Holly Berkley Fletcher’s The Missionary Kids examines the intersection of American Christianity, culture, and missions through the experience of missionary kids (MKs). Fletcher grew up an MK in Kenya. Her book combines personal stories, interviews, research, and analysis.
I’m also an MK, born and raised in Nigeria. My parents served with a conservative interdenominational mission. At age six, I was sent to Kent Academy; for high school, I transferred to Hillcrest (where I met CRC MKs). I only saw my family a few weeks a year, and left Africa when I was seventeen.
Fletcher doesn’t bash missionaries as evil or whitewash them as exemplary. Instead, she grapples with “the complex reality of missions: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the brutal.” She explores four themes: missionary calling, mission work and multicultural attitudes, missionaries as sinners not saints, and the dispensability of American missions. She raises lots of pointed questions. I’ll highlight a few.
Fletcher describes the problem of prioritizing parental calling over children’s needs. For many MKs like me, the repeated cycles of being sent away to boarding school caused a “tsunami of pain” in childhood and a “lifelong search for home and belonging.” Child separation was a sacrifice to save souls—one we were told God richly rewards. (I still shudder at Mark 10:29.) But, Fletcher wonders, does the end justify the means? Are kids simply collateral damage for a greater good? Her conclusion is blunt: if the action to which someone feels called hurts the children involved, it isn’t of God. When my parents grasped how much my sisters and I were struggling at boarding school, they left Nigeria. They put our social and emotional needs first and never returned to Nigeria.
Second, Fletcher identifies the problem of spiritualizing pain. When that happens, distress can’t be properly named. For many MKs, a spiritual dimension complicates emotional grief. Their disorientation and loss are directly tied to God: after all, it’s God who called their parents to be missionaries. Fletcher internalized this message. She writes, “whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.” I, too, feared that if I couldn’t handle boarding school and my parents had to leave Africa, then Muslims wouldn’t hear about Jesus and would suffer eternally in hell. That’s a heavy lift for any child.
Next, Fletcher exposes the problem of theological certainty. My parents sent me to boarding school because they believed that people who didn’t hear (their very specific version of) the gospel are doomed. This assumption—that American evangelicalism is the only true Christianity—“has created a culture so convinced of its own rightness that it has little space for self-reflection.” Sacrificing children to convert strangers is just one example, Fletcher says, of how “rigid doctrine trumps the well-being of flesh-and-blood people.” Conservative churches disown LGBTQ+ individuals and won’t ordain gifted women because they are “more interested in protecting inflexible beliefs than in following an ethic of love.”
Fourth, Fletcher analyzes the problem of cultural superiority. “The popular narrative of missions as colonialism,” she says, “is an exaggeration.” And yet missionary activity is “intertwined with racial concepts of American imperialism and exceptionalism and cultural dominance.” The written history of my parents’ mission implies that bringing Christianity and bringing civilization to “heathens in darkness” were one and the same. I worry that they absorbed its paternalist attitudes about “primitive Africa” and simply passed on a North American faith uninfluenced by Hausa insights, even though they always showed respect and affection for the men and women—Christian and Muslim—they worked alongside in leprosy care and theological education.
Fletcher then calls out the problem of pervasive patriarchy. In virtually every MK boarding school worldwide, male-centered hierarchies have enabled abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual. Self-preservation and a sense of indispensability make mission agencies—including my parents’—refuse real accountability. Many “have resisted publicly acknowledging past abuses and identifying perpetrators.” Few “have earnestly taken responsibility for enabling and mishandling abuse.” Theologically liberal and egalitarian missions are better at owning up to abuse than theologically conservative and patriarchal ones. Mission boards have now adopted child protection policies. That’s an important and necessary step. But it isn’t sufficient. As Fletcher insists, until they address the underlying patriarchy that allows abuse to happen and be hidden, they haven’t solved the problem.
Next, Fletcher examines the problem of displacing racial justice work overseas. On the field, implicit bias and soft racism were—possibly still are—prevalent missionary attitudes. Meanwhile, at home, supporting foreign missions is easier than confronting the long shadow of racism born from slavery and Jim Crow. Fletcher points out that missions blossomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the same Christians who were lynching former slaves in Alabama and forcing Navajos off ancestral lands were sending white missionaries to convert black Africans. She writes, “White American Christians have thrown themselves into evangelism and humanitarianism among non-white people overseas, while avoiding the less heroic task of confronting their own responsibility for and complicity in the US’ horrific racial past.” What would America look like today, Fletcher wonders, “if white Christians had devoted even a tenth of the money, effort, sacrifice and prayer” towards racial equality at home rather than to foreign missions.
Finally, Fletcher considers the problem of divorcing foreign commitments from domestic politics. A contradiction lies at the heart of many conservative churches. “The same people who are funding missionary endeavors around the world are supporting policies that cut America’s refugee program and legal immigration. Evangelicals might support medical missions to vaccinate Pakistani children while indulging in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories here. They may vote for political leaders calling for a Muslim ban while they hail missionaries befriended by Muslims in other countries.” Cross-cultural mission activity hasn’t impacted the American church’s domestic political engagement.
The Missionary Kids can be dismissed as the complaints of a disillusioned MK. Or its critique can be taken as—at least partly—right. Instead of trying to deflect Fletcher’s uncomfortable truths, missionaries, mission boards, sending churches, and denominations might acknowledge their force, pursue self-examination, and tackle purposeful change. Fletcher’s book does not offer easy solutions, but it offers something more demanding: moral clarity. If missions are to be faithful, they must be willing to relinquish certainty, confront patriarchy and racism, and place human flourishing—especially that of children—at the center of their theology and practice.
