Returning Home as a Stranger: Reverse Culture Shock & the CofE
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The Idea of Culture Shock
20 years ago, in the outback of Australia, I first heard about the phenomenon of ‘reverse culture shock’. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it describes what happens when people return home after living overseas, and discover it’s not quite the same. Their home culture, which was once to them like water is to a fish, suddenly becomes alien, strange, and different.
Fast forward two decades and I thought I knew what I was in for on returning to the UK from the sub-tropical Gulf Coast of Texas. After living in and learning from a different culture for just shy of a decade, I anticipated that it would take time, it would feel different, and I might need to relearn some of the Britishness I’d left behind.
First-hand Experience of Coming 'Home'
In many senses, I do think I was readier than some for the return. But there were two things that I was not as prepared for as I’d thought. The first was this: the culture hadn’t actually changed all that much. Yes, there’d been a pandemic, a cost-of-living-crisis (that continues), and various other shifts, but the UK was largely the same as it was before.
It wasn’t the culture that was different, but me. I no longer fitted in as I did before. The cultural hills I used to be willing to die on don’t matter to me anymore. I still appreciate the art of a good queue, a decent cup of tea, and other such delights. But they’re not as intrinsic to me as they were before. I care more than I used to about parking—and the astonishing obliviousness with which some Brits park. I will speak up about bad service in a restaurant. My time is precious and I will do something about it if I feel like someone is wasting it. Even my sense of humour has changed!
I am different: my identity has been shaped from living in Texas for as long as I did. And I found on my return I can still fit—but not in the same way. I find myself gravitating towards people who also know what it’s like to call different countries home and can laugh at both cultures. I find myself connecting with different Brits to the ones I might have connected with before. I am doing things and speaking in ways that I wouldn’t have done before. In the words of Taylor Swift, I discovered that “I’m the problem, it’s me.” (Though to be fair I don’t really see this as a problem!)
Coming back to the 'Mother Church'
The second thing that I wasn’t prepared for was the locus of where I felt this most acutely. I felt, and continue to feel this most acutely within the (literal and metaphorical) walls of the Church of England. I was raised in the Church of England, worked for Anglican churches and schools, trained in an Anglican theological college, yet I find that I don’t fit like I used to.
Part of that is more general difference: the level of bureaucracy in the CofE is at times alarming and bizarre. After all of my history and rootedness in British Anglicanism, because of technicalities and clerical fudges, I am considered an ‘overseas’ priest. So I can only minister with Overseas Permission To Officiate (OPTO), rather than the more typical domestic version, which required the Archbishop’s approval.
But apart from the institutional differences at the level of administration, my perspective on theological issues has shifted. I’m not saying my theology itself has changed, but how I hold it has. I come back into a church fighting over all kinds of issues (from liturgical forms to sexuality) and it seems so much more tribal than I remember.
I used to be in those tribes—I knew the impulse to self-protection and defence, to engage in the name of what is true and loving and godly. But I no longer fit (and to be clear, I mostly think this is a good thing). But some days it’s really weird being on the outside. It’s like listening to conversation where you hear the words, you know what they mean, but at the same time it sounds completely foreign and alien.
In some ways I experienced the same thing moving to the States. I didn’t understand the culture (and in some ways I still don’t), the fights over politics, the culture wars, and various other things. But I knew that I was in a place that wasn’t the culture in which I was raised, so I expected it. Where I didn’t think I’d feel it was back in the UK Church.
Making Sense of an Unfamiliar Home
So how do I make sense of all of this? How do I navigate this new reality where I don't fit in the same way I used to?
I was teaching recently with a colleague on biblical interpretation and we were discussing different models for approaching a text and how people making meaning out of it. For example, we talked about how Anglican evangelicalism reads the Bible, but also how it has been shaped in the last a hundred years or so by constantly engaging with German academic liberalism. We also asked what this dialogue might gain from engaging with different conversation partners and other models of interpretation—from the Global South, from different backgrounds and experiences, many of whom ask questions of the text we would never think of asking!
Having a breadth of conversation partners is important. Anglican evangelicalism was significantly shaped by responding to a more sceptical German audience. This shaped the dialogue in a certain way: questions about historicity, origins, and authorship. Bringing in different voices and conversations brings with it an inherent richness to think beyond our own limits, gain new insight, and see more of what God is doing in the Bible and what He is wanting to say (which in my view is a very good thing!).
I say all this, because it points to just how important it is to have discussions that engage different voices: it breeds creativity. It helps us break new ground and see new things—and get beyond the trenches of where we are in opposition. What I've noticed in coming back as a now quasi-outsider is this: the church too often loses sight of the signified. We focus on the signs that point to the signified. We get caught up in the language we use, the external descriptors that point to the reality of what God has done in Christ, rather than the reality itself.
The question for me is how does God want me to use my different perspective? How might I participate and bring with me a voice that is both an insider and an outsider?
It’s very easy (and somewhat tempting) to choose not to participate and check out—to disengage.
But actually, God has called us to community. To connect. To be the diverse body of Christ we are (Gal 3:28). Wherever God puts us He calls us to do the work He has for us. And the question is really 'to whom have you called me, God?' Among whom am I called to serve?
So I’m praying about with whom and where that might be. And that I might have the courage to do so, even if it narrows that sense of strangeness.
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Photo by Raul Varzar on Unsplash
