Missionary Families Find a Sense of Place and Identity: Two Generations on Two Continents by John S. Benson (review)

As returned Lutheran missionaries who spent most of our child-rearing years in West Africa, my wife and I have often mused on the considerable difference between our own experiences and those of our children. Home for us has always been North Dakota, and Africa was our calling. Home for our children was Africa, and furlough times in North Dakota were something of an interruption. We returned to the States at the end of our work with a sense of embrace by our own culture. They returned to the States, to some extent, foreigners.

John S. Benson, a “missionary kid” (MK) from Tanzania, has gone far beyond mere musing about such things. Over a period of five years he interviewed twenty-nine retired Lutheran missionaries who had served in Tanzania for twenty years or more and sixty-four of their children, allowing them to talk about their experience of Africa and North America. He then framed their responses around two main loci: the significance of what he calls “notions of place” (5) and the significance of their “notions of religious development” (8) as defined by chosen social scientists.

Chapter 1 sets the stage with a brief history of the mission work in what is now Tanzania by the Augustana Lutheran Church and its successor body, the Lutheran Church in America. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the role of “place” and “religion” in the formative years of a missionary generation and its children, respectively. Chapter 4 considers the quite different college experiences of the two generations, and chapter 5 the differences in the experience of “calling.” Chapter 6 highlights the way the parents had to make sense of the alien African milieu through the lens of their calling, and chapters 7–10 explore different aspects of their children’s search for meaning in their alien North American milieu through their choice of a spouse, an occupation, a place to live, and a church. Chapter 11 allows both generations to wonder what it means to call a place home in the context of a continuing compelling memory of and emotional connection to a locale where one no longer lives. The development of the theme is well supported by twenty-five tables, informational as well as statistical, and seven maps. A short conclusion attempts a synthesis.

To summarize briefly that synthesis, Benson discovers that “place” was a relatively insignificant factor in determining the identities of the missionaries, but that it had an enormous impact upon the world view of the children, even those who never returned to Africa. At the same time, religious conviction and calling as defined rather narrowly by church tradition were much more riveting factors for the missionaries’ lives than for their children, who in some existential uncertainty often explored other options (263–64).

But such brevity diminishes the richness of the book. Its interviews and reflections, reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” truly take the reader into the lives of a missionary generation and its progeny, into the details that mattered for them in formulating their worlds, and into the multiple ways in which responsiveness to a sense of calling for one affected entire life stories for another. Coming “from within,” written by one who experienced it personally, it is a kind of social autobiography, that I commend not only to church people and students of the missionary movement, to be sure, but also, a bit in the tradition of Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth, to sociologists, psychologists, and educators as well.

A son of the Swedish Augustana tradition may perhaps be excused for an apparent confusion of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod for the (Norwegian) Evangelical Lutheran Church (94), but this historical error should be corrected.