I’ve observed two extreme lifestyles among cross-cultural workers that can greatly disrupt family life, diminish effectiveness of the family in the work, and sometimes even send them back to their home country before their first term has come to an end.
The bulk of responsibility for a well managed home belongs to us husbands and dads. But, if we can avoid the following extremes and do some good prep work, our job can be a lot easier.
Living in a Bubble
Some families who come to do cross-cultural work never seem to adjust to their host culture, the people to whom they were called.
One spouse may have little or no experience with a second culture. Sometimes, a spouse is leaving his/her home culture for the first time. I’ve observed wives, especially, who go overseas because they feel strongly about being supportive of their husbands, but who sense no clear calling for themselves to be with and minister to people of a different culture.
As parents, they are often over-protective of their children, and transfer what can be a suspicious, almost paranoid attitude about the local people to their kids, whether intentional or not.
After 6 months to one year, when the newness of living in a new country wears off, the inevitable culture stress, experienced by all cross-cultural workers, hits this family much harder than usual.
If this family doesn’t get help quickly and make the needed adjustments, they usually sink further into their insulated cocoon, spending less time in language/culture acquisition, and more time in their own cultural “bubble”. They watch more movies, seem to get sick more often, spend more time on the internet, struggle more in their relationships with team members and locals, feel more isolated, and eventually leave the field earlier than they planned.
Going Native
The other extreme almost always includes a husband/father with a very clear, strong calling to serve cross-culturally. He usually has had previous experience serving overseas. He is the primary minister in the family. He travels a lot, and seems very productive. This man rightly wants an incarnational ministry with the local people, but in his efforts to identify himself as “one of them,” his relationships with his wife and children are neglected. He sees little of his children and thinks that his wife is doing just fine, while she’s actually withering away in isolation.
They also leave their field of service much earlier than originally planned. The reason stated for leaving, which is very often health-related, is usually secondary to an underlying dis-connect between the husband and wife.
So, what do you do if you feel called to missions, especially if you have a family? How can you be prepared for the long haul, and connect with your host culture, while thriving together as a family on the field?
Share the vision
Thriving cross-culturally together begins long before you set foot off the plane in your new country. If one spouse does not sense a clear calling to go, then it may be a matter of waiting for God’s timing. If you are having significant issues with a child, especially a pre-teen or teenager, and they’re very discouraged at the thought of leaving their home culture, this needs to be seriously considered, as well.
Last month, the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Carey was celebrated. He’s been called the “Father of Modern Missions”. By the time Carey died in 1834, there were around thirty missionaries, forty teachers, forty-five mission stations, and about 6oo church members all connected to the mission he had founded. For thirty years, he was professor of Bengali, Sanskrit, and Marathi at William College in Calcutta. Carey and his team translated Scripture portions into more than forty languages.
[http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b3careyw.htm]
But there’s another side to the William Carey story. Dorothy Carey, William’s first wife, never shared his vision of cross-cultural missions. She probably would never have left England if a family friend had not first told her that she would likely never see her husband again if she didn’t go. While Carey busied himself with missions work, his wife struggled daily with raising their children in an extremely difficult environment, chronic sickness, mosquitos, frequent moves, and poverty. The family also suffered the death of their five-year old son.
[http://lexloiz.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/dorothy-carey-and-the-cost-of-mission/]
Over time, she lost touch with reality, often screaming in the room next door while William did his translation work. After over a decade of suffering this way, she died on the field of a fever. [http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/whatdifference_onemake.htm]
There is no shame in waiting if you sense that your call is a question of timing. Or, perhaps, one or more family members will never be willing to go away from their home culture.
If the latter is the case, don’t be discouraged. Don’t lose hope of ever making an impact on the unreached people groups of the world.
A friend of mine recently posted that in one zip code in New York City (Flushing, Queens) there are approximately 130 nations represented. Opportunities to make an impact on the world abound, often in our own neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. See if perhaps God may be calling you together to a ministry such as this.
Check your attitudes
Are you or another family member fearful of those of a different culture from your own? Take advantage of opportunities you have in your own culture to engage people who are culturally different from you. If you have a prejudiced heart in your home culture, then you can only expect failure in your relationships with your neighbors overseas.
I spent my first two years living overseas as a single, in an Asian country, experiencing for the first time the good, the bad and the ugly of cross-cultural service. I remember a co-worker with much more experience than me continually talking about “us” and “them”. He would regularly complain, “I can’t believe these people…” and “They never …” Or “They always…”.
