Missions on Point Episode 255 Training for the Sending Church
Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions. Hello and welcome to episode 255 of Missions on Point. This is the sixth in a series on training for the sending church. It's the second in a segment of that series on education.
There are so many things I want to squeeze into this episode, and some of them are sort of basic life lessons, but applied to the church in this particular aspect of learning how to do missions better and training as a sending church.
One of the great problems we have in church life is that churches tend to measure themselves by themselves. That is, they look at last year's statistics and metrics and they say, we want to do a little bit better, or maybe we want to do a lot better in many things. And often, missions is just even left out of the equation altogether. We want to do better in attendance. We want to do better in incoming members. We want to do better in community outreach. We want to do better in evangelism. And we contrive metrics that specifically try to measure those outcomes so that we can compare year to year.
Have you ever heard of a church saying, how can we do better in missions besides giving? And yes, giving is one of those things we want to measure. How much better is it for us to measure against benchmarks that are objective and not from ourselves? That's what the church missions profile does. So if you go to sendforward.org or propempo.com and look for the church missions profile, you'll find a description there of how to compare your church in 12 aspects of missions. This is part of your education and growth is to learn how to think about missions in your church overall and grade yourself in this self-assessment church missions profile. I urge you and your church to do this.
Another key I want to urge you to consider as you think about becoming a missionary or being a missionary sending church, or even if you're a mission agency person who's listening, you want to not be in a hurry. Don't be in a hurry. Missionary, don't be in a hurry to get to the field as soon as possible. If you do that, you're much more likely to fail. Church, don't be in a hurry in learning how to grow as a sending church and learning how to equip and develop your missionary candidate. The goal is not to get them there quicker. The goal is to get them there really well equipped to stay for the long haul.
Missions agency, don't be in a hurry to get that new candidate to the field as soon as possible. You will be taking shortcuts on their equipping, on their character, on their understanding of cross-cultural missions, and even on their understanding of the local church and how that plays into not only their support, but their end goal on the field. So accepting and pushing candidates out to the field sooner and more quickly than they're truly ready to go is fooling yourself. It's shooting yourself in the foot. They're going to fail, and the mess that's created may cause more problems than if they never went. Don't be in a hurry.
Another key life lesson is for your leading pastoral leadership to go on a field visit to visit a missionary that you support, perhaps one of the more beloved missionaries that you support. One of the tricks to this is to not have that pastor or missions leader go to the field in order to set up public ministry for themselves. It's not a preaching tour. It's not putting the visitor from the U.S. on display. It is the shepherding of a local church pastor or missions leader shadowing the missionary and finding out what their life is really like.
Now, we've covered this in a few earlier episodes of Missions on Point, but I'll just race through them now. When someone goes to the field representing the church, they ought to be there to understand the missionary's life and ministry better. That means that they have the right to go through a checklist for a field visit, to ask deep questions about:
- the missionary couple and individual's personal spiritual life,
- their marriage and family relationships,
- how are their children adjusting on the field,
- what about their team relationships,
- and relationships with their neighbors and the locals with whom they have some kind of business or social relationship with?
- How deep and how quality is their language and culture learning? We must insist that a missionary's language be more than tourism language. It needs to go deep enough to actually teach intangible truths found in the scripture.
- What are their stresses and needs and concerns?
- How are their finances doing?
- Are they good at communication with their supporters and particularly their home or sending church?
- What are their priorities and goals for the short term and the long term?
- Does that fit into the church's goal and vision for what missionary work they should be involved in?
- What particular strategy and methodology are they using? Is that dictated to them? Do they have a little bit of flexibility in that? Are they following a particular pattern? Are they taking things just day by day and "let's see what happens?"
- Find out from them what's going on with that.
- Ask them about their personal health. And ask them about their agency relationship. How's it going with their agency? Are they satisfied with their agency?
- What might be done better for the church relating to the missionary? And even the agency relating to the missionary?
Running through this checklist with a field visit is invaluable. And it is part of the education process of the local church as a sending church to find out those areas in which you can serve your missionary better. You can train your missionary better. You can shepherd your missionary better. Whoever has that wonderful privilege of traveling to visit your missionary on the field and visit with them at that level has that missionary and that ministry injected into their veins. It's going to come out in their messages, in their teaching, in their prayers, in their decisions about other missionaries because it just influences them with the reality of life on the field. They get to see and taste and feel and experience what life for their missionary is like. And it changes their whole perspective on missions in general on behalf of the church.
