ACCEPTANCE: PRETENSE AND REALITY
Did the missionary ever accept the people
Acceptance of the host people by the missionary is probably a difficult quality to define or measure. If asked, few missionaries would say, “I just could not accept the people I was living with” even though they may have left the field after only a few months. Surveys tend to show that the reasons given by missionaries for leaving the field are health, family problems, children’s education, and burnout, but never lack of acceptance.6
What, then, constitutes acceptance? Dictionaries use a number of different terms to explain the concept: “To receive gladly,” “to receive as adequate or satisfactory,” “to be favorably disposed toward,” “to regard as usual, proper, or right,” “to believe in.” All of these factors probably play an important part in becoming bicultural.
A number of years ago, a veteran missionary, when building a new mission house, built a special cement bench in the living room where the nationals were invited to sit. Although he had lived and worked on the mission field for over forty years, faced countless personal dangers with national pastors, lived with them in village huts, eating whatever they ate, he was never able to accept them as equal. They were not permitted to sit on the other furniture! Although this is an extreme illustration, it may well reflect the unspoken, sublimated attitude of missionaries who leave the field because of “family problems.”
6 Frank Allen, “Why Do They Leave? Reflections on Attrition,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 22 (April 1986): 118–28.
Marge Jones and E. Grant Jones, Psychology of Missionary Adjustment, ed. Stanley M. Horton (Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1995), 56.
