Passing on the Evangelical Missionary Narrative in Today’s World

Alison Allen considers how values are communicated generation to generation.

I grew up attending a church where international mission was central: we heard the stories of mission often and had missionary prayer cards (and occasionally actual missionaries) in our home. One of my first observations as I researched Millennials who are Christian missionaries overseas was that most had experienced a similar upbringing: hearing missionary speakers and reading missionary biographies and prayer letters at a young age. Such early exposure to the discourse of evangelical mission helped to make ‘missionary’ a viable career option for them. Without this evangelical missionary narrative perhaps they – and I – would have interpreted the urge to go as ‘itchy feet’ and simply taken a gap year, gone on foreign holidays or donated to aid agencies.

The worldview of our parents and immediate community, as expressed through both language and practices, provides a framework for our own understanding of the world around us. Berger and Luckmann (1991/1966)[i] call this our ‘primary socialization’. From infancy we watch how the adults around us respond to various stimuli, whether with words, with actions or through ritual. We learn to copy these responses, but we also internalize them as our understanding of reality. This is where our sense of what is – and is not – ‘normal’ comes from. Those of us who have lived and worked cross-culturally are well aware of how our ‘normal’ may differ from that of other cultures. Yet such transmission of narrative frameworks is constantly at work on many levels, from national cultures to subgroups to the nuclear family.

For the children of evangelical Christians, the primary socialization which occurs at home is reinforced through attendance at evangelical congregations. Sunday school, congregational worship, youth groups, etc., work together with family prayers, Bible reading and faith-based parental life choices to illustrate a particular interpretation of the world. The evangelical understanding of reality, of which the missionary narrative is a part, therefore becomes the earliest interpretive framework of such children. They learn early, for example, that one should respond to suffering through prayer or that swearing is wrong.

As a child grows up, however, he or she is exposed to different voices. The evangelical narrative imbibed through primary socialization must compete with a non-religious narrative communicated through television, the internet, friendship groups and the education system. Just as children growing up with two (or more) national cultures are forced either to merge them or to give preference to one over the other, so those whose religious socialization at home is at odds with the values and practices of the majority population are similarly faced with a narrative conundrum. Given the centuries of Christian influence upon British culture, this often causes no problem. Values such as equality and individual choice align comfortably with the values of evangelical culture. Yet when equality and tolerance lead to a belief that there is no one truth, or when individual choice is elevated above right and wrong, evangelical Christians find themselves having to make a choice: they can reject one narrative and fully embrace the other, or they can merge the two by drawing elements of the wider culture into their understanding of faith or aspects of faith into their expression of culture.    

Such a merging of cultures happens continually: cultures are, of course, not static. Rather they constantly adapt as they interact with other cultures and with new experiences. The British culture in which Millennials were immersed as children differed from that experienced by the generations that came before or that have come since. The differences are not so great as to make the culture unrecognizable: change usually happens slowly over many generations. Similarly, the evangelical culture from which eighteenth-century British missionaries travelled throughout the then Empire was different from that which continues today to send missionaries across borders (while simultaneously receiving missionaries from other nations). Much, however, remains the same. British evangelicals continue to hold to a mission narrative which emphasizes the centrality of the gospel message as well as the need both for a personal faith commitment for all and for a personal sense of divine calling for those who choose to become ‘missionaries’.  

In my new book, British Millennials in Global Mission, I explore Millennial missionaries’ lived experience of Christian mission in the twenty-first century, considering their appropriation and interpretation of the evangelical missionary narrative. I also raise the question of how that narrative continues to be transmitted to younger generations today, amid practical challenges such as the fall in church attendance or the decline of the evening service, and alongside a discomfort with mission’s colonial associations. As a former missionary, a Christian and also a parent, I wonder how well we are normalizing the missionary narrative so that today’s children and young people are prepared to receive and to act upon their own call to mission. Children will always imbibe the narratives that surround them: the question is how intentional we are in the formation and communication of these narratives.

Alison Allen gained her PhD in Sociology of Religion from Kingston University, London, in 2024, titled ‘An Exploration of British Millennials’ Involvement in International Christian Missions.’ She is Head of Member Care at Christian charity Friends International UK.

Her book British Millennials in Global Mission is out this month and available to order here, with 20% off all orders before the end of February.

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[i] Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., 1991/1966, Social Construction Of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology Of Knowledge, New York: Open Road.