Now, we get calls and email inquiries all the time from churches who have something that is precipitating their awareness that they have a need to grow as a sending church. It's fantastic. It's an answer to prayer. We love taking those calls and responding to churches to help them grow in their understanding of local church-centered missions biblically. We always start with the Bible and good Bible definitions, which we've covered in a couple of previous episodes.
But I want to just give you a little snippet of real life in a number of churches and how we've helped them with their precipitating factors to grow as a sending church.
One church in South Florida called us and needed help for refreshment and recalibration because their missions had grown so much that it was just unmanageable. They didn't really know their missionaries well. They were supporting a whole lot of them and didn't have a vital connection between the missionary, their ministry, and their local church.
Another church called in need of some help because they were ready to send someone and they were seeking balance in local ministry versus domestic cross-cultural ministry within their own state and remote, unreached people group ministry and how to train people for that very specialized, deep-kneed place.
Another church in Missouri called us because they knew about our teaching. We had visited their church before, but their church really wasn't ready. However, when they got a new senior pastor, it changed the whole ballgame. They were open to reevaluating and trying to understand their role better as they moved forward in sending people from their own church. So leadership change was the precipitating factor.
A church in Virginia called us because they needed fresh vision. They had expanded in missions and gone deep in missions for a good number of years, but they wanted to know what's next. And they just felt like having a strategic focus was great, but they also wanted to include trained pastoral leaders from Mexico that they were related to as the fruit of their ministry in Mexico. So they wanted a cross-cultural team that included Mexican pastors with American elder-qualified brothers to go to the Middle East.
A church in Alaska called us because they wanted to get their missions straightened out and more focused. And yet one of the precipitating factors in their mind is they had a long-term supported missionary from the church that took a hard left turn doctrinally and just was not compatible with the church. They needed help in knowing how to define where the boundaries and the guardrails were for keeping missionaries in line with their own doctrinal and ecclesiological persuasions.
A church in Florida called us because they had too many missionaries with too little definition of what it means to be a missionary. A whole lot of different types of ministries. They had little relationship or focus and they needed as the whole leadership of the church, all the pastors and elders and missions people of the church needed help in defining what are the parameters, where are we going, and how do we get there. They are so much more delighted now than they were when they called me, and they've got an active and well-groomed missions outreach in especially focused places of the world.
A church in Georgia I worked with for a long time basically had new candidates that needed equipping and focus and sending, and the big questions were, where do we go? How do we get there? How do we equip them through the long process, not being in a hurry, to be well-qualified missionaries to go to that place that we mutually agree on?
Another church in Texas called because they felt like they really weren't understanding missions biblically enough to enter into the arena, as it were, to be able to send people from their church. Besides that, short-term missions had taken over the church. It was going crazy. So many church people were being involved in short-term missions that were not under the direction or guidance of their own local church, so it was kind of getting out of hand. They needed to understand how that fit into the whole big picture of long-term missions and how they could be involved in sending someone of their own.
A church in Tennessee called because they lacked focus. They didn't really understand where they were going. It was being driven by all kinds of relationships connected with church members instead of being driven by the leadership and understanding this is how we want our church to go. When they did a survey with our recommendations, they discovered that so many of their church members were working in medical fields and involved in short-term medical missions without any kind of target involved or no consistency with their church members. They were going out under all kinds of other agencies instead of the church taking the lead in focusing their ministry to assist with church planting and leadership development through medical means on fields where they have strong relationships.
A church in North Carolina called because they wanted to have a priority of going to unreached people groups and they wanted to know the step-by-step of how to do that. They were an affluent church and had a lot of things going on in missions, but they had never taken the initiative to guide the whole church in terms of praying and focusing on an unreached people group and going there. They developed a 10-year plan to actually focus about three years at a time on different ones of the neediest people groups of the world.
So there you have it. Education partly depends on the initiative, maybe guided initiative, of the local church leaders saying, We need help. We want to be more focused and do missions better. And ultimately, we want to see God be glorified in raising up well-equipped missionaries from our church that we can shepherd for the long term as we do our part in fulfilling the Great Commission.
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.
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