Do you ever have imaginary conversations with people? Maybe somebody says something that ruffles your feathers the wrong way, and you lie awake in bed hours later, imagining all the things you might have said in response, if you hadn’t been raised to be as polite as you were.

The imaginary article I write for this issue has me wondering sourly whether missionaries will ever grow bored of dissecting TCKs. Growing up surrounded by missionaries, most of my friends’ homes had a book on the shelf trying to explain the TCK experience. As a 20-something young woman, I recall asking an older male missionary—a friend’s father—if he would stop attributing every facet of my personality to my being a TCK. He laughed, and responded, “You know what? That’s exactly the kind of thing a TCK would say!” And I guess he would know. After all, he’d read the books.

Of course, I won’t write that article. I have a resigned, obedient sense of loyalty to “mission” as a concept, and to missionaries as a kind of nebulous entity. My core identity is tangled up in my parents’ work in a way that I don’t observe amongst my peers whose parents are solicitors, journalists, fashion designers, or engineers. To openly denounce any element of this would be to denounce some part of myself, and to betray both my parents and God.

My experiences won’t be true of all TCKs; certainly, TCKs from diplomatic or military backgrounds often swap the missionary kids’ religious baggage for the specific emotional trappings of their own parents’ work. And, even to many cross-cultural missionary kids, my experiences and feelings would be alien. Nevertheless, I am told that there are commonalities across the missionary TCK experience. I wonder how many of those are due entirely to being TCKs, and how many arise from being steeped in '80s/'90s/'00s evangelical Christianity—an experience shared with the monocultural Christian kids of our respective generations? Or perhaps they arise from the pressure-cooker understanding that our behaviour and choices could have direct implications for our parents’ professional reputation and good standing in their field—something that many pastors’ and politicians’ kids can probably relate to? How much of our shared experience is due to the socio-political circumstances in the countries in which we found ourselves along with so many other expats, immigrants, nationals, and refugees in those countries?

I was born in South Asia—“on the field”—to an American mom and an Asian dad. After eight years, we left, very abruptly, in the middle of the night, when a simmering conflict suddenly erupted in a military coup, and all foreigners were expelled with 24 hours’ notice. The mission hastily found us a series of temporary places in Europe, and we finally settled in one, gaining citizenship here in the process. I don’t actually recall the night of our departure from South Asia. There had been so many prior flights for visa trips and furloughs that I don’t think the significance of that particular journey sank in until several months later, when it became clear that we wouldn’t be going “home” again.

These days, I feel more or less at home here. I work in a public-facing role. Neither my physical features, nor my skin tone, nor my accent are easy to place and, a few times a week, somebody asks me where I’m from. Occasionally, they volunteer a guess. I never object to this conversation. Usually, I give a well-rehearsed overview— enough tidbits to be interesting, not so much detail that the other person becomes confused or uncomfortable. Once, I misjudged this and included a “humorous” anecdote about starting at my new European school and completing a task that included sticking a sheet of paper into my exercise book. I carefully glued the sides and bottom of my sheet, leaving the top open as a pocket, in case we were ever fleeing the country and I needed somewhere to hide a passport, or a sentimental photograph, or some emergency money. My colleague did not laugh along with me, but looked entirely bewildered, and I filed that anecdote under “Unrepeatable—do not share.”

Is that self-censoring of our stories part and parcel of the TCK experience? Perhaps. Even pedestrian anecdotes from a cross-cultural childhood can be difficult for monocultural people to identify with, and complex or traumatic situations become impossibly obscured by their enmeshment with “the Lord’s work.” Years later, I would unpack with a therapist my anger and resentment at feeling like collateral damage in that work, but during my growing-up years, I unquestioningly absorbed the idea that my role in the Great Commission was to be impeccably behaved, to do as I was told, and not to make a scene. I am sure that my parents, who made innumerable personal sacrifices both to answer the call of the Lord and to parent me and my siblings in difficult circumstances, would be mortified to know that I had ever felt this way. (They would also probably be surprised to discover that is what I thought I was doing!)

One of the great privileges of a cross-cultural childhood is that it allows you to experience the good in multiple different cultures and ways of being. But doesn’t the Christian faith demand loyalty? A singularity of sorts? God declares himself to be “a jealous God” (Exod 34:14). And much of the Western church seems to have interpreted that through the lens of specific sets of behaviours, social norms, and political opinions that are often at odds with my experiences overseas. My memories of South Asia are joyful. In a broadly anti-Christian country, the fruits of the Spirit were present in abundance. The national conflict notwithstanding, I felt peace, safety, and love in the homes of our local friends and neighbors. By contrast, returning to America on furloughs felt alienating. The best thing I had to offer the white, American Christians in the churches we visited was the appeal of the exotic, so I showed my peers how to write their names in unfamiliar scripts, taught them peculiar-sounding words, and dressed up in “ethnic” clothing to play foreign instruments in church. But being an exhibit was a survival mechanism, and I craved the easy friendship and acceptance of our friends in Asia, and the ability to just be. (Perhaps that is why my initial reaction to being invited to write this article was to inwardly snarl, “Go find some other misfit to gawk at!”).

The thing with being a missionary kid is that every aspect of your life, good or ill, takes place within and because of the Christian faith. My early impression of Christianity was fragmented: How could the same professed values and beliefs look so different amongst the Christians in South Asia and in the West? How much of what I observed
amongst missionaries, Christian converts in Asia, and amongst our sending churches in the West was faith, and how much was culture? And if the Bible could be interpreted so differently in different cultural contexts, did it hold any objective truth at all? Our sending churches gave sacrificially to allow Christ’s love to permeate the farthest reaches of the world, while simultaneously taking what felt like a very ethnocentric stance on other issues affecting those very same places. They embodied a duality that seemed reflective of God himself. As the brown-skinned natives were to the American congregation, I was to God: In one sense, I was worth saving, even at personal cost, but ultimately dispensable in the name of his own greater good. My early faith took the form of a vague sense of spirituality and a pretty good approximation of Western Christian behavioural norms, but I was very skeptical that God was good, and he certainly wasn’t someone I was interested in being vulnerable around or intimate with.

A few years ago, right before Covid lockdowns, I had my first child. I found myself isolated, struggling to make sense of mothering, and overwhelmed by an awareness that my lackluster faith was entirely inadequate to minister to her soul. I joined some online groups for Christian moms but couldn’t shake the familiar feeling of not quite belonging. When we were finally able to start meeting people in person, it was the Pakistani and Egyptian Muslim moms in our neighbourhood that I found myself drawn to. They assumed the existence of a spiritual realm, and this infused their lives and conversations in a way I had not encountered since leaving South Asia. When my baby gurgled and laughed and waved her hands at an empty space, my friend Shaheda smiled and said, “She’s playing with the angels,” and I felt a little bit like I had found my people.

I didn’t convert to Islam. But it was in conversation with these Muslim women that I found the space to explore my ideas about who God is, within the framework of a mixed immigrant culture and without the expectations attached to being a missionary kid. Time and again, I have found myself returning to Jesus’s question, “But who do you say that I am?” (Matt 16:15). This question stops me from abandoning the Christian faith entirely, although I have long since relinquished most of the cultural assumptions surrounding that faith. I have given up on hoping that I will ever really belong in a church, although most weeks I take my children to one, in the hope that they may find authentic community there. I hope that they might form deep friendships with Christian children who understand them, and who they understand, and that they might discover how to be known and loved and accepted just as they are, by God himself, and perhaps even within the walls of a church.