Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions. Come on in to episode 220 of Missions on Point. We're in a series from Here to There, How to Get Sent to Your Mission field. Today, the topic is get fully qualified. What we mean by that is get fully qualified toward full and final approval from both your mission agency and your local sending church. If you've been tracking along, you know that you've been building a strong foundational relationship with your local church to send you to the field. It may feel to you like a long and grueling process. You just want to get to the field and you've wanted to get to the field for quite some time now. We've been through a lot already and all the steps from your first inklings of having a missionary call to where you are now. Let me remind you that you want to be a missionary that is going to be effective and fruitful for the long haul.

Life on the mission field is no picnic. You want to be fully qualified in every way in order to withstand the storms and trials that you will face on the mission field. Some of those will be internal to you and your own heart. You really do want the affirmation and validation of your local sending church that you are the right person to send to the field. We've gone through no small efforts to find the right missions agency as a match for you to go to your field and your proposed ministry on the field. Mission agencies offer experience that can help local churches send missionaries. Well, the training they require helps missionaries and their churches avoid wasting precious time and resources. Just think about professionals in other areas of work that require a lot of time to earn their credentials. Physicians in the medical world and almost anybody with a certification or license in the medical world, engineers, we're talking years of graduate work and experience under close supervision and evaluation before they get that license. Nearly every tradesman has a similar track of training, experience, observation, and assessment.

On the other hand, there are a few people that think that they need to study academically and experientially so much that they may never get to the field. Those people are practically addicted to the academic credentialing system and it's a lot more comfortable to stay in classes training than it is to actually go out and do the work. The most obvious example of that in my experience is missionaries who have been used to achieving high grades all through their schooling career. Then they come to the field and they want to study the language by books and audio so much that they are afraid to get out into the public and actually use it because they'll make mistakes and they're not used to making mistakes. Often those people get scored a lot lower on language acquisition because they're just afraid to get out there and use it and practice and do better and better through the practice.

There is something of a biblical principle that applies to help your mindset in this. Too often you probably have heard from other missionary candidates that they want to hurry through the qualification process and keep even the language learning process to a minimum so that they can do the real work of missions ministry. This seems intuitive, but it's incorrect.

In first Samuel 30 verses 24 and 25, we drop into a scene in which David, even before he became king, went out and defeated an enemy group. There were some of his men that were too tired to go across the river to finish the battle and they had a huge pile of loot that they collected from the defeated enemy. David allowed 200 men to stay by the stuff and guard it while the others pursued the enemy to finally completely defeat them. When they came back, the guys that had gone on in the battle didn't want to share the loot with the guys who stayed and David said, "For as his share is who goes down into the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the baggage. They shall share alike," and he made it a statute and a rule for Israel from that day forward to this day.

What he was saying was guarding the baggage was just as important as going into the battle itself. This is reflected in the New Testament when Paul says that the Philippian church shared in all things with him for the fruit of his missionary ministry and in third John the Apostle John writing it tells his brother Gaius a church leader, that those who are supporting these missionaries are fellow workers for the truth. The extension of this principle is that you're doing the work when you are training to do the work. There's nothing less in status because of training and qualifying for the work of the ministry. Studying to learn the language is not any less a reward than actually going out and using the language to share the gospel.

The point is you stay faithful doing the right things in your time and God will bless it. You'll not miss out on the reward, so to speak, of seeing the fruit of the gospel in the lives of others, so we want to have that balance of being fully qualified and yet not sort of overqualified so that it takes longer time. Usually, the missions agency is going to give certain requirements for all their missionaries before they go to the field, and we've addressed this and a lot of the training that is local church based, some of it formal and external to the church, other parts of it, informal and related directly to church ministry and experience. Biblical and theological training is one of those foundation stones. Language learning or language acquisition training is a key skill to gain before leaving for the field, especially if learning languages has been difficult for you.

