Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions On Point, The Propempo Perspective on Church and Missions. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited about the beginning of a short new series of four parts that are going to help you understand how to evaluate your church missions ministries. One of the key problems that we have in churches, is that we don't even know how to evaluate our church missions ministries.

Most often churches tell me many times over, that the way they evaluate most all of their ministries, including missions, is simply to compare with what they did the year before. If they have great foresight, maybe it'll be comparing to what they did five or 10 years ago. Rarely does a church tell me that they want to evaluate their missions ministries or any ministries of their church with a view toward what they want their church to become five or 10 years from now. Usually, they're evaluating their church based on past history, and that isn't necessarily a good goal. What are the benchmarks? If you compare yourself with yourself, you have no external benchmark for deciding what would be a good thing or what would be not so good.

Over years and years of experience working with churches, we've developed what we call the church missions profile. It is an objectivised self-assessment profile where you look at 12 different areas of missions ministry. I'll bet you didn't know there were 12 areas of missions ministry, but we'll look at 12 different areas of missions ministry and do an evaluation based on the best practices of the best churches in those 12 areas. This church mission profile process is available in two different ways on our website. One is if you go to the store, you can buy sort of a paper version of it, but the more important one is the online dynamic version in which you pay a small amount so that you can go through the process, answer the items of the 12 areas, and it produces a result in a PDF format with recommendations specifically individualize for your church and your assessment so that you can grow to the next level in each of the 12 areas.

I would encourage you to do that. You can simply go to propempo.com and click on the button near the top of the page to start your church missions profile. Listen to these four episodes of missions on point to get the overview of all 12 categories of evaluation. As you take the church missions profile, you're going to be evaluating your church on what we call the P scale. It's a scale from one to six, from low to high in each of the 12 areas, and we've described it this way. The descriptors in each of the 12 areas relate to these six levels, beginning with possibility. Missions is just a possibility. We hope to get involved in missions. Our church maybe could do thus and so. The next level is project. We have a few missions interests, so our church occasionally gets involved with such and such.

The third level is program. Missions is really visible in our church life. Our church regularly does these kinds of things in missions. The fourth level is priority. Missions is a priority. It's very important to our church. Our church gives priority to these kinds of things, and our missions ministries. The fifth level is purpose. Our church thinks that missions is an essential reason for our church's existence, so our church focuses on these certain things and missions. And the final, the last, the highest P in the P scale is passion. Missions is integrated into the life of the whole church. Our church makes most important the functions of ministries in such and such a way. Today we're going to work on just the first three of the 12 areas. That is biblical foundations, local outreach, and missions education. Biblical foundations is the first and essential area in missions.

Your church needs to understand that the exercise of missions ministries is entirely biblical, so the first level of possibility is our church is open to learning about the biblical basis of missions. Maybe you've had no experience in that before or never been taught that, or had a pastor that really understood the biblical basis of missions. I would encourage you to go back and listen some of the earlier episodes of missions on point and discover some of those things. The second level is project. It means sometimes we have meetings that communicate the biblical basis of missions, maybe a once a year sermon on missions. The third level is program. Our church has an annual missions emphasis during which the biblical basis of missions is communicated. Maybe it's a whole weekend on missions or maybe it's a couple of weekends on missions or what historically used to be called a missions conference.

The fourth level is priority. It means that we frequently communicate the biblical basis for missions in a variety of contexts. The fifth level is purpose. Our church almost every week in some way communicates that God's glory proclaimed to all nations is a central purpose of the church. The highest level on benchmarks for this area is passion. We actively seek to help each individual study and understand God's heart for the nations from scripture. So I want you to see that every one of these levels of assessment for biblical foundations is actionable. There's something that you can do to have your church reach that level. Ideally, every church would be striving to reach the highest level, the highest benchmark, a passion level for missions across all 12. But I know from experience that rarely does that happen. There is no church out there that scores the highest on their self-assessment of every single one of these 12 areas of missions.

