Torn by Two Worlds

Can an American in Kenya truly go home again?

I doubt many north american Christians have given serious thought to missionary parking problems. But some days of my four years in Kenya, parking formed the most imposing barrier against the Lord’s work. One day in particular, I searched frantically for a space in downtown Nairobi, a region of bustling streets and high-rise office buildings. I was late for an appointment with John Mpaayei, an Oxford-educated African church leader I had been trying to see for months.

Reaching Mpaayei’s office panting and dishevelled, I apologized for my appearance. “I didn’t want to be late,” I explained. I remember a faint smile passing over Mpaayei’s grizzled face. I had not lived in Kenya long enough to know that an old man like him could not possibly mind a difference of 15 minutes in my arrival time. But he knew missionaries. He knew how we hurry.

In view of the obvious urgency I had placed on our conversation, the vagueness of my questions was embarrassing. Youth for Christ had invited me to come to Kenya and help start a magazine for African young people. Mpaayei had worked with many different missionaries. He knew the problems. How could I avoid them?

He looked at me quite sharply, perhaps with a trace of amusement again. “Oh, we have had such wonderful missionaries come to Kenya,” he said. “Some powerful personalities. People who could do almost anything. Sometimes I think they are almost too capable. You know, sometimes they have overwhelmed our people. We have been intimidated by your capabilities.”

He paused and looked straight at me. “If you see any spark of initiative—blow on it.” Then he repeated himself. “Any spark of talent or initiative, even if it may be wrong—blow on it.” He laughed, and that was all I got out of him. He would not elaborate.

I had heard that Africans communicate in parables, but that was my first encounter with it. I think I learned something about how Jesus’ disciples felt. A parable, if not developed into a fullblown sermon, seems flimsy, simplistic. You don’t quite see why the speaker has placed such emphasis on it. But Mpaayei’s words, over a period of months and years, ate away at my thoughts. I came to think they were the best advice I’d had, when I understood them better.

Crossing Culture

My wife and I arrived in Kenya full of enthusiastic ignorance. The news media gives a picture of Africa as one huge, superating wound, infected by endless coups, droughts, and outrages against humanity. It had been hard to imagine what daily humdrum life would be like. I knew Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, was a large city, but could not picture what scenes in the street would be. Some years before, the newspapers had printed a photo of Henry Kissinger standing in Nairobi with Jomo Kenyatta and some colorfully dressed tribal dancers; would I find such dancers, in their monkey-fur capes, on Nairobi streets? Or were they a relic preserved for tourists?

We found no dancers in the streets, but pretty black secretaries dressed in the latest styles. Three-piece business suits mixed with turbans. Once in a while you glimpsed the pink blanket of a Maasai tribesman, or a man with earlobe holes you could push a fist through. You could hear a dozen languages in a single coffee shop. We saw horrible slums and beautiful, green parks where monkeys lived, like squirrels. Just outside Nairobi, within sight of the skyscrapers, we saw giraffes and zebra grazing the plain. We feasted on the sights and sounds: Nairobi is one of the most fascinating cities in the world, a place where many worlds meet.

Missions means crossing cultures, moving in those different worlds. Two peoples whose ideas of rhythm vary radically must learn to move together. For me, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian, this meant learning an African style as different from latter-day American Presbyterianism as I can imagine: broad, full of gusto, formal in its grand procedures but highly spontaneous in its details, and unembarassed by disarray.

I had lots of ideas about the “right” way to start a magazine. After all, I had been invited because of my experience, my technical expertise. And putting out a magazine in Kenya is little different, technically, from putting one out in America. But technical know-how is not what makes a magazine successful; it is not really what makes any Christian work successful, anywhere. Technical skill is necessary, but far more crucial is getting your communication culturally apt—finding work for people that fits the way they feel about themselves; using words and choosing subject material that rings an inner chime in readers.

