Chapter 8

 

Community Identity

 

 

            As we saw in Chapter 7, when Paul (a TCK) was taken into protective custody,  the arresting officer asked who he was.  Paul replied in Greek, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia,…” (Acts 21:39).  Paul found his identity not only in his passport and host cultures, but also in his community, the city in which he had lived as a child.  Of course, Paul was known as Saul earlier in his life, and Christians today often refer to him as “Saul of Tarsus” to differentiate him from King Saul in the Old Testament.  Being from Tarsus gave him a positive identity—he was from an important city known all over the world.

            A few minutes later when he addressed the crowd, Paul said in Aramaic, “I am a Jew born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city…” (Acts 22:3).  He found additional identity in the community where he had lived as a teenager while he was away from home studying theology.  Jerusalem was the capital of the nation, and it also had an important part of forming his identity.

            In Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “I am a part of all that I have met.”  That is true.  Part of your identity comes from the places you have lived, people you have known, and so forth.  The longer you live in a place and the deeper you become involved, the more of your identity comes from it.  We all recognize this when we ask someone, “Where are you from?” (A question all TCKs dislike because they are not sure how to answer it).

 

New Testament Times

 

            New Testament people were sometimes identified by adding the region they were from to their name, such as “Judas the Galilean” (Acts 5:37).  This indicated that Judas was from the northern part of Palestine in an area called Galilee, an area in which people had a distinctive accent in their speech.  These people were not as “pure-blood” as the Jews further south in Judea, so the people of Judea looked down on the people in Galilee.  Of course, between Galilee and Judea was the region of Samaria.  Samaritans were even more racially mixed than those in Galilee, so people from both Judah and Galilee looked down on the Samaritans!  Although Judas may not have been proud of being from Galilee, at least it gave him an identity.

            At other times New Testament people were identified by adding the town or city where they were from, such as “Jesus of Nazareth.”  This phrase occurs in the first Chapter of John where Philip told Nathaniel, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law, and about whom the prophets also wrote--Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

            “Nazareth!  Can anything good come from there?” Nathaniel asked.

            Why would Nathaniel make such a comment?  Although we hold Nazareth in reverence today, such was not the case at that time.  First, Nazareth was in Galilee.  Strike one.  Second, few people had even heard of Nazareth—it was not important enough even to be mentioned in the Old Testament. Strike two.  Third, Jews who had heard of it but lived in other places considered Nazareth a town of low moral and religious standards.  Strike three.  Thus Nathaniel’s question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Again, although it was negative, being from Nazareth gave him an identity.

 

USA Years Ago

 

            Throughout history people have been greatly influenced by the community where they grew up because the community was a real part of their upbringing.  Cornell psychologist Urie Bonfenbrenner (1970, Two Worlds of Childhood, New York, Russell Sage Foundation, p. 96) wrote about his growing up in New York as a Russian immigrant in the 1920s.  “And it wasn’t just your relatives.  Everybody in the neighborhood minded your business.  Again this had its two aspects.  If you walked on the railroad trestle, the ‘phone would ring at your house, and your parents would know what you had done before you got back home.  People on the street would tell you to button your jacket, and ask why you were not in church last Sunday.”  Whether the children liked it or not, they at least knew that people cared.

            Louis Sullivan, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the 1980s, growing up in Georgia in the 1930s said, “I was not just the child of my parents--I was in fact a child of the entire neighborhood.  When I was out of sight of the folks and thought I could get away with something, Mr. Jones or Mrs. Smith down the block was sure to step in and administer corrective caring--whether I liked it or not” (Reader’s Digest, August, 1991, p. 121).   He noted that his neighborhood constantly reinforced particular values, such as self-esteem, self discipline, responsibility, and service.

 

USA Today

 

            This influence is not nearly so likely to happen in the USA in the twenty-first century.  If adults told children (other than their own) to button their jackets, the children would likely tell them to mind their own business.  If other adults stepped in and “administered corrective caring,” they might be sued by the children’s parents.  What has happened to change this sense of community identity?

 

What can adolescent TCKs do?

 

            Of course, adolescent TCKs have no control over many of the things that have resulted in a loss of community identity.  TCKs move at least as much as the people who live in only one culture all their lives—and they often move far more often.  They have no control over whether they live in a large city or a small town, where they go to school, whether they ride a bus, and so forth.  However, there are some things they can do to get a community identity.