Telling Each Other's Stories: Missionary Kids and Storytelling Practices

Children of missionaries (often called missionary kids or MKs) occupy an understudied place in practical theology, despite their outsized influence on the theological academy and the church. This paper examines storytelling practices among MKs at a Christian summer camp, asking how these practices help MKs make theological sense of their cross-cultural lives. Drawing on ethnographic research, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, it argues that the camp's formal and informal storytelling practices facilitate identity construction by immersing participants in a community of others who share similar experiences of migration and cross-cultural living. More specifically, MKs learn to interpret their own experiences by listening to other MKs narrate theirs, "apprenticed" by older peers into shared practices of meaning-making. The paper concludes by asking what kind of theological future becomes possible when we not only listen to young people's stories, but help them tell those stories well.