And this, like Mpaayei’s advice, sometimes utterly puzzled me. For instance, I soon realized that in order to publish a magazine we would have to train writers; almost no Christian writers were available. But consider this “personal sketch” submitted to me by an aspiring writer at one of Kenya’s theological schools:

“Mrs. Mull is a personality you can hardly dislike. She has a slim, tall, well-tissued body. Her body is proportional. She has a rather round head that fits properly to the neck. A nice straight hair caps the head. It’s neatly kept. Frequently, she keeps on placing it back when it falls on the slopes of her face. How the trunk attaches itself to the hips is admirable. The legs adhere comfortably to the girdles. Her walking is gracious. It’s characterized by some slow, skippy steps. These steps compel the rest of the body to move with some gentle vibrations. Her arms swing alternatively with irregular reaching for her hair as she walks. Truly she is a figure you can hardly ignore.”

I hasten to add that Mrs. Mull is an attractive but thoroughly modest middle-aged missionary. But this student, like all of our writers, knew English as a second language. He obviously had more trouble grasping its fine points than some. But on the other hand, he evidently had a keen eye—at least for Mrs. Mull. How was I to discern whether he (and others) should be encouraged to write, or encouraged to think of other fields? And how to help him?

More than anything else, I encouraged. In practice I saw the wisdom and importance of Mpaayei’s words: I blew on sparks. Some were real, and flamed up; others were imaginary and died. But you only need a few sparks to make a blaze.

The day came when Kenyans were really making decisions, final decisions, about what to put in the magazine. They took this leadership role with firmness. Even though I had learned quite a lot about Kenyan rhythms, I was not sure I approved of their choices. But the Kenyans’ choice of material, and their way of putting it together, was like putting a match to a firecracker. Their leadership made a tactile difference from mine—it clicked; people talked of the magazine in surprised tones. Suddenly it made African sense. The circulation, which had been rising anyway, took a sudden leap.

I began to understand Mpaayei more fully. Christian ministry begins with the perception of a need for warmth. But too often missionaries warm things up by doing calisthenics: much bustling activity that does, indeed, keep you warm so long as you keep jumping. But blowing on sparks injects a different dynamic. A fire is a self-sustaining and spreading phenomenon that requires no sustained outside input; it converts local material. The only outside agency is the breath of wind that encourages a spark into flame.

And I understood something else. When you blow a spark into fire, it warms and illumines you.

I went to Kenya to teach. But I found myself taught—my life illumined and warmed by that Kenyan fire. While some of my Kenyan friends gradually caught from me a grasp of western-style publishing, they gave me a glimpse of the world seen through Kenyan eyes.

Kenyans And Babies

When our daughter Katie came into the world, she must have received more hand-knitted sweaters than any American baby in history. By Kenyan custom, when a baby is born to a friend, you must visit in the home (the hospital doesn’t count) and bring a gift. You must also hold the baby, and too bad for the baby if she is sleeping. We were flooded with guests, several a day for months. The birth of a child brought us to common ground with our new friends.

It also subtly changed the direction of our thought about babies—that is, about human life. You often read impatient references to poverty-stricken countries that will not practice birth control. Kenya is one of those countries, for though U.S. aid funds a strong family planning program, Kenya has a population growth rate that, at 4 percent, is among the highest in the world.

Experts cite reasons for that, such as that an indigent farmer sees children as a form of social security. This is true, but does not go to the root of Kenyan thinking. For Kenyans, babies are just good. They need not be good for anything. They may bankrupt economic plans, disrupt careers, create social chaos. That does not change their fundamental state: they are, just in being, blessing. They thus bring joy and show that their parents’ life is not futile.

So it is very hard for an ordinary Kenyan to make sense of a proposal to limit his family. And hardly any Kenyan, no matter how educated, can grasp the western custom of waiting a few years after marriage to have the first child. They listen to our reasons having to do with adjusting to marriage, establishing ourselves financially, buying a house, and the like, but nothing clicks. These are problems, but babies remain a good—a fundamental good. Why limit good? A baby’s blessing goes deeper than the blessings of money and convenience.

After a while I was not so sure they were wrong. They eroded my confidence in our American hierarchy of values. I still favor birth control. But I would rather err on the Kenyan side of valuing human life than on the American side of valuing economics. Kenyans taught me that.

