Episode 257 Training for the Sending Church 8 of 10 – Elevation 1 of 3

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

Hello, and thanks for joining us for episode 257 of Missions on Point. 
We're on number eight in a series on training for the sending church. 

These last few episodes in the series will deal with what we call elevation. 
We first started with evaluation, asking a lot of questions about the history of the church and the present status of missions in the church. Then we talked about education and primarily the education was focused on leadership, church leadership and missions leadership. Training and teaching people what difference it makes and how you go about doing local church centered missions. This last section will deal with elevation. And in that I mean going to the church congregation and making everyone more aware than they have been before and bringing them into the circuit of responsibility. It's raising everyone's awareness, understanding and responsibility in the process of being a sending church. 

So let's just think about a few things in categories of doing. 
These are things that now the church leadership and missions leadership should be doing. 

Number one is teaching. Now would be an excellent time to have a special series from the pulpit on Sunday mornings about missions and especially in the local church's role in missions. You can find lots of guidance for that in past episodes of missions on point and in the book entitled Missions on Point: The local church at the heart of ecclesiology and missiology. I suggest adult Sunday school classes or adult Bible study groups, but you can also fold in the teens in that. The youth group needs to get this same kind of awareness. It will help solve a lot of problems in the future if they have a better biblical vision for the local church's role in missions and in potentially their role in missions, whether going as a missionary or staying as a sender. I would encourage you to invest some time in researching some of the past titles and series of missions on point podcast, because there are good examples in there of teaching missions through missionary biographies, through biblical material, through key terms, through missiology, through a variety of different ways that could be of great interest and help to you in teaching missions for the whole church. 

In this area of elevation. Discipleship in missions has a wonderful impact on other areas of Christian growth and church life. Discipleship in missions means training and encouraging people to be obedient to the Lord. It means being humble and having a servant attitude, being teachable so that you can gain in skill and equipping for ministry. Certainly any plans that you may have for short-term missions should include a multi-week training program in which all the participants, including the leaders, walk through some biblical core issues of the heart in terms of how they serve and how they view what they're doing in short-term missions. Then you will want to develop what we call a pipeline. That in and of itself does not qualify a person to be sent and to go. So everyone in the process, including your whole congregation needs to know that it takes time and effort to be qualified in every area of character and convictions and competencies in ministry, especially for cross-cultural competencies in church planting, which is our goal. Another part of this area of organizational is putting together a Barnabas team. If you have a missionary that originates from your church and is sent out to the field, it's great to have a Barnabas team for them. It's a prayer and care team. It's a specialized little group of people that are focused on caring for that missionary and communicating with them in such a way as to be that hub of two-way communication for the church, but also to make sure that that missionary knows our church really cares for you and wants to do whatever it takes to put our arms around you and help you make it through long-term on the field to do that thing that you're sent to do on the field. 

Another area and opportunity for elevation is some kind of annual missions event. I am still surprised to find that many otherwise very good churches in many ways do not have an annual missions emphasis type of event. They may say that they do something quarterly, which is often quite short and abbreviated as a part of the regular programming of the church. But I'm talking about making a big deal about missions at least once a year. That annual missions event is a great time to roll out new ideas and let the whole congregation be elevated to understand missions in a fresh new way. New ideas like the local church's role in missions, including the equipping and verification of the missionary call and jointly discovering who that partner mission agency would be and what the field would be and then shepherding and sending them while they're on the field like forever. New ideas like the annual missions event would be and you can introduce new roles or positions that handle those kinds of things. Things like mentors and the Barnabas or Prayer and Care Team. Things like a renewed or refreshed missions committee or missions team. And the elders commitment to doing missions well and biblically as a sending local church. It is an exciting time. But of course, there will be a lot of questions. Most people coming to a local church come from a wide variety of understanding or lack thereof of world missions from their church background. And they probably have never seen a church like yours is becoming to be a sending church. So you'll field a lot of questions. They're not going to be challenging in the sense of wanting you to stop what you're doing, but challenging in the sense of, hey, this is a new thing. We're learning how to do this together and you can be a part of it. Our church is going to be better because of this and our missions is going to be a lot better because of this. 

Fourthly, in this area of elevation and communication and acceptance among the whole church body, you have an opportunity to recruit new people to do special roles in missions. We talked about missionary candidates having a long-term mentor or a circuit or a series of long-term mentors to help them through the preparation process and then ultimately be a part of that Barnabas team or the long-term serving and support team for that missionary. But you very well may want to reconstitute the membership of your missions committee or your missions team or whatever label you guys put on that group. So just thinking about doing that means that you have to back up a step and actually provide them with written information about the requirements, the qualifications for those roles, how those roles operate, what are the scope and work of that particular role, and that becomes part of the body of the documents that frame the missions team and all of those roles about Barnabas team, mentors, and so forth. 

The fifth thing in this area of elevation is screen for missionary candidates. And what that means is that people interested and involved in missions, maybe praying for missions, should get together and just have a jam session conversing about who are the most likely missionary candidates in our church. It might be that the Lord has already provided some people for you that know that they're interested in missions and want to pursue that. It may be that you have a Timothy sort of situation where the church leaders actually tap somebody on the shoulder and say, Hey, you're needed on the mission field with this missionary. Why don't you prepare and go? We call that the draft. It's conscripting qualified people to do that ministry. It is a good practice from time to time to take a step back and think through who has been through our short-term missions programs. Who has a special gift or inclination to work cross-culturally with people that are different than themselves? Does anyone have experience or inclination to learn another language? Are they interested in becoming a missionary? Could they be interested in becoming a missionary sent out from our church? I know a number of churches that do this with some regularity, approximately annually, where the church leaders get together and say, Who's a candidate for church leadership? Why not include who's a candidate for being a missionary? 

The last thing in Elevation is maybe the first thing in some respects. It is to pray that you have a prayer emphasis. Lord, these are new things happening in our church. We're getting fresh vision from your word to be a sending church. So please help us find those missionaries that you want us to send out. Please guide us to the strategic focus of whatever people group or ministry or unreached people group area you would like us to focus on. Those prayers can be fueled by good demographic information that's available online and in some books. Traditionally, Operation World has been a fantastic resource. It may be that your own survey of your congregation would show that there is a particular inclination toward a particular area of the world or particular language group, which your church should pay attention to. So begin to have a prayer emphasis, maybe some special prayer meetings scheduled, but just include it and weave it in to the warp and woof of your fabric as a church to pray for missions and to seek God's leading and guiding with respect to finding new missionaries and sending them out to the right places. I pray that your church will grow in excitement and anticipation of what God will do through your church in sending and supporting missionaries. 

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.