Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Come on in and get comfortable for episode 215 of Missions on Point we're in a series, From Here to There. The subtitle might be How to Get Sent to Your Mission Field. It's directed toward missionary candidates or those who think they might want to go into missions. This episode is focused on Get a Mentor. This episode will become a chapter in the third edition of the Here to There book, which we trust will be available before the end of the year. I've written other things on the special role of the missionary mentor in the development of a missionary candidate on the internet, but it's also available in the newly published book named after this podcast, Missions on Point, subtitled The Local Church at the Heart of Ecclesiology and Missiology. There is a chapter on the role of the missionary mentor in that book.

Over the course of many years, I've grown to believe that the role of missionary mentor is a very much needed role. Somehow it has been overlooked in the overall structure of training and developing a missionary candidate. Now, if you're a missionary candidate, I am begging you in this podcast to please find a missionary mentor. Ask, pray for, obtain, get a missionary mentor for your training process. Don't mistake the name missionary mentor as someone who has been a missionary or is presently a missionary. A mentor is just a wise, trusted guide, a sponsor, a counselor, a personal confidant. In our context, a mentor is someone who is mutually accepted by you as the missionary candidate, but also by your church leaders, to walk alongside the candidate through the qualification process in order to be sent by the local church.

So a couple of hidden factors are, first, that the missionary mentor is someone from your local church, your sending church. Missions agencies these days will often assign a coach to you if you become a member of the mission. The coach is supposed to act like a mentor to help you fulfill whatever extra qualifications that the mission requires you to have before you go to the field. But primarily, they're coaching you and holding you accountable for support raising. They're not necessarily experienced or wise or particularly godly or have a long-term interest in their relationship with you.

Secondly, an underlying factor that's not easily seen is that this mentor or the mentor role does not have to be one person through the whole time. It could be a tag team of persons who are specialists in their particular area or their particular concern for you. I know of a church who basically had one each of nine elders spend a month with the missionary candidate in touching on the different areas of finances, personal life, spiritual disciplines and marriage, parenting, comprehension and application of biblical and theological truths and the gospel, all of those different things over the course of time. So they were mentored by a tag team of people that were trusted by the church.

It also, due to circumstances, might be someone who has a very intense mentorship for a much shorter period of time than the whole training period of your months or years preparing to be sent out by your church. A common conclusion is a comprehensive assessment of you and your qualifications as a missionary at the end of your candidacy. When you're looking for a mentor, it doesn't necessarily have to be someone that you know and trust already, but as you counsel with your church leaders, they may know of someone who they would match you up with so to speak, so that you would have someone who's trusted by them and you learn to love and trust them as your mentor as time goes on. Obviously, this person or persons that we're looking for have high character qualifications themselves and they must be willing and open to open up their own life to speak into your life.

The mentor should be willing to open up the Bible to help you with teaching and reproof and correction and training and righteousness as needed. Obviously, it needs to be someone who you will be or become comfortable with praying about your concerns, your issues, your character, your opportunities, and your development as a missionary candidate. So again, obviously, it should be a godly Christian who loves missions and is willing to learn a lot about missions right alongside you as a candidate, who wants to walk you through the training and preparation for the mission field. In fact, this person will be a sounding board or a trusted evaluator on behalf of the church leaders to find out if you are indeed qualified to go when that time comes in.

The contrast between a mission agency coach and a mentor from your sending church is in part the idea that the mission agency and that coach wants to get you to the field as quickly as possible. Mostly, that means getting your support as quickly as possible. Your church mentor, on the other hand, wants you to be as highly qualified as possible and reasonable in the time you have and the particular field that you're going to. The mentor is going to encourage you to take it slower and do it really well. Interestingly, if the local church really accepts the centrality of the local church in the sending process, then their involvement will simplify and shorten this fundraising process significantly. That's often the biggest, longest duration hurdle that a missionary has to go over before they get to the field. But the church can help because the church becomes interested and involved through its whole network of affiliations and relationships, and the mentor becomes a key relationship in that whole matrix of the local church being involved.

