Like Son, Like Parents

Mike and Rosemary Harris took a shortcut for choosing a ministry location that you’re welcome to try: They let their kids do most of the work.

After growing up as a missionary kid in South America, Mike’s attitude toward missions was, “I’ve already done that.” For most of his adult life, he was content raising a family and building a furniture business. In his mid-50s, the Lord used a short-term mission trip and a church in Central Europe to change that. “There weren’t more than 10 people in the church aside from us visitors,” Mike remembers, “but they were on their knees, praying. And when they sang, they stood up, raising their hands and giving God glory. I would go back to my room in the evenings and think about what I’d seen. God put it on my heart, That’s what we need to do—to go out and share the gospel with people.” When he got home, Mike told Rosemary, “In 5 years, I want us to sell my part of the business and head to the mission field.” From then on, he had no doubt it was the right decision.

Rosemary, on the other hand, had a few doubts. She had wanted to go into missions in high school but put it on a back burner because Mike wasn’t interested. Now, she felt less adventurous. When her son started seriously considering missions as an adult, she thought, Maybe God was calling me to raise kids and release them into cross-cultural ministry. Mike Jr. and his wife, Melissa, joined Pioneers and moved with their kids to West Africa. Their new team had been praying for years for an older couple to join them. The junior Harrises thought of Mike and Rosemary and their new openness to global missions. “As a church planting team,” Mike Jr. explains, “we wanted to engage our community at different levels. It’s good to have singles. It’s good to have couples. And it’s good to have people farther along the road in life. It gives you access to different sections of the community.”

Mike Sr.’s commitment was complete and immediate, and he saw no drawbacks. He wanted to empty the house, sell it, and move to West Africa for the rest of his life. In fact, he was so enthusiastic about getting rid of things that Rosemary had to dig through trash bags to retrieve cash he had inadvertently thrown away. Even selling his furniture business didn’t feel like a sacrifice. “As time got closer,” Mike says, “my interest in my business was getting less and less, and my desire to go was growing more and more. It was just the way God was working, and that’s why it wasn’t hard at all.”

Open Doors, Open Hands

For Rosemary, starting this new phase of ministry was more of a step-by-step process. An early step involved convincing Mike to keep their house in case they needed to return. She pictured a 10-year stint rather than the rest of their lives. Another step was confirming their kids’ team in West Africa as the right fit. Mike and Melissa lived in a rural town in the middle of an unreached people group. The Harrises didn’t join the team simply because their family already lived there, but that was certainly a perk. As God opened each door, they would step through, and then He would open another.

God opened financial doors in surprising ways. While hesitant about becoming “hardcore fundraisers,” Mike and Rosemary decided to talk to their friends about the vision for ministry God had given them. Since most of the people they knew were established in careers or nearing retirement, they had flexible income, and they gave generously. Some were quite blunt— “I’d never do it, but if you want to, I’ll support you.” Near the Harrises’ departure time, Mike checked their ministry account early one morning and found a $5,000 gift from people they didn’t know. He woke Rosemary to tell her, with tears in his eyes, that they could book their flights.

“To us, it was this huge barrier, and God was already taking care of all of it.”
Rosemary

Not every open door led to pleasant surprises, however. Just months before the Harrises planned to leave, Mike was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Rosemary asked herself, Did we misread the calling? Is this God saying no? During their first oncology appointment, the doctor looked at their last name and told Mike, “I think I went to school with your brother in South America.” The oncologist was also a missionary kid, and he wanted to help Mike and Rosemary get to West Africa. The problem was timing. The Harrises had plane tickets to leave in three months. Standard treatment for Mike’s cancer included 40 weeks of radiation. The oncologist suggested a new treatment option which could be completed in two weeks. When the Harrises’ insurance declined to cover it, the doctor paid for it himself. For Rosemary, “That was a huge increase in our faith.”

French-less Fashion

Much of West Africa was once ruled by France, and business and government interactions are still often conducted in French. Most missionaries moving to the region spend a year learning French, then several years learning a local tribal language. For Mike and Rosemary, the idea of learning two languages in their 50s felt daunting. Their team advised them to skip the French. Both the junior and senior Harrises agree it was the right decision. They lived together as a three-generation family, so Mike Jr. and Melissa could help with French communication as needed.

Learning the tribal language took the senior Harrises longer than they planned and took more effort than they expected. Rosemary turned out to be the more natural language learner. Mike wouldn’t describe himself as a classroom person, but he worked diligently for 2 full years. His son remembers him “constantly studying vocab” and sitting with the men in the market for hours every day, practicing. “He’ll tell people he doesn’t speak well, but he really does,” Mike Jr. says. “And a lot is communicated in the nonverbals. People wonder, Are you an open person? Can I be comfortable in your presence? You don’t have to have all the words for that to come across.” Mike and Rosemary even lived with a West African family for six months, immersing themselves in local language, food, and traditions.

