‘Assimilate or Go Home’

“I had grown up wanting to be a missionary all my life,” D.L Mayfield says, “but nothing I learned seemed applicable when real people were in front of me.”

Mayfield began volunteering with a group of Somali Bantu Muslims in her hometown of Portland, Oregon a decade ago. In Bible college, she says, she learned how to evangelize. But spending time with refugees taught her how to listen. Eventually, she gave up trying to convert her friends and moved next door to them in low-income apartment complexes instead.

“The more I failed to communicate the love of God to my friends,” she says, “the more I experienced it for myself.”

The same week that U.S. President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy was making news, CC’s Editor Angela Reitsma Bick interviewed Mayfield to discuss the global refugee crisis and her new book, Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith.

Christian Courier: Can you explain how your own journey reflects the four general stages of resettlement – anticipation, reality, depression and acceptance – that most refugees go through?

Mayfield: These stages matched up to my upbringing: buying into a triumphalist theology, the hubris of being 19 years old and thinking I knew everything there was to know about God. And then through meeting Somali Bantu Muslim refugees and grappling with the fact that I didn’t have answers, not only to their questions but to their lived realities and to what they were still suffering in my own country – that led me to a crisis of faith in myself and in God and in my country.

CC: Why do you call yourself “pretty much the worst missionary ever”?

Mayfield: Out of all my refugee friends I have never turned anyone into a white Evangelical Christian. I was trained to do that. But I don’t think God wants everyone to be just like me. Now I have a much broader view of what it means to bring about the Kingdom in the here and now.

CC: Children are a lively presence in your book – your own kids & the ones you meet.

Currently over half of the 20 million refugees worldwide are children, the highest number since WWII. What’s unique about the obstacles that refugee kids face compared to adults; and in what ways is their courage also distinctive?

Mayfield: This is good to talk about because it combats all the negative themes about refugees just being men who will do terrible stuff. But refugees really are mainly these precious kids who have survived the unimaginable. These kids are amazing, they are hyperactive, they have joy – but trauma will seep out in everyday situations. Watching Charlotte’s Web in the movie theatre, some kids started freaking out because there was a crow in the movie, and crows would pick out the eyes of the dead people in the camps they were from. These kids have literally survived the end of their world and are rebuilding it day by day. For me these kids are demonstrating resilience and trauma at the same time; they carry both those worlds within them. I have to open my heart to both of those.

CC: What do you see happening at the Mexican border right now?

Mayfield: It’s one sign of an immigration system that has been broken for a really long time. I’m glad that people are getting emotionally invested in what’s happening, but honestly our immigration system has caused many families to suffer for decades now, and most of us have just segregated our lives to the place where we don’t have to see that. But it is designed to exploit people and use them for their labour and as a scapegoat politically, so the whole system is de-humanizing and Christians especially don’t seem to have a well-thought out theology for how to view our global neighbours and how to welcome them.

CC: We just observed the UN’s World Refugee Day this week. First, I’m curious – do your Somali friends or ESL students know about this day? Does a day like this change anything?

Mayfield: The newcomers are in survival mode. They are not fluent in English; we don’t talk about things like that very much. But I would assume that they would find it a show of solidarity. I think it’s powerful when organizations like World Relief use that kind of a day to continue their advocacy work, calling Christians back to general principles of loving the stranger. Any work we can do in that spirit is so important right now.

CC: How can the average Christian help alleviate the global refugee crisis?

Mayfield: I wish that every single time Christians would hear someone say something hateful about Muslims, they would counteract it. Stop their friends spreading misinformation and rumours. The atmosphere has become so poisoned that it affects everything – policies, how neighbourhoods feel. Recently one of my friends who wears a hijab was spat upon by a man in a car. That’s what I wish more people would counteract. Dive into those hard conversations.

People ask me, “Can we donate clothes? Money?” I always tell them the same thing: Refugees are just people. They don’t necessarily need your stuff, but they need really good neighbours. They need people living life with them, near them, sending their kids to the same school, living in low-income apartments – but that is too big of an ask for most people.

It’s actually what we’re called to do, but it paralyzes people. I want people to at least think, “Where do I live? Where do I send my kids to school? Go to church? Grocery shop? Are these places where everybody looks and thinks and talks like me? Can I change one of those things in the direction of these communities that could use some good neighbours right now?”

CC: Whose voice is saying those first four words in the title of your book, Assimilate or Go Home, and to whom are they speaking?

Mayfield: People have told my refugee friends some version of “Go back to your country.” And liberal people basically say, “Assimilate, or stay in your apartment all the time so we don’t have to interact with people who are different from us.”
And then, I would say the second meaning has to do with my own view on being a missionary towards this community, wanting to peel back the layer of a Saviour complex, which I think is the same thing. My entire theology had only prepared me for – they say yes and convert, or they don’t and you move on. I felt God saying, “You stay here. They won’t convert, but you stay anyway.”