Most people in cultures around the world have been exposed to other languages and at least have to have some minimal fluency in some other language than their own. Americans, on the other hand, are notably monolingual. So you might be required to attend a semester of language acquisition techniques or of linguistics like at Summer Institute of Linguistics or some other language acquisition course related to the majority language of the place you're going through mission training international or Compass or even a local university that has special classes in the major language that you're heading toward. You'll also want to do some study in world religions, particularly the target people group majority religion like Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or animism as applicable. It's not uncommon for new appointees, especially those who are married and those who have children to go through a sequence of counseling. It's a good thing to start this practice of seeking outside help and counsel to improve your relationships within your marriage or your family.

You need to have some good tools in your toolbox for repairing those relationships or improving those relationships or having ongoing shepherding of your children. You might have some final requirements expected of you which are unique to your particular field or team. Once you know the field team with which you'll be working, that team may require certain before you can begin work with the team. The mission agency may require you to study and understand their organizational structure, their agency policies and positional statements, team philosophy and dynamics. Such requirements have often been developed after previous new members have encountered difficulty without such training in advance, so take it seriously. Of course, you'll be expected to raise support. You may be required to take special training in support raising. Listen to the next episode on get a support team. Support raising or partnership development can be daunting. However, consider this. All of the skills required for support raising resemble skills required for church planting.

You need to learn how to communicate intangible truth and vision. You need to have skill in meeting with strangers who you pray will become new friends. You need to be depending completely on God for results. In support raising, you're pulling a committed group of people and supporting churches together into a partnership for ministry. It happens to be your ministry. In church planting, you'll be pulling newly committed people together into a partnership for ministry as a local church body. Let me just pick out a few key ideas from the areas of training that we've already covered earlier and will show up in an appendix on the master missionary candidate training curriculum. The first one is character. We're talking about integrity. People who are assessing your integrity are going to ask others around you. If you have integrity, meaning that you have a single story, you're not two-faced, that everything about you is consistent in your relationships, in the way you talk and act in public and in private.

Another area is debt or finances, how you handle it, how you manage it. Do you actually have the skills to manage your finances well? Do you have an inordinate amount of debt? In more than one case, I've prevented candidates from even trying to go to the field without eliminating their debt. What about in the area of morality and how you conduct yourself around people of the opposite sex? This includes having victory over pornography in your private life. Basic relationship skills are important. There are one or two people that I would've said should have hesitated to go to the field until they built up better relationship skills because they were able to get all the way through college and maybe even graduate work based in an academic classroom kind of environment without having really good relationship skills and you must have better relationship skills to thrive cross-culturally and on a team of other knuckleheaded missionaries that need to get along together.

Certainly you need to have observable spirit of servanthood. One of the little acronyms that's used a lot, you'll find different versions of it out there, but this is the one I like. It is the acronym of FAITH, F-A-I-T-H, faithful, available, intentional, teachable, and a heart for God. One characteristic I would add to that is someone who takes initiative, doesn't wait to be asked or figuring it out before they actually take a step. These character attributes ought to be observable by anyone that watches you closely. The second major area is in convictions or knowing and in this you need to have a level of awareness and evidence of teachability. In other words, you're not a know-it-all about theology or bible stuff or spirituality. You want to know things, but part of that is knowing that you don't know it all and that you have a drive, a desire to seek to know more and better how to understand and how to apply truth in your life.

The third major area is competencies, and this is skill and commendation and service with excellence. The last part of being fully qualified is to virtually qualify as a church leader. This doesn't mean that you get voted into the position or have the title, but you certainly need to have a sense of leadership in ministry, in the church. In whatever department or specialty of ministry, you need to know enough and have enough experience that the church would feel comfortable with you being the leader there. If you are a guy and you're looking toward being a pastoral-level leader on the field, you need to have the first Timothy three and Titus one qualifications of an elder, and if you're not, then you should at least have the qualifications of a deacon. If you're joining a church planting team, it would be wise for you to have permission to at least be able to sit in as an observer in an elder's or pastoral meeting sequence so that you understand how messy people work is and the dynamics and tension around the table in coming to a unified position or decision on a topic.

You need to see that and feel that and have an understanding that this is what real church life is as you plant a church. Win the approval of your church leaders to do that and make sure that you understand the inner workings, the behind-the-scenes, the leadership room atmosphere for church leadership before you go to the field. You're very close to the finish line. Keep pressing forward. Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that 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.