Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith

The gist behind this simple but extraordinary book is how a missionary, called to cross cultural and faith boundaries, to live as a foreigner, and to share their life in concrete and powerful ways with the dispossessed and the poor, shares friendship, love and solidarity. These gifts are the most significant things one can give another and they all speak the same language. It is the story for many of us who spend our lives as missionaries for the Church.
When she graduated from Bible college, D.L. Mayfield was on fire and ready to share the Gospel. Inspired by the stories of missionaries who settled in unfamiliar places, Mayfield moved into a neighborhood of Somali Bantu refugees and tried to convert her neighbors. Before long, she realized that she was in over her head, and that her theology and tracts weren’t working.
Assimilate or Go Home is the story of her steep learning curve toward true solidarity and witness, chronicling her own mistakes and doubts along the way. As she cultivates friendships with her neighbors and learns to see them as persons rather than projects, Mayfield ultimately learns that the heart of ministry is incarnation. “I used to want to witness to people, to tell them the story of God in digestible pieces, to win them over to my side,” she writes. “But more and more I am hearing the still small voice calling me to be the witness. To live in proximity to pain and suffering and injustice…To taste the diaspora, the longing, the suffering, the joy.”
Assimilate or Go Home is a beautifully observed testament to the perseverance, dignity, courage, and terribly difficult lives of her neighbors. Mayfield immediately shows us that she is self-aware about what she calls her own “evangelical fervor,” but as the book unfolds, it reveals a person who fully inhabits what is best about that fervor: compassion, energy, and a willingness to look like a bit of an idiot in the name of love. The result is a captivating blend of personal essay, deeply humane portraiture, and social commentary that breathes love in every paragraph.
—Reviewed by Abbie Storch
Purchase your copy here. Read an excerpt from the book here.