France are much more isolated. "In France, in a school of about 1000 students I knew of ten Christians at the most. I acted as a Christian and I strongly believed the Bible, but if I could avoid talking about God I would, just because I had very little support at school. French people would never even dream of having the resources and support we've got here."

A connection beyond culture
I asked Hannah if she feels Australian. "Not particularly. The fact that I was born in Australia only really became important to me in boarding school, where there were lots of Americans — it was a marker of difference." Australia was little more than a place of origin

Hannah's identity is focused on her experience as an MK. In fact, when she first moved to Melbourne she helped to set up a support network for MKs.

Naomi and Phillip agreed that being an MK was an inescapable part of their identity. They pointed out that while their parents could become ex-missionaries, they could never become ex-missionary kids. They simply become adult MKs; adults whose early years were irrevocably influenced by a third culture experience.

MKs share what Naomi called "a different connection, a different perspective on life." Aspects of an MK's host and home cultures are incorporated into their identity, but their identity is more than just a sum of these parts. If it weren't, an MK would be an island of cultural influences — unique, inimitable, alone. Instead, MKs have a commonality of experience that outweighs their cultural differences.⁶

Mapping out a third culture
Naomi said she was more 'Australian' in Japan than she is in Australia. "The stereotypes about Japanese people being quiet are true, by and large. But I was part of a large, noisy Australian family, and we were committed to church — which is very unusual in Japan. We were also the only kids in the neighbourhood who wore helmets when we rode our bikes around. So we definitely stood out."

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Naomi grew up under the curious gaze of her Japanese neighbours. She remembers people staring at her on the train, and then quickly averting their eyes when she looked their way. She remembers being annoyed when her opinions and actions were dismissed by recourse to her birth country: 'Oh, that's just because you're Australian.'

In a country in which nationality and race are perceived to be profoundly intertwined, Naomi found her identity almost completely delimited by her white skin and her Australian passport. "When they first met me, people were often more interested in Australia than in me. But I'd spent most of my life in Japan, and I didn't actually know all that much about Australian culture. My nationality didn't sum me up."

Naomi always knew she could never pass as truly Japanese. Japanese adults would exclaim in surprise, "How can a foreign girl speak as well as everyone else?" Naomi was always relegated to the status of a foreigner by the matrix of pre-conceived ideas about what it means to be 'Japanese'. "In Australia, you can take on an Australian identity without having to drastically change your cultural ways," says Naomi. "But Japanese citizenship is more strictly defined in terms of culture and race."

Home is where the house is
It's the classic question posed to MKs: "Where is home?"

Phillip circled the world listing the places in contention: "If it's where I'm living right now, then it's my college room. If it's where my parents live, then it's back in Strasbourg. If it's where I grew up, it's Paris. Or if it's where I was born, then it's Sydney." In the end, Phillip's answer is Australia. "I can't really explain why. Maybe it's because it's the place I always end up coming back to." But although Australia feels like home, Phillip likened France to "a best friend's place": it's comfortable, familiar, and almost home.

MKs often have an ambivalent sense of belonging, born of an acute understanding of the impermanence of their earthly dwellings. Geography fails them. Hannah's formulation of belonging is disconnected from place names and postcodes. "I guess home is here, right now. It's a temporary thing. Obviously where my family is has a big part to play in it, but ultimately it's about where I feel content at any given time."

When I asked Naomi this same question, she gave me a small, knowing smile. "My citizenship," she said matter-of-factly, "is in heaven." As Naomi negotiates the jet-setting, between-cultures way of life bequeathed to her by her missionary parents, Paul's reminder of our divine residency is a great comfort.

Genesis 12-25. All Scripture quoted in this article is taken from the New International Version (NIV).

Ted Ward, 'The MK's Advantage: Three Cultural Contexts', in Joyce M. Bowers (Ed.), Raising Resilient MKs: Resources for Caregivers, Parents, and Teachers (Colorado Springs: Association of Christian Schools International, 1998), p. 67.

Joyce M. Bowers, 'Looking Back, Pressing Forward: The Legacy of the ICMKs', in Bowers, Raising Resilient MKs, p. 3.

David C. Pollock & Ruth E. Van Reken, Third Culture Kids: the Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (Yarmouth: Intercultural Press, 2001), p. 19.

Pollock & Van Reken, Third Culture Kids, p. 7.

Pollock & Van Reken, Third Culture Kids, p. 34.

Want to read more? Here are some essential resources:

Rosalie Cameron, Missionary Kids (MKs) (Queensland: Cypress Trust, 2006). David C. Pollock & Ruth E. Van Reken, Third Culture Kids: the Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (Yarmouth: Intercultural Press, 2001).
Joyce M. Bowers (Ed.), Raising Resilient MKs: Resources for Caregivers, Parents, and Teachers (Colorado Springs: Association of Christian Schools International, 1998).