A response to the Christianity Today conversation on MK trauma and deconstruction

When an article like this one makes the rounds again, I notice something predictable happens in missionary communities: a collective intake of breath. A quiet defensiveness. Maybe guilt. Maybe recognition. And then, often, a reaching for either data or distance.

I want to suggest we try something else.

I’ve spent years sitting with missionary kids. Not across a desk, but around a table in the UK, on a retreat in South Africa, at a neighborhood market in the US, on a hillside in Papua New Guinea. And what I’ve learned is that the question “are missionary kids alright?” is almost always the wrong question. It puts us in the posture of assessors rather than companions. It frames MKs as a metric to be measured rather than a community to belong to.

The Real Question Is About Belonging

Research confirms that MKs experience trauma at rates nearly double those of kids who grow up in monocultural settings, and their needs are frequently overlooked by agencies, by churches, and sometimes by their own families. That’s worth sitting with. But the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition doesn’t hand us a crisis to manage. It hands us a pledge to keep.

In Wesleyan-Holiness thought, sanctification is never just personal. It’s communal. Grace is not administered from above. It’s mediated through relationship. That means the question we’re being invited into isn’t “What’s wrong with MKs?” It’s “What kind of community are we, and have we been, to them?”

That reframe changes everything.

Loss Without Language

What I hear most from MKs is not primarily anger at the church or cynicism about faith. It’s something quieter and more painful: the experience of carrying real loss with no adequate language and no community willing to hold it. Repeated goodbyes. Interrupted friendships. Grief that never got named.

Pauline Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss is helpful here. MKs often grieve people, places, and versions of themselves that can’t be buried because they were never fully mourned. The MK who left their best friend at age nine, who crossed an ocean and was expected to be grateful, who learned that tears at the airport made their missionary parents feel guilty: that child didn’t lose their grief. They just learned to carry it alone.

Sometimes the church has compounded that isolation rather than relieved it. The doctrine of entire sanctification, which at its best is a vision of love perfected in community, has sometimes been used to communicate that grief is a lack of faith. That struggle is a spiritual problem. That the children of missionaries should be above the ordinary wounds of childhood. MKs who hurt have sometimes been treated as an embarrassment to the mission rather than a call to deeper faithfulness within it. When that happens, the theological framework meant to draw people toward wholeness becomes one more reason to hide.

And when grief goes unnamed in community, it doesn’t disappear. It transforms. Sometimes into spiritual exhaustion. Sometimes into what the Christianity Today article calls “deconstruction.” But in my experience, what looks like deconstruction in MKs is often something closer to honest lament looking for a witness.

What Deconstruction Often Really Is

I want to be careful here, because I think the church, including the Church of the Nazarene, tends to either catastrophize or minimize when it hears the word “deconstruction.” We either panic about lost sheep or we offer tidy answers to questions that haven’t been fully asked yet.

But here’s what I’ve seen again and again at Rendezvous. When an MK finally has a safe space to say “I’m angry,” or “I don’t know if I belong anywhere,” or “I felt invisible for years,” they’re not walking away from God. They’re looking for a God who can handle honesty. They’re testing whether the community that sent their family out can also receive them back as they actually are.

That’s not deconstruction. That’s lament. And lament is deeply biblical, deeply Wesleyan, and deeply necessary.

The Psalms don’t ask God to be palatable. They demand that God show up. And our tradition at its best has always insisted that prevenient grace is already at work. God is present and pursuing, even in the middle of the mess. Our job is not to talk MKs back into certainty. Our job is to be a community in which honesty and belonging can coexist.

A Commitment to That Possibility

When I think about what this kind of care actually requires, it comes down to this: a conviction that community, experience, and witness can do what curricula and programs alone cannot.

We don’t open with trauma assessments. We open with connection. We create space for joy before we invite lament. Research on positive childhood experiences tells us that nurturing relationships and opportunities for emotional expression are what buffer hardship. Not the absence of hardship. MKs don’t need easier lives, though I’m sure we’d all love that for them. They need communities that can hold complexity with them.

Part of that means taking emotions seriously. All of them. Not just the presentable ones. Joy, grief, anger, longing: these are not obstacles to faith. They are the terrain of it. Giving MKs language for their inner lives is some of the most important work we can do, because naming what we feel is the first step toward not being alone in it.

The Church’s Call Is Not Only Crisis Management

Here’s where I want to push back gently on some of the conversation circling this article. The response to “MKs are not alright” cannot primarily be programs, assessments, or systems. The response has to be people. Presence. Incarnation. That is, after all, the model we preach.

But programs do have a place, and we need more of them. Good intentions without structure leave MKs to fend for themselves. The same is true for pre-field preparation, for re-entry support, and for ongoing pastoral care across the years. These are not substitutes for relationship. They are the scaffolding that makes sustained relationship possible.

The global church was willing to send families to the ends of the earth for the sake of the gospel. The question this moment is asking us is whether we’re equally willing to receive those families, including their children, with the same conviction. Whether we’ll ask not just “How can we support the work?” but “How are your kids? And how are they, really?”

One MK advocate puts it simply: “Just be the church to us. We’re hurting. We need your help.”

That’s not a policy recommendation. That’s a pastoral invitation.

What Holiness Has to Say

At its best, the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition offers something profoundly life-giving to MKs: the conviction that love is the mark of the Spirit’s work. Not performance. Not resilience. Not theological precision. We are made whole not through the absence of pain but through the perfecting of love. And that love, by definition, is given in community.

MKs are not a cautionary tale for missions. They are, as I’ve come to believe, a particularly clear mirror held up to the rest of us, showing whether the love we preach is the love we practice.

So Where Do We Begin?

If you are a parent, you don’t have to have the right words. You just have to be willing to stay in the room when the hard conversations come, and resist the urge to fix it right then. Ask your child how they are really doing. Let there be silence. Let there be tears. Yours, if they come. That kind of presence is not a small thing. It is, for many MKs, the thing they have been waiting for.

If you are part of a sending church, start with a name. Not “the missionary family” but the actual names of their children. Write them down. Pray for them specifically. Send a message that asks nothing of them and offers only this: we see you, we haven’t forgotten you, and we’re glad you’re ours.

Neither of these requires a program or a budget. They require only what the gospel has always required: a willingness to show up for someone else’s story.

And the good news is that it’s never too late to become that kind of community.

Not perfectly. But faithfully.

One kid, one family, one honest conversation at a time.

This post reflects the author’s perspective from work with MK communities and does not represent an official position of the Church of the Nazarene.