Rooted and Restored: How the Church Supports Third Culture Kids

“Satan attacks the vulnerable. And he will use anything, even damaging your children, to discourage you.” Those words were spoken to my parents after my father shared about his children’s struggles of transitioning to the USA from the mission field.

For missionary kids like me (MKs), it all happens so fast. When I transitioned back to the US, my past world of living overseas felt as though it disintegrated into a forgotten blank space. Tropical fruits, the call to prayer, motorbikes, rice paddies, and foreign languages turned into tame driving, barbeques, farms, church buildings, and American football. Looking like an outsider instantly changed to feeling like an outsider.

This is just a glimpse of what some MKs, also known as Third Culture Kids (TCKs), may feel when we enter back into our passport countries. Third Culture Kid is a term for those who have spent a significant number of development years in cultures outside their passport countries. Rather than describing the number of cultures a child has lived in, it refers to the host culture, the passport culture, and the third culture that is created through dancing between and beyond these two cultures.

I cannot count the number of times my parents have mentioned the hardest part of their ministry experience has been seeing their adult children continue to suffer due to their MK childhood. If we want to care for our missionaries, we must care for their treasured children even after these children become adults.

These Broken Pieces

The TCK experience is often marked by rootlessness, unresolved grief, and loneliness. My siblings and I can attest to this reality in our own lives. We’ve struggled with the broken pieces of our past worlds, pieces that often don’t fully fit together. Pieces like countless goodbyes, hurried transitions, unresolved grief, trauma, spiritual darkness, cultural overload, and premature maturity.

These broken pieces take time to fit back together. The puzzle can’t be solved in a matter of months or even a year. TCKs hold these broken pieces until we find someone who hears and stays when we are ready to speak. The church must take care of preparing the soil, a soil where TCKs can safely place their broken pieces down, a place where they can be rooted instead of rootless.

Rooted in Care

For TCKs, suffering does not remain theoretical. It permeates the heartbeat of their parents’ ministry. TCKs may not feel they don’t have the words to process their suffering, causing deep-seated doubt to hide in broken places. Their suffering feels separate from themselves and yet is altogether connected to their experiences.

For TCKs to be rooted in care, they need places to process pain. I did not fully recognize the impact of growing up in a cross-cultural missional lifestyle until I had a place to unpack my experience with a cross-cultural counselor. These places cannot be manufactured by a program or sermon series but take root in relationships. Caring for TCKs requires a sacrifice of time to understand their cross-cultural realities and the third culture.

During a conversation about sharing our stories with others as adults, my brother contemplated “It’s like everyone’s too late. Like if you made a sandcastle and wanted to show it to someone, but no one cared till the next day when it’s been swept away by the waves. So if no one shows any care in your sandcastle, why should you care about it yourself?” Churches can equip their people to get down in the sand and encourage TCKs to rebuild what feels disintegrated and to integrate what feels paradoxical about their suffering. Through a willingness to listen and a posture of gentleness and patience, we can care for TCKs.

Rooted in Community

I remember the sensation when I stepped out of the Malaga Airport in southern Spain for the first time. Entering another new country, I experienced a familiar feeling of arriving back home. No expectations. Just a bit of culture shock and a whole lot of exploration! Then it dawned on me… I feel at home when I am foreign, and I feel foreign when I’m at what should be home, the USA. Now I don’t know about you, but this sounds like a recipe for loneliness and confusion! TCKs often have a desire to settle down and create community. However, we somehow feel as though we belong everywhere, at least outside of our passport culture, and yet we also feel as though we belong nowhere, never fully connecting with a location.

Because of this rootlessness, TCKs often agonize about the possibility of future goodbyes. To choose community with others means inevitability being ripped away from them in the future. TCKs are often mistaken for being too vulnerable, diving too deep too fast in friendships. However, friends may also find it difficult to break down the walls we put up to guard ourselves from more pain. Like any friendship, a good community for TCKs must be built upon grace. Grace to wait patiently for TCKs to share their broken pieces and grace to jump without judgement into close friendships. Asking them to share their favorite food or to evaluate the nearest cultural restaurant can be the doorway to hearing more memories and viewpoints they have about the world.

Rooted in the Church

“Reverse culture shock” often refers to the stressful experience of returning to your passport country. This shock hurts most within the church. American Churches are often quite different than the expat, international, and house churches they had overseas. Compared to the tight-knit community of a team on the field, churches feel more like events than a true family to TCKs.

Welcoming TCKs into your home and family provides a relational aspect of the church they miss. Through hospitality and personal care, they experience the heartbeat and love of Christ. The church roots their TCKs in belonging only as it draws its own life from Christ. Our Father is our refuge, the place we belong, the home we are all looking for.

A few years after repatriating into the US, I came across Shane and Shane’s song “Psalm 84 (I’m Home).” The chorus struck me as I pondered it in light of the comings and goings of missions:

When I sit at Your table, I am right where I belong.

In the chaos of life, in the confusion of pain, we belong in the presence of our loving Savior who opens his arms wide to root us in himself.

He opens his home to us so that we may never need to search for another.

Through tears and lament in community, we can sing, “In the doorway of my Father’s house, I’m home.