“We may not speak the language well,” Mike explains, “but we can communicate, and that creates a bond with the people.” The Harrises also wore local clothing, and people sometimes thanked them and commented, “The French would never do that.” Mike particularly enjoyed riding in the horse carts that served as public transportation and listening to people talk about him. Most villagers assumed any white foreigner only spoke French. At a dramatic moment, Mike would respond in the tribal language, to their surprise and usually delight.

Finding a Fit

Over time, the Harrises each found their fit in team and family life. For Mike, that meant continuing some of his language-learning habits. After working in sales for 30 years, he loved talking to people. He often walked through town in the morning, praying over his neighbors. He spent his afternoons in the market, where older men gathered to drink tea and chat, or he visited friends, always on the lookout for an opportunity to talk about Jesus. Mike gradually started visiting friends in their villages and participating in community events. He says it took years to earn enough respect to speak into people’s lives, but during a baby-naming ceremony, a local religious leader commented, “You are always a part of our community.”

“The community loves my parents.”
Mike Jr.

Mike believes growing up in a missionary family prepared him for this ministry of relationship building and friendship evangelism. “I was a white kid in a country of dark-skinned people,” he explains. “Being different in West Africa was no big deal. I didn’t have inhibitions or fears that I might not be able to connect. I love to joke, and God put us in the perfect country because the people there also love to joke.”

Some aspects of culture were harder to adapt to, however. After spending decades in professional careers, Mike and Rosemary both struggled with the West African concept of time. Unexpected visitors had to be treated as honored guests, not as interruptions, even if it meant putting off an appointment. “You stop and you take care of people, whatever the need is,” Mike explains. “We had to learn that.” Valuing people over schedules sounds nice in theory, but it can feel irritating when team meetings consistently start an hour late. Other cultural expectations could also cause frustration. Mike wanted to join the teenagers playing soccer but was told it wasn’t dignified for someone his age.

For Rosemary, ministry fell into two broad categories. One was helping run the joint household. Her daughter-in-law is a physician assistant, and her skills were in high demand. Rosemary took on much of the meal prep and cooking for the family to free Melissa up to serve the community’s medical needs. Multi-generational homes were normal to their West African neighbors. In fact, Mike Jr. says it would have looked strange if his parents had lived in a separate house. “One of their critiques of the West,” he explains, “is that we don’t take care of our parents. I’m the oldest son, so having my parents live with us gave us a lot of credibility within the culture.” And having grandparents on site was a blessing to the kids, their busy parents, and other families on the team.

Rosemary also supported the team with her finance background. She had worked as an administrative assistant for bank executives and put her experience to good use taking minutes at team meetings and preparing expense reports. “Nobody wanted to do them,” she says, “but I love it.”

Besides career skills, the Harrises’ life experience proved to be a valuable asset. People regularly sought them out for advice, young couples wanted to talk through marriage struggles, and a single teammate asked Rosemary to read her correspondence with her long-distance boyfriend for accountability. Mike appreciates how comfortable people felt around Rosemary (“You don’t share your love letters with just anybody!”). Several single missionaries from another team regularly traveled over an hour to spend the weekend with the Harrises. Admittedly, Rosemary’s cooking was part of the draw, but they also craved interaction with someone who had lived a lot more of life. For Mike and Rosemary, it was a mutual joy— “We were blessed by them, and they were hopefully blessed by what we did.”

“Give me a spreadsheet and I’m happy.”
Rosemary

During the Harrises’ early years in West Africa, their son led the team, which gave him a unique perspective. He noticed his dad could sit with “the old guys” in the market for hours on end, talking and listening and drinking tea. Culturally, Mike Jr. and the other men on the team were too young to join in. He points out, “Dad immediately had status in the community, and he immediately had a voice. People, from the very beginning, would meet my parents and realize, They have gray hair. We need to honor and respect them.”

As a team leader, Mike Jr. also appreciated his parents’ maturity during their first few years of language study and cultural adjustment— “Having had the ups and downs of life, even in America, made the transition much easier. They weren’t thrown off by every little thing.” But that didn’t mean the father-son dynamic on the team was always easy.

Family Friction

As young adults, all of Mike Sr.’s kids had worked for him in his furniture business. He was used to being their dad and their boss. Now his son was his team leader, and Mike Sr. wasn’t used to being told what to do. The friction surprised Rosemary, who believes part of it was spiritual warfare. “Living as a three-generation family, we could reach whole families with the gospel,” she explains. “Satan didn’t like that, and conflict is what he does best.” Mike assigns himself the blame— “To be real honest, it was my fault.”