Kenyans And Money

They taught me other new ideas about money. I had expected to be moved toward a simpler life in Kenya, and I was. But the change came in a different way than I expected.

Living beside acute poverty, I had thought, would increase my sense of guilt at the world’s inequities. I welcomed such guilt, because I thought it would force me toward generosity. I did not want to look away from the misery of poverty.

We certainly saw it. Whatever goes by the name of poverty in the U.S. is wealthy by comparison. We stayed in the homes of people who don’t see $100 a year in cash. They eke out a living for a large family on two acres of land. They have no welfare plan: if they run out of food, they starve.

Yet they welcomed us with great warmth, showering us with gifts. We tried to be generous, but they always outgave us—and with gusto. They did not act poor or broken down.

We often visited the home of a Youth for Christ evangelist. Gilbert, his wife, and three children lived in three tiny rooms with a cement floor and a shared privy outside. They cooked on a small charcoal grate. The wind howled through thousands of cracks in their walls. One day a large cardboard-covered crate arrived at the office, bearing a graphic arts camera. Gilb was thrilled. He took the cardboard home and nailed it to the inside of the walls. That cut the wind.

They were very poor, yet I have never been in a more welcoming home, where happiness dwells. I loved to visit them because of the spirit that shone around them.

I had expected to learn the horror of poverty. I learned instead that money has limited value, both for good and for evil. I kept up with American news through Time magazine, which was as always wringing its hands over the state of the U.S. economy. All that worry began to seem slightly silly to me when I thought of Gilbert. Money and the lack of it matter, but not enough to match the dead seriousness accorded it by our age.

I am not, God help me, trying to paint a portrait of idyllic poverty under the tropical sun. Poverty is a mean, tiresome, occasionally deadly burden. I believe perhaps more strongly than ever in generosity toward the poor. But I am not sure the final income levels matter so much as the human kindness behind the sharing. If the poor became rich I doubt it would make them better or happier, and I doubt the world would be a better place—unless they became rich because those of us who can share, did so out of love. This human love, and the equally difficult love which accepts the gift thankfully, are what I long to see increase. Kenyans helped teach me that such love matters more than money.

Kenyans And Faith

A third source of illumination was the Kenyan reverence for God. Office workers crowd Nairobi’s city parks at lunch hours, sitting on the grass to eat. Nearly any day you find bands of Christians (and Muslims, and members of other religious groups) preaching to these crowds. But you can wait a long time without hearing a preacher heckled. Most people pause respectfully to listen.

Call this superstition if you like, but that respect made our magazine possible. Readers would not drop a magazine as soon as they found a reference to God. We could sell a Christian magazine on the newsstand, alongside Time, Playboy, and local secular magazines. Non-Christians as well as Christians bought it and liked it, so long as it spoke to their concerns. Step magazine is, in fact, currently the highest-circulation magazine in both Kenya and Zambia.

This openness about religion was exhilarating and illuminating. Our American society, while religious, keeps religion boxed in. Newspapers keep religion on the religion page. TV confines it to Sunday morning, and “religious” channels. I sometimes imagine an extraterrestrial creature coming to earth determined to learn about human culture. Landing in America, he gets a TV and watches it nonstop, thinking that since the TV takes him into our homes, our hospitals, our government institutions, it will offer him a good quick course in human culture. If he tuned to the major networks, how long would he watch before he realized that some human beings still pray and go to church?

Christians in America have been tamed into a special-interest group. It is not yet so in Kenya. Christians there retain the possibility of affecting their society wholistically. Kenya gave me a renewed sense of Christ’s rightful power over culture. I felt how unhealthy our own awkward, hesitant mention of Christ is, because I adapted to a culture where such hesitance is unnecessary.

Back In The U.S.

I am back in the U.S. now, having completed my Kenyan assignment. Worshiping in large, active American churches, I am struck by the contrast with Kenya. The activities of our church in Nairobi were limited primarily to Sunday morning services in a single large room with cement floor and tin sides and roof. Here it takes two pages of the bulletin just to list the activities of the coming week for the carpeted, well-equipped multiple rooms of the church. The services, timed to the minute, move carefully and professionally through their paces. Every nuance of worship is tucked into place.

