Losing Faith in Ourselves
An interview with D.L. Mayfield —
author of
Assimilate or Go Home:
Notes from a Failed
Missionary on Rediscovering Faith
– PAGE 2 –
ERB: Earlier drafts of many of the chapters in the book first appeared on the McSweeney’s website. How did you get the opportunity to do these posts? And how were they received there, being decidedly Christian amidst the very eclectic perspectives on that site?
DLM: I had been reading McSweeney’s website for a couple of years, and I really enjoyed it. They would host a column contest and invite readers to pitch an idea for a column. My life seemed so interesting to me, and I wanted to write about it. I thought that the readers of McSweeney’s would be interested to read about a fundamentalist Christian girl trying to convert these fundamentalist Muslim refugees, and all the mishaps that we had along the way. So, I entered and won the contest.
ERB: And how long had you been working among the refugees when you started writing this column?
DLM: I think I was six or seven years into it, so I had a significant amount of work to look back on. I had this sense that my experience would be interesting to people, and it was. At the same time, I got some much needed feedback about the way I portrayed the refugees, which caused me to think through questions of power and privilege in how I told these stories. McSweeney’s gave me two great gifts. One was that I had to write a column every three weeks. I wasn’t a writer at the time, and I had a six-month-old baby; doing this column forced me to write down a lot of my stories of working with the refugees, which I might not have otherwise done. Also, it forced me to think through issues of representation of this refugee community in a way that I’m not sure that the Christian publishing community would have done.
ERB: I’ve heard you say in other interviews that you don’t really see yourself as a writer, but would rather identify yourself as a reader. Can you talk about the ways that reading has been formative for you in your Christian faith, and how it has also shaped your writing?
DLM: I’ve always been a huge reader, and at the same time, a lot of what I’ve had to unlearn is that traditional missionary narrative that I frequently read about as I was growing up. I was obsessed with missionary biographies when I was a kid. I read so many of them and thought that they were so inspirational. I wanted to be like all these people: Amy Carmichael, Gladys Aylward, Adoniram Judson, Elisabeth Elliot and Jim Elliot, for instance. I was so into those books, and that’s what I wanted to do with my life. It was hard when I tried to live this out, in a haphazard sort of way here in America, and reality did not match up with my expectations. A lot of people go through similar experiences, where you have to go through your beliefs and deconstruct them, and then reconstruct them again. Reading these missionary biographies set me up for failure in a way, but reading other books has helped me to repair.
ERB: Can you give an example or two of books that have been helpful to you in this work of repairing?
DLM: I’ve recently been working on a list of my favorite books about refugees, and books like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down [by Anne Fadiman] would be definitely be on this list. It’s a heartbreaking book about the clash of cultures, the complexities of religion and how it influences what we do, and the ways that the West worships intellectualism. I read this book when I was in the thick of working with the refugee community, and its exploration of the ways we don’t understand people who are fundamentally different from us was really helpful for me to read. It helped me to feel less lonely. I had this sense of failure because nobody was becoming a Christian, or nobody was getting healed. In all these stories I had read, great things happened all the time. None of the books talked about the missionaries’ struggles: maybe this one had depression, or maybe this one was a workaholic and was isolated from true community. So, reading stories by really honest authors became really important for me, books like Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris and Take this Bread by Sara Miles. I read all of them at very different points in my life and their commitment to honesty both about themselves and their relationship to God was extremely compelling to me.
ERB: I’m a long-time fan of Shane Claiborne’s books, and I know that you mention his work a few times. But one of the things that I’ve seen over the last decade is that young people—college students or those just out of college—will get really excited about Shane’s work or that of other writers in a similar vein, and will want to live radically for Jesus, outside their comfort zones. They follow these desires, and eventually when things get pretty tough for them, they get disillusioned. One of the things I really appreciated about the way that you told your story in this book was the self-effacing sort of way in which you seemed to always be deflating this kind of idealism. Can you talk about your experience of wanting to live in radically faithful ways, to live into these missionary stories that were so formative for you, and yet regularly meeting failure in your efforts? It seems like the primary story of your book is not the successes of seeing people converted or healed, but of you coming to grips with your own limitations.
DLM: I am an advocate for working toward a more equitable kingdom here on earth, but I’m really interested in the question: what are our motivations for doing this kind of work? My own motivations sometimes went into some pretty sticky areas, but God used my neighbors to root out these lies that I believe about God and myself. My neighborhood has been a part of the process of my own discipleship, when I thought that I was going to make disciples of my neighborhood. This was an unexpected twist for me.
ERB: You discovered mutuality in these relationships?
DLM: Yes, mutuality is a huge keystone in my life. I feel a little weird when people hear about my story and fixate on the “failed missionary” label (which, by the way, I did not choose as a subtitle) because I LOVE talking to people about God, and I love talking about Jesus and I love praying with people. If people want to read the Bible with me, I absolutely love that, but it is coming from a place of mutuality. If I pray with you, then I expect God to speak to both of us, and we both share that. If we read the Bible together, I know that the Holy Spirit is going to speak to both of us, and not just to me. Learning this sort of mutuality has been a big shift for me. I will say though that I have been obsessed with the stories of other people who wanted to be radical in their faith, and who got burnt out and left this work. I talk about a lot of my harder experiences in the book, but there is also this undercurrent of joy in my life. I genuinely like hanging out with people of other cultures. I like living on the margins and outskirts of cities. I remember reading an interview with Jackie Pullinger, who was a missionary in Hong Kong and one of my bigtime missionary heroes. She talked about the first time that she saw the walled city in Hong Kong, this huge slum, and she felt so full of joy. She said that every day that she lived there felt like it was her birthday. And that really resonated with how I feel. In my neighborhood, I feel like every day is my birthday. I just love it! I do think that there needs to be at least some joy in the steps that you take into pursuing a more just way of living. If the work is always drudgery, then that’s just not going to go well for anybody.
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