Yes, cultures are radically different and every frustration this man had with adjustment to locals’ ways and lifestyles was stuff we deal with everyday. We continually have to ask God to help us see people the way He sees them, and to not grow blind to our own prejudices.
We also must not be guilty of hyper patriotism. Another worker on my team was actually quite fearful of his host culture. One day he told me that he didn’t want to live anywhere that he could not see an American flag waving nearby. I really felt sad for them, more than anything, because I thought that their pride in being American made them distrustful of anything and anyone not American. Their level of patriotism was destroying their ability to disciple the nations.
I’m very thankful for being an American citizen, but any nationalistic, xenophobic attitudes that we hold onto in our own culture will only worsen overseas, and will certainly hinder the work we’ve supposedly been called by God to do.
Our children, especially, will pick up on and reproduce our prejudicial attitudes, whether they are spoken or not. They see and hear more from us parents than we can ever imagine, especially in our heart attitudes toward locals.
So, over time, I think our attitudes should change from “us” and “them” to just simply “us”. Whatever our ethnicity and cultural upbringing, we’re all human, in need of forgiveness and divine purpose and direction.
Start small
Most of my colleagues serving on the field now had some kind of previous short-term missions experience. There are cases where career cross-cultural workers have never set foot in a different culture before beginning their first day of long-term service, but they are rare.
Consider taking a short-term mission trip, anywhere from two weeks to two months - the longer the better. Going with your whole family would be best. Be sure your trip is not a glorified touristy kind of “feel good for the foreigner” project. There are too many of those. Whether you go with your church missions team, or some other sending agency, it’s best if there’s been some ongoing relationship with local believers and churches on the ground in your host culture.
Ideally, you will be able to spend time not only with some new local friends but also with longer term cross cultural workers/families who can give you a living example of what it’s like to live and work overseas.
Stay engaged at home
Once you are on the ground in your new culture, ready for the long haul, don’t make the mistake of not paying attention to your family.
Husbands and dads, we especially have a tendency to become completely engrossed in the work. The ministry really doesn’t all depend on us, but that’s how we sometimes act. Something’s going to go sideways if our hands are not glued to the plow, we think.
“[An overseer] must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (I Timothy 2:4-5).
Scripture is quite clear on this point. Perhaps our attitude should be that managing our families is the main task, the plow that we must keep our hands glued to. Like it or not, men, you are modeling to your local friends how to live, how to walk with Christ, how to be and do church, and how to be a family man. If you’re not leading in this, then the men you are working with will not be the Godly leaders you want them to be, either.
Don’t go ladder climbing
Unless you are a language/culture learning phenom, you will spend anywhere from 3 to 10 years (I know this is a pretty wide variation, but so much depends on how different your host-culture language is from your own heart language) just getting to the place where you can have really deep conversations with local friends.
Time and again we have seen denominational mission agencies and other sending groups thrust cross-cultural workers into leadership positions just at the time where they are beginning to go deeper in making/multiplying disciples, or in much-needed theological education. Why?
Larger sending agencies, unfortunately, sometimes resort to leadership structures and field strategies that mimic corporations rather than follow good disciple-making practices. There is truly a big need for more seasoned workers to help those coming onto the field for the first time.
But, if you believe God’s called you to make disciples cross-culturally, then don’t give in to pressure from your leadership to make any moves that would pull you away from time with your people.
Any time that you spend supervising and/or supporting fellow workers is that much less time that you have to spend with your family and with your local friends.
God has gifted His people with leadership and administrative skills; pray for Him to send out more of these gifted ones into His harvest, and keep on making disciples.
The same pressure to climb ladders in corporations can often be found within mission organizations. A good question to ask yourself, when approached with the offer of a move “up”, would be this: “Would saying ‘yes’ to this opportunity be coming from a desire to bring glory to God by submission and obedience to His ongoing call? Or is there some other secondary motivation, like fear of man, or wanting to make a name for myself?”
Get out of town
During our first term overseas, we had some friends from a different sending group offer us good counsel. They had already been on the field as a family for quite some time, and said that they had made a practice of leaving their host culture for some vacation time every 6 months.
We’ve tried to do this, and it’s been very helpful for us. You may find that you are able to do this without leaving your host country; it’s a lot cheaper and you’ll probably save on travel days. However, we found that it was not possible for us to truly rest without leaving and going into a bordering country, because we were always faced with the same culture stress when trying to retreat from within our own host country.
Regardless, the principle, I think is the same. Jesus made the time to retreat, and we need the same refreshment. Find a place that you can do that on a regular basis and you’ll be thankful for the results.