“Finding the people who, even in their 60s and 70s, still have a learner mentality is really important.”
Mike Jr.

The reality is probably a combination of factors. Many new missionaries struggle with identity and self-confidence when they first move overseas and can’t yet communicate or function independently. The dynamic gets tougher when your team leader is 30 years younger than you but has more authority and more experience in the local context. Mike Jr. thinks even without the father-son relationship, integrating a retirement-age team member would have been challenging:

For most of your career, so much of what you do is defined by productivity. In a lot of mission contexts, productivity is not the end goal. The older you are, the harder it is to shift that mentality. You used to run your own business and be independent. Now you’re at the bottom of the team structure and don’t have much say in team decisions. Humility is required on all sides.

Looking back, Mike Jr. has great respect for his parents tackling cross-cultural, multi-generational ministry in a tough context. Their town was rural, blazing hot, and prone to dust storms. Their house had running water only intermittently, and for several years, only at night. Mike Jr. remembers hearing, while traveling abroad, that for days his parents back in West Africa hadn’t had enough water to rinse the sand off in the shower. “It’s a difficult place to live,” he says, “and they did it graciously.”

Losses and Leaving

Mike doesn’t remember life in West Africa being a tough experience and insists he didn’t miss the U.S. “I was on a golf league and really enjoyed it,” he says, “but God took those desires away from me. I had friendships, but I made friends with West Africans, too. It wasn’t like I was giving up anything.” He does acknowledge that daily 105- or 110-degree (Fahrenheit) temperatures could be uncomfortable.

The relational losses of moving overseas were harder for Rosemary. While they lived with their kids and grandkids in West Africa, they left a son, a daughter, and six more grandchildren behind. “I didn’t want our kids in the U.S. to feel we were choosing their brother over them,” she says.

The Harrises’ youngest child graduated from college right before they moved abroad, and they worried about her finding a job and a place to live without having them as a backup. The day she emptied her childhood room, she told her parents, “I kind of feel like I’m getting kicked out of my house.” The Lord provided her with a job and a good living situation in time for Mike and Rosemary to settle her in before they left. In a way, Rosemary is grateful for God’s “just in time” answers to prayer— “He showed both my daughter and me what He could do. If I had been able to rearrange the details and make everything fall into place, we wouldn’t have seen God’s provision. It was a very exciting time.”

While living in West Africa, the Harrises returned home every few years to visit family and connect with their church and donors. Rosemary also spent a month in the U.S. for a granddaughter’s birth. The most difficult sacrifice for her was time with her sister. “She was my hero and my champion in us doing this,” Rosemary explains. “Whenever I needed somebody to talk to, she was my go-to person.” Three years after the Harrises moved to Africa, Rosemary’s sister was diagnosed with dementia. Keeping in touch from afar became more difficult over time, and Rosemary grieved the slow loss of her sister, mentor, and confidant. “We missed those years,” she says, “but I wouldn’t change it.”

Full Circle to French

Mike and Rosemary left West Africa after 11 years of ministry because they needed access to medical care that wasn’t available in their rural town. They were both grateful they still owned a house to come back to, thanks to Rosemary’s practicality. A few months after their return, the Harrises’ pastor took them out to lunch. He and his wife were considering moving to France to start a ministry to refugees, and they sought out Mike and Rosemary for advice. “In a way,” Rosemary says, “I’m a little jealous. They’re just starting out.”

Rosemary can’t picture her life without missions. “What would I have been doing these past 11 years?” she wonders. Mike adds, “As much as you think you’re blessing or helping somebody out, you’re going to look back and notice how much God has worked in your life while you were away, and you’re going to be blessed by it.” Their kids echo the sentiment. In Melissa’s words,

Missions isn’t just for 20- and 30-year-olds. It isn’t just for singles. It isn’t just for pastors or businesspeople. There’s no one domain of what it means to be a missionary. We all need one another. Whoever you are, whatever your life experiences, God is able to bring all of that together so His glory shines.

The Lord has continued to provide Mike and Rosemary with opportunities to mentor and encourage others and to be involved in overseas ministry. Against all odds, Mike is now studying French. He leads trips from his church to serve immigrants in France, many of whom come from West Africa. He’s met two people who not only recognized the town where he and Rosemary lived but also knew their specific neighborhood. “I wish I had had more time to spend with them,” Mike says. “The rest of the team wanted to get going, and I was always dragging behind.” West Africa’s people-centric view of time has clearly rubbed off on him.