Recovered Memories and Accusations of Sexual Abuse: A Review of Scientific Research Relevant to Missionary Contexts

Childhood sexual abuse of missionary children is a tragedy that mission organizations are seeking to prevent. A second tragedy concerns missionaries falsely accused of sexual abuse. Psychotherapy that generated false memories of sexual abuse was common in the 1980s and 1990s and still continues to some degree today in Christian circles. This chapter reviews scientific evidence that such false memories exist and provides guidelines that Christian organizations may use to help sort true memories of childhood sexual abuse from false memories of childhood sexual abuse.

North American missionaries developed a North American-style school to prepare their children for life back in North America

In her article “Sacred children and colonial subsidies” Anicka Fast suggests that the missionaries of the American Mennonite Brethren Mission developed a school for their children in order to separate the missionary children from the Congolese children. That is an unfortunate misinterpretation of the historical situation. The missionary children were always intimately associated with Congolese children on the mission stations. The missionary children’s school was developed to train the missionary children so they could return to North America, where they were legally expected to return and live. They were not immigrants in the Congo. They needed a “North American-style education” so they would have a reasonable chance of success when they returned to North America. The school itself eventually was moved to Kinshasa where it developed into the American School of Kinshasa, which serves a wide spectrum of black and white children from around the world. The matter of colonial subsidies was only tangentially related to the development of the school.

Perceptions of the past and schooling for missionary kids An introduction to the dialogue on sacred children and colonial subsidies

In this brief piece, I present an introduction to a conversation on decisions surrounding the education of missionary children in the Belgian Congo during the period 1946 to 1959. This conversation began in April 2018 with the publication of Anicka Fast’s article on “Sacred children and colonial subsidies,” to which Lawrent Buschman submitted a rebuttal. Fast then submitted a response to Buschman’s rebuttal. My introduction seeks to frame their conversation for the readers of Missiology: An International Review.