Blogger Maria Foley, at I Was an Expat Wife, writes that her husband’s employer did a great job of easing her family’s transition to life overseas. In fact, she calls the help they got in their move to Singapore “wonderful.” But the return trip was a different story. When they came back to Canada, she says, “the silence was deafening.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In “What the Missionary Sector Can Teach Us about Handling Re-Entry” (May 6, 2013), Maria applauds the work of the Assemblies of God in meeting the needs of their cross-cultural workers. She tells about her friend, Heather, who is a youth coordinator in the International Society of Missionary Kids‘ reentry program, part of the AG’s efforts to help missionaries and MKs adjust to the comings and goings of their cross-cultural lives. Part of Heather’s motivation to help MKs comes from her own experiences as a child in a missionary family. “I wish I’d been able to go through a program like this. It would have been helpful to have those tools,” she says. “That’s why I think it means so much to me to work with these kids, because I had such a difficult re-entry.” (You can read more from Heather at her blog, Adventures in Transition.)
This is a common sentiment among those who work in member care: wanting to serve current cross-cultural workers and their families by providing the kind of help that wasn’t available when they faced similar difficulties in their own lives.
That’s what happened with Lauren and Jo Ann Helveston, who started The Mission Society‘s pastoral-care department in 2007. When the couple were missionaries in Ghana, they weren’t part of “an agency like The Mission Society,” says Jo Ann. “So debriefing, or even training, was not part of our experience.” Now they debrief missionaries who are back in the States.
Jo Ann’s comments come from The Mission Society’s spring 2013 issue of Unfinished—an edition devoted entirely to member care. The article “What Missionaries Don’t Tell You” describes the issue in this way:
The pages of Unfinished typically tell the stories of what God is doing through our missionaries. This issue, however, is more about what God is doing in them, particularly during those difficult seasons that aren’t typically chronicled in their newsletters or blogs. It’s about how missionaries themselves need to be cared for and ministered to.
Other articles include
When Hope Begins to Stir Missionary care can happen through listening (the source of Jo Ann Helveston’s comments above)
How Can We find Our Way? What happens to missionaries when disillusionment becomes their constant companion?
Top 10 Ways to Care for Your Missionaries
Top 10 Items to Include in a Care Package
A Different World Third culture kids speak about a life only a select population can relate to.
I stumbled upon Unfinished as I was collecting information for my post on African-American missionaries. What a find. Not only does it include great information and insights, it is an encouragement to see that when we participate in member care, we are joining a growing group that has common goals, lives out common experiences, and speaks a common language. It is a group that grows in understanding as we share with and learn from each other.
In the world of Christian missions, statistics play a large role. How many people groups are “unreached”? What percentage of a country’s citizens are believers? How many languages still don’t have a Bible?
Here’s another question: What portion of protestant missionaries sent from the US are African-American?
Answer: less than 0.5%—even though blacks make up 20% of Americans affiliated with protestant denominations.*
That number is reflected in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant group in the US, where 0.6% of its missionaries (27 out or 4,900) are African American.
Last month, Christianity Today devoted an article to this situation, quoting Fred Luter, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the first African-American to serve in that role, and David Goatley, the executive secretary treasurer of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, named after the first African-American missionary sent out and supported by a mission agency.
Following is some of what they have to say, on why there are so few African-American missionaries and what can be done to increase their number, along with several other voices on the topic.
Fred Luter:
A lot of our African American churches are in the “hood.” It’s a daily fight every day. [People ask me], “Why do I need to go to Africa, Asia or Europe? We need to get people saved in this community.”
It’s a both/and approach. We need to reach the people in our neighborhoods and get African Americans out on the foreign field.
Granted, some (young people) want to be nurses, doctors or attorneys. Some want to be football players or basketball players, but a lot . . . can be missionaries. I never heard that all my life in the church I grew up in . . . I don’t hear it being said in the church I pastor now.
As SBC president, I will let African American churches know that we desperately need more African Americans on the mission field. I want to challenge pastor[s] to start with your young people.
Keith Jefferson: African-American Missional Church Strategist, International Mission Board (Southern Baptists)
Charity begins at home, but it doesn’t end there. The command begins in Jerusalem, but we don’t stop at the beginning.
Our ancestors didn’t say, “We’ve got to take care of Jerusalem before we go.” No, some of them had the call and they went.
The world is becoming smaller and smaller. African American professionals are traveling worldwide. Communication is becoming greater and greater. Younger people especially are communicating with people throughout the world, and they are more adventurous. They’re not “set.” They’re open to new things.
God is calling us, because like every other child of God, we have a responsibility. We don’t have any excuses.
On the difficulty of raising funds for mission work:
Whites have 20 times the wealth of African Americans. So when you go to raise support, it’s really hard because there’s so much less money going around.
David Goatley:
[African American] income is about 75 percent compared to our [Anglo American] siblings’—even when we have comparable education and experience. Our unemployment rate is also nearly twice their rate.
The prospect of African Americans being part of Christian organizations with sending capacity is small.
On the value that African Americans’ cultural history brings to missions:
[T]he experiences of racism and white supremacy . . . would teach them to avoid better the paternalism that too many Anglo Americans show toward Africans and other majority-world people.
Richard Coleman
Senior Director of Mobilization and Candidacy, The Mission Society
As a student at Oral Roberts University, Coleman went on a short-term trip to Uganda.
[W]hen I went to Africa, Africans would say “Where are the blacks? How come they don’t come?”
When you look at the civil rights movement, everyone had to focus inward and everybody was needed to deal with this big issue at home. They had to suspend other ventures.
And once we got the same rights and privileges as everybody else, human nature—and this is not a black thing or a white thing or any color thing—pursues security, comfort and equality. And so when the playing field became a lot more level, I think our pursuits changed toward building up the community and I don’t think we’ve really begun to look outward.
People around the world have heard that story and have seen the overcoming of struggles. Black churches have a message of encouragement for the world.
Leroy Barber: I’m the Jackie Robinson of missions, you know.
Soledad O’Brien, CNN special correspondent: Leroy Barber is a man with a calling, and he’s the president of Mission Year. It’s a year-long ministry and volunteer program for Christian young adults in the United States.
Barber: There is a goal for people coming to know Jesus. There is probably another strong goal of things are not right in the world, and I want to be part of making them right.
O’Brien: How many African-Americans are involved in Mission Year’s missionary work?
Barber: Generally about five percent a year or less sometimes.
O’Brien: So why does that matter?
Barber: I don’t think it’s good for a kid growing up in an urban neighborhood, to only see white faces coming to serve.
. . . . .
Jim Sutherland: In terms of the mission area percentage of African-Americans it’s less, far less than 1 percent.
O’Brien: Jim Sutherland studies missionary work and the black church.
Sutherland: Many black churches are—do a fairly good job of taking care of their own local communities but the vocation of missionary in the African-American church is essentially off the radar. It’s basically not there.
O’Brien: So why are there so few African-Americans who are involved in missionary work?
Barber: I think the way missions is traditionally done is you raise support to do it and—
O’Brien: Money.
Barber: Money. How you work out taking a year off which means not working, not earning an income.
* The African American Missions Manifesto, ratified in 2007 at Columbia International University, estimated the number of African-American missionaries to be around 500, though they admit the actual number is unknown and say that 500 “may be overestimated.” This would suggest that African Americans make up about 0.4% of the total number of missionaries. The percentage of protestants who are African American comes from numbers derived from the Pew Forum’s “Religious Portrait of African-Americans,” (January 30, 2009).
Clearing Customs 