Obviously, your mentor should be someone of the same gender as you, hopefully someone who has had more life experience and has the wisdom of time in their favor. Whenever a mission sending agency becomes involved, the agency needs to know your mentor's name and role and what all they've done with you over the course of your growth in training. In fact, your mentor may become your most valuable evaluator for missionary qualification. One of the analogies I use for missionary training through the church is the role of parents educating their children. Now, parents delegate a lot of educational input into their children's lives, whether it's through public or private schooling, homeschooling, co-op. The missionary mentor and the church may delegate formal and informal training outside the church to cover all that's needed in the biblical, theological, linguistic, and cultural training. The mentor is going to become that interface for making sure that your understanding of what training may be required by your church and your mission agency is actually accepted and embraced by you.

Your mentor needs to be able to speak the truth in love and to counsel and encourage you in your weaknesses, to strengthen those areas before you get to the field. It's not someone necessarily that understands missions so much, but someone that loves missions and loves missionaries because they love the Lord and love the gospel. Of course, this also means that your mentor should be someone who is going to make themselves available to spend some time with you, probably on a weekly basis. If you do formal training away from your church area, maybe that would stretch out to monthly basis, but they're checking up on you regularly. They're praying with you, they're hearing you out, your concerns, your needs, your troubles. Your mentor is going to help you cross the finish line and be well-prepared to enter missionary service as you are sent out from your sending church. Both you and your mentor should be acquainted with the main areas of qualification, which are also found in a number of resources, but we've developed for MissioSERVE a master missionary candidate training curriculum, and it includes everything that's possible for any missionary going anywhere.

Obviously, that would have to be trimmed and tailored to you in your specific situation, but just consider these major areas of growth and training. First is the area of being or character, and that's talking about your inner compulsion or missionary call. Really trying to wrap your hands around that and define that clearly so that you can communicate it to others. It means building or establishing strong personal spiritual disciplines. What we're talking about is your personal spiritual growth with the Lord, your time in the Word, your personal time in prayer, in witness, in meditation on the scripture. All of the spiritual disciplines. It also is taking a look at good dynamics in relationships with others. So if you have some corners or edges that need to be sanded off a bit and smoothed out, your mentor's going to recognize that and help you do it. Your mentor will also want you to fulfill qualifications of a church leader. Depending on your ministry, that may be equivalent to qualifications as an elder or as a deacon-level qualification. It's primarily character and actual ministry to others.

Another major area of being or character is integrity in all areas of life. And if your mentor is being faithful, they're going to ask you about how you handle money, how do you relate to money, as well as integrity in all areas of your life, morally, in understanding how pride and humility works, taking initiative and valuing cross-cultural relationships. Those are all part of your being or character.

The second major area is knowing or convictions, and this is simply Bible knowledge and comprehension, understanding of basic, systematic and biblical theology, biblical interpretation or hermeneutics, understanding of missions from the Bible's point of view and having convictions about that, as well as very practical ecclesiology. Knowing not only what the church is biblically with biblical definitions, but how the church acts dynamically. And to get that, you're going to have to interact with your church leaders and with others' both practical study and experience.

The third major area has to do with experience. It's about doing or competencies, and so you would be expected, and the mentor would help you, to walk through a broad range of church ministry experience. Seeing how the local church works with getting your hands dirty in it. Leadership and teaching skills. Also, other kinds of skills besides the local church, in the workplace and business experience, which is so needed in today's world of missions, particularly in limited access or closed countries. Your communication skills. Your ability to use personal organization to get things done. Whatever other short-term missions, experience, and internships you might do both locally and cross-culturally. Hopefully your mentor will be able to help you with strategic thinking and planning and goal-setting skills, or put you in touch with someone who can help you with that. Prayerfully consider and seek counsel about who or what situation will provide a missionary mentor for you in your training to be sent by your local church.

The missionary mentor role is a valuable role within the local church. The effectiveness of the mentor can make or break whether the candidate really qualifies or how well they qualify. And the missionary mentor might even disagree with the missionary candidate's qualification if that is necessary. And if that is necessary, believe it or not, it is a mercy from God that they would speak up and let it be known and then try to work things out. If you haven't realized it already, as a missionary candidate, sending missionaries out to the field from the United States to unreached people groups costs a lot of money. The stewardship and commitments made by people around you as the missionary are crushed if you have to return from the field too soon or earlier than expected because of a lack of preparation and readiness. By God's grace, your missionary mentor will be used in your life to enable you to withstand the rigors of life on the field, encouraging you and challenging you to fully qualify for the long haul for God's glory.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust you'll find more help and resources on our websites, at propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.