So take the ones that are high and keep working on them. Take the ones that are low and give some special attention year by year to increase it so that your vision for missions in the church actually has this five to 10 year goal of getting much better in implementation and effectiveness in each of the 12 areas. The next category we'll look at is local outreach. Local outreach actually has two prongs to it. It is important for emissions, but there's two sort of different directions that can happen. One is simply evangelistic outreach. It's reaching your own community with the gospel. In what ways is your church actively evangelizing through the members of your church in the context of the community? Not always inside the church walls, but outside the church walls. But there is another sort of aspect to it, and that has to do with reaching internationals, having a cross-cultural component in a local context in your community or in your metro area.

Do you have those kinds of ministries going on? So let's go from low to high on local outreach. It is basically a measure of how inwardly or outwardly focused your church is. The first and possibility level is we desire to get involved in or support outreach beyond our local church ministries. The next level is our church has done local evangelism and/or compassion ministries in our community. The third level of local outreach is our people participate in several local outreach oriented ministries, whether that's sponsored by the church or sponsored by a group of churches or some outside organization. The fourth priority level is our church trains and deploys individuals in outreach ministries in our community and beyond. So if you checked that level, you would say, I think our church intentionally trains people to get involved in outreach ministries beyond the walls of our church.

The fifth level is we intentionally and consistently equip and deploy individuals in local cross-cultural outreach ministries. So here we've entered into the cross-cultural aspect of things. It's not just about people that are just like us per se, but it involves specifically thinking about and reaching out to internationals or cross-culturally within your neighborhood, your community, your metroplex. The highest level, the passion level of local outreach is our church seeks to proactively train and deploy members in local outreach ministries. This is an expectation for every member. It is the church teaches and models and trains and deploys people in such a way that every member potentially could get involved in some level of local outreach, whether that is evangelism just of their neighbors, their team, their coworkers, their classmates, or gets involved in local cross-cultural outreach as well. So the third and last area we'll cover on the church missions profile today is missions education.

This is part of the overall category of leadership of missions, and it means that the leadership of the church really takes an active role in helping everyone in the church know about missions from the Bible and what their role might be individually and corporately as a church body. The number one lowest level, the possibility level of missions education is our church is interested in learning more about missions. The second level is we have some awareness of missions through the projects we do, so we may be involved with some projects and we learn a little bit about missions through those projects. The third level, next level up is missions is taught from the pulpit in the classroom and in small groups on special occasions, maybe not all year round, maybe not always referring to that or connecting the dots, but on special occasions we get information and education about missions.

The fourth level is the priority level, and this descriptor for self-assessment says missions is taught periodically through multiple venues to all age groups. So whether it's the youngest Sunday school class or the oldest adult class, missions is taught periodically through some means. There may be some regular emphases on it year by year. It may be part of the curriculum, but certainly it is intentionally taught on all venues at sometimes. The fifth or purpose level is missions is taught regularly and faithfully through multiple venues to all age groups. This might mean that a church has special interest missions classes for those who are interested not in just becoming missionaries, but in the whole missions world, history of missions and what's going on now in missions and issues related to missions and missionary life, and how challenging it is to bring the gospel to unreached people, areas of the world.

Those kinds of things are in that level. The highest level is the passion level, and the assessment says this. Our commitment to the world is evident every week in multiple ways, especially through our leaders. This has such a high level of consciousness that regularly in the prayers from the platform in Sunday school classes scattered throughout the ministries of the church and throughout the week, leaders continually point people to the work of God around the world in missions and keep this mission's education and awareness level high. When you actually do the church mission's profile dynamic online self-assessment, not only will you be marking yourselves in these areas, but it's going to give you a results report with recommendations for how to improve step by step through these areas from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. Our vision is for re-energizing your local church missions ministries.

We want to see a new electric shock through your church for missions in making you more effective for the Lord and for his glory around the world through your church. Please follow or subscribe and share this podcast with others to get the word out, particularly about this series on your church missions profile. Also, communicate with us. Tell us what you'd like to hear. Tell us if you agree or object to things that we're saying. Let us know how this impacts you and your church. We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at the email address, ministry@propempo.com, ministry@propempo.com. Thanks.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions On Point, The Propempo Perspective On church and Missions. I trust that you'll find more help and resources on the website, propempo.com. Please prayerfully consider supporting this ministry. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.