We enjoy it. We bask in our American wealth of capable leaders, trained musicians, soft seats, good books, good sermons, good organization. In such an environment Kenya seems very far away.

Like many returning missionaries, I do not feel completely comfortable at home. My experiences have made me an in-between man. I can never belong completely to Kenya. But I no longer completely belong to America, either. In Kenya I saw life from another angle, and an insight is something you cannot retreat from. I cannot quite slip back into my old slot.

I notice now that commitment to missions is very weak. Yes, the American church keeps sending out missionaries, and there are pockets of revived concern. But for the average church member, and perhaps the average pastor, missions floats along on a river of memory, not a dramatic conviction that the church cannot be true without deep concern for the uttermost parts of the earth.

Some churches are simply so preoccupied with their own needs and programs that the rest of the world seems only hazily real to them. Missions has become a sideline, an afterthought they support but will not bleed for. Other cultures and churches may be interesting to them, but they do not recognize them as their own flesh and blood.

Thus a missionary may be admired, but with the wrong kind of admiration. People admire the sacrifice I made in giving up “a good career” to go somewhere no one knows much about and be forgotten. This often translates to, “How wonderful that you were willing to waste your life serving the Lord!” The worst ignominy of a missionary is that often his home church finds his work not quite important enough to rate a slot in the Sunday evening service, that graveyard of secondary concerns.

As I look at the American church, I sometimes wonder if we are oblivious to the trend of history. Are not those things we take the greatest pride in often just what will soon seem archaic, like buggy whip factories in the age of Henry Ford? For only the eternal things are worth setting our hearts on, and there will be no isolated American church in heaven. Our programs, buildings, and institutions will all burn up. Only people will pass through the fire.

But not people as isolated individuals. In heaven we will find ourselves in a great crowd, and (perhaps to our surprise) we will be thrown in with people very unlike ourselves. Jesus is calling his people from every nation under the sun, and from every age. We will join these brothers and sisters in a multi-cultural chorus, mixing Kenyans and Americans, twentieth-century men and Moses. We will sing one song, despite our radically different sense of rhythm.

I take it as axiomatic in the New Testament that the kingdom of heaven is what we are to live for, long for. Heaven teaches us how to separate reality from fantasy, for only what we will find there is dependably solid. Heaven is what Hebrews calls “the city with foundations.”

We more easily think of heaven as the unreal, for it is yet invisible, and its full revelation waiting for some future time. But when Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, he had in mind its urgent reality.

Are we preparing for this? One aspect of preparation is to make sure that the missionary’s insight, in bringing the warmth of a foreign fire, is not disregarded. Strangely, in our age of highspeed communication the people in other parts of the world have become less real to us than they were to our grandparents. They cared that millions of Chinese were dying without a Savior. We have trouble caring about, or believing in the existence of, people in the ghetto a few miles from our door.

But these people are the stuff of heaven. They will endure. Our programs will not.

We are to remain, perhaps eternally, Americans. Revelation 21:3 paints a picture of the end of history with cultures remaining distinct: “They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.…” (Most translations, as Ralph Winter points out, mistranslate “peoples” as “people.”) We will retain our own culture, apparently. God intends Johnny Cash to sing with Saint Augustine and with David, yet each to retain his own accent and style. But we will sing together one song. The more the parts, the more splendid the music.

And this is not only true in heaven. It is true on earth. It is the lesson John Mpaayei taught me: when I blow on others’ sparks, I myself am warmed by the fire. Every church struggles to look outside itself, but the more we extend our borders and care for people unlike ourselves, the closer we come to being the church of heaven. Such a church has joy, has power, has fire that sustains itself and grows, consuming all around it.

Seen this way missions is no afterthought. It is very close to the heart of the gospel, for it plants our feet in eternal country, the country Christ lives in. If we preach a gospel that is not for others, for others as different as can be, it becomes no gospel at all. For a gospel that cannot be sung in heaven is unworthy of the name.

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