KINGSVIEW

OUTREACH THAT FITS THE MESSAGE
Two Missionary Kids Reflect

Michael A. King with Valerie Weaver-Zercher

"Led by a Christian who at minimum implies God has told him to do it, the most powerful country in the history of the world launches war against a largely Islamic country. Soon after, a variety of Christian denominational leaders and missionaries declare that Islam is evil and that it is their task to save the Islamic citizens of this conquered country from misguided allegiance to a bad religion.

Interfaith considerations such as this example raises are endlessly complex; I don’t want to claim to do more here than comment on small aspects of a much larger picture. But I do think the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq is an appropriate time to at least to ask how forms of Christian outreach to persons of other faiths will fit the message being shared.

Two aspects of the Jesus I see in the New Testament particularly catch my attention in relation to this. First, "the Word became flesh and lived among us," as John 1:14 puts it. Jesus, as many Scriptures emphasize, was more than a man; he uniquely made flesh the divine itself. But in becoming flesh he did not conquer those among whom he lived. Rather, becoming like a slave, to echo Pau’s classic hymn in Philippians 2, he dwelled among them as one of them, in all the particularity and richness of their culture.

Second, his message fit the form of his incarnation. Blessed are the conquerors? The strong? The mighty? The leaders of the great nations? Far from it. Blessed are the poor, the enslaved, the captive, the hurting. Kill the enemy? Return evil for evil and vanquish it with arsenals of smart bombs? No. Love the enemy. Return good for evil. Refuse to play the game the world’s way and play it God’s way.

What these aspects of Jesus’ teaching suggest to me is this: Too many American Christian leaders and missionaries are now too eager to follow the smart bombs of the military with spiritual smart bombs—which is what I see them doing when they launch outreach from the high ramparts of their belief that they, like their government, represent the one true Truth before which those of other faiths had better bow low lest the spiritual missiles of the missionaries or of God himself destroy them. Such missionaries are tempted to live out the American tale of redemptive violence far sooner than the gospel story of redemptive suffering on behalf of and amid the captives and enemies.

In times like these, then, it seems particularly appropriate for someone like Valerie Weaver-Zercher, a missionary kid, to ponder in personal and intimate yet sophisticated ways the pitfalls of reaching out to those of another culture. But that isn’t quite the end of the story. Originally my own column was going to be on a different topic entirely, and the conversation below was intended to be precisely what it reads like: a personal e-mail exchange. But as the conversation unfolded, for reasons that end up explained in the exchange itself, I concluded a column had emerged without my realizing it at the time.

So here it is, my initial response to Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s preceding column on her life as a missionary kid, then another e-mail turn or two before my concluding comments.

Michael to Valerie

Just a bit of personal reaction yet to your latest Marginalia. I had never really focused on the fact that you were an MK and would have memories of the experience. As an MK myself, I found your column fascinating, provocative, quite well done. I think I largely end up where you do; I often thought of that agenda when taking a course at Temple University on postcolonialism and remembering the many ways missionaries in my background worked at colonizing, if with the best of intentions.

My one difference in nuance, perhaps, in putting things together for myself—more a personal position than a well-thought-through theoretical one—is this: I do see my majority identity as White and implicating me inevitably in the colonizing dynamics. But I also was raised, at depths that go far beyond what I can consciously assess, in non-White cultures (first Cuba, then Mexico), so much so that I spoke and thought in Spanish before English.

Last year my family and I spent a day in Tijuana, Mexico, 15 miles south of San Diego. My children and spouse Joan were in near-awe of what they saw happen: They said I became a different person, member of a culture that looked to them beautiful yet alien to their own, and that it was amazing to watch the faces of the Mexicans as they shifted from thinking they were talking to a Gringo to realizing that in some odd way I was also one of them.

Please hear me: I don’t think this changes the power/race dynamics you insightfully discuss. Just because in a certain sense I can enter Mexican culture doesn’t change the power and privilege accompanying my Whiteness.

But what it does make me think is that there are aspects of who I am that, like it or not, are Mexican, because they are bred into my bones almost as deeply—and possibly in some cases more deeply—than my American characteristics. This seems to me to add one complicating dynamic: When I went to Tijuana I was indeed going as a powerful White Yankee male; no question about it. But I was also in some modest sense going back to my own country. And it is often as a "Mexican," I’ve come to realize, that I have the eyes to see some of the more troubling aspects of my country’s (U.S.) social, political, and economic decisions and directions. For what it’s worth!

Thanks again for some powerful reflections, Valerie.

Valerie to Michael

Thanks for your reflection on the whole MK/colonialism thing: Your thinking makes complete sense, and I imagine it grows in part out of your more intimate connection to Mexico. I really spent very little time in Tanzania—my first year (of course, without memories) and then half a year when I was in sixth grade. So most of my experience comes simply through family lore.

I am concerned that this column is too harsh, too clear-cut-sounding; your reflections point to the other side I’m afraid is lost in it. So thanks—maybe you could do an "On the Other Hand" response in the next issue? (I started out suggesting that in jest, but maybe it’s an idea you should mull over. . . .)

Michael to Valerie

I had at one point a year or two ago been planning to write along the above lines but never got around to it. Not sure if this time I’ll find the right words, but your half-jest, half-serious invitation may tempt me.

Let me stress I’m not seeing what I already wrote or might write as rebuttal—I think yours is one of the most insightful MK ponderings in this area I’ve seen. I’m more thinking that each MK experience will interface with the agenda you raise in unique ways, so my comments were testimony to that, not disagreement with the conclusions your experience brought you to.

It is interesting that part of our variation may be that you were a very young MK (I wasn’t aware of that). In contrast, I was an MK except for two one-year furloughs in Virginia and Pennsylvania from age three months to nearly age 18.

Concluding Reflections

As I reflect on the conversation just reported, it seems to me that Valerie and I, both with considerable schooling in forms of thought that tend to view the West harshly as a colonizing power, focus one way or another on that agenda. A different though still related agenda involves the question of where the intent of the missionaries, which was to spread the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ, fits in the story.

As suggested through my introductory comments, I do believe the problem of the West as colonizing power has long been a real one. Now it is more chillingly urgent as U.S. President George W. Bush and many of his advisers, supported by millions of Christians, have made explicit their belief that the mightiest Western power, the United States, should intentionally aim to remain forever the most powerful country on earth.

In pondering Valerie’s column amid such developments, I see her as rightly highlighting the dangers of treating mission work as a colonizing enterprise. That is why I hope my response makes clear that largely I support her perspectives.

Still, in the "on the other hand" aspect of my response invited by Valerie, I am suggesting this: Sometimes those of us brought up in other cultures receive the gift of a bicultural perspective through which we can view the world partly from within the beauties and wisdoms of our adoptive culture even as we can then stand partly outside our own Western culture and see its dangers (and beauties also, but danger comes first when a nation declares itself preeminent).

This makes me suspect that as critical as it is, now more than ever, to ponder how missionary outreach can be a way we violate cultures of others, it is also important to open ourselves to those aspects of the missionary experience that can be enriching.

My parents plus their missionary colleagues, and those Cubans and Mexicans who became their friends, can speak more directly than I to the question of whether the outreach of their generation was a conquering or a servant one. Some of both, I suspect. But whichever side of the line those efforts fell on, I at least want to testify to my own conviction that how I now see the world is a gift from Cuban and Mexican cultures I can never fully claim as my own—but whose depths have forever shaped my vision.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. He lived in Cuba 1955-1960 and Mexico 1961-1972.