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Archive for the ‘Christian Missions’ Category

Days 9-11: A Whopper Jr and Politics!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on November 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

Antalya, Turkey

I’m having a Whopper Jr and a diet coke for breakfast in Antalya, Turkey, because that’s all there is at the airport at 8am! That’s not entirely true. At the Turkish restaurant next door, I could have ordered a Doner sandwich—basically a gyro sandwich—with Turkish coffee, but that option didn’t seem any better to me.

Did you know that very few countries in the world have special breakfast foods? Most people eat the same kind of food for as many meals as they may eat in any given day: soup, rice, beans, noodles, bread, cold cuts, cucumbers, tomatoes—all very common breakfast foods around the world.

Whopper Jrs are not common breakfast food in any country!!

We came to Turkey in 2002 with the first LST team here—really one of the very first entries into Turkey by churches of Christ since the early 1970s, when our M’s—you don’t use that word in Turkey– were all forced out.

Andrew and Katie were part of that first LST team, and now they have lived for almost four years in Antalya as full-time workers.  We had breakfast with them at our hotel—which did serve fried eggs (right next to the eggplant salad!)—and then Andrew took us to the English Center where he and others are offering conversational English classes to university students.

They can’t use LST materials because our Bible-based materials are too political!  Yes, political is the word the school officials use to describe the orientation of Christians in Turkey.  That surprised me! Religious, sectarian, infidels, heretics these words would not have surprised me, but political did.

As Andrew explained it to us, the greatest fear in the Muslim world is not a religious fear; rather, it is a cultural and political fear. They are afraid they will lose their culture and their control of their own political situation.  Christianity represents a threat to all of these in their minds.  It is the encroachment of Western dress, western morals, western politics, just western-ness into their ancient ways of living and thinking.

Being a political threat makes work for Christians in Turkey much more difficult.

As Andrew was dropping us off near the place where Christians meet in Antalya, a Turkish woman walked up to him and asked if anyone was in the church office.  It was actually a holiday so no one was around, but Andrew asked if he could help her.  She replied that she needed help. She felt trapped in Islam and was smothering. Could he help her?

Very kindly, Andrew asked a few more questions and then told her that his wife would call soon to talk to her. Women must be taught by women in this country. Katie will share the Good News with this woman in need.

The clash between countries and cultures may seem insurmountable, but Christians reaching out in love and in the name of Jesus to people in need will never be stopped by pejorative labels.

I’m really glad Andrew and Katie are here!

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Days 7 and 8 – What Do They Serve For Lunch In Corinth?

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , , , on November 8, 2011| 6 Comments »

Mark and Sherrylee with Alex and Eleni Merrilytos overlooking Corinth.

We did not see the Parthenon! We did not see the Acropolis or the Agora! We did better than that!

We met the church in Athens, in fact, churches: a Greek-speaking church, a Bulgarian-speaking church, and an English-speaking church. In addition, we broke bread with Russian Christians, American Christians, a wonderful group of women from the Philippines who work in Greece, one brother from Nigeria, and one from Ghana.

The Omonia church of Christ in Athens is a church with open front doors! And the world is coming in! Alex and Eleni Melirrytos are the Greek couple who minister to all these groups.. There are other leaders who work very hard in all of the larger ethnic groups, but they are the responsible servants of God!

The congregation has existed for many years and has gone through lots of different phases. The current phase is challenging! The neighborhood has deteriorated badly. Other evangelists have led this church in years past, but have gone. The current economic situation in Greece has resulted in many of the foreign members of this church returning to their own countries or to other countries to find work.  And, of course, the inevitable personal situations have accumulated here as they do almost everywhere, always being heavy baggage to carry for those who live with the consequences.

Sherrylee and I fell in love with this church! It’s authentic! The people are devoted to God and to one another–and they are talking about forgetting what is behind and pressing forward. Paul would be proud of them.

The Greeks are dramatic! They can talk loudly—almost shouting—and their body language is BIG, and they can be all talking at the same time!  And ney means “Yes,” but sounds like “No”! We laughed so hard because we could never tell if they were mad or just loving on each other!  Alex and Eleni were the worst—and the BEST!

They took us to see Ancient Corinth on Monday—a little over an hour away from Athens by car, but probably three to four days walk for Paul and his entourage. That hour driving gave us time to talk about all the possibilities for LST in Athens, especially what the challenges might be.

What a beautiful setting on the sea. No wonder Paul stayed in Corinth so long!  Of course, there are only small areas excavated, still you can believe you are walking on the same street Paul did when he went to buy groceries. The Bema, or Place of Judgment, mentioned in Acts 18 has been identified and is being restored, so we could see where Paul stood before Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia.

Alex sneaked me down a back path to the ruins of the theater which are really closed off to the public, but we wanted to see the place discovered in 1929  where Erastus’ name and title are inscribed. This is almost certainly the Erastus mentioned in Romans 16 who was the director of public works.

What do you think they serve in ancient Corinth for lunch? Gyros, of course! What were you expecting???

After a pretty late lunch, we went to Cenchreae, where there is precious little left of Phoebe’s hometown, mostly just ruins of a church being swallowed by the sea.  But almost next door is a beautiful camp hotel where Christians in Greece gather once or twice a year for Bible study, retreats, and warm (probably dramatic!) fellowship. We are definitely going to try to get an invitation to be on their program!

Almost 2000 years ago, right here in Athens, Paul said,

From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. (Acts 17:26-27)

I’m thankful for every Christian in Greece and am praying for every person from every land that God has brought to Greece so they could seek Him and perhaps find Him!

Maybe you will be one of those people someday, coming with LST to Greece to talk to people about the unknown God and His Son Jesus!

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Five More Tips for Planning Your Overseas Trip!

Posted in Christian Missions, Traveling Thoughts, tagged , , on October 22, 2011| 3 Comments »

A week from today we leave on our overseas trip. What should I be thinking about after having finished most of the items on the big checklist I gave you in the last post.  Just one big thing left to do before we get to the things that can only be done at the last minute:  Go back over your big check list to make sure you really did everything you checked off—or that you forgot something that should have been on that list.

Some of you Readers, especially Randy,  made some excellent suggestions of actions that should have been on the first check list that I gave you.  It’s hard to think of everything at once.  Here is what you have added to my list:

  1. Check for visa requirements. This should be done at the same time you are checking on your passport for the first time. If you need a visa where you are going,  it can take up to a month to get; for other countries perhaps only a week; and for many countries you can just buy it at the border. Most visas are pretty easy to get, but some are not. Be very exact in filling out their forms and following their instructions. If you have any doubts about how to fill out the forms, you may want to use a visa service. Their prices are not unreasonable.  And, lastly on visas, sometimes you have to send your passport in to have the visa inserted into the passport, so you can only start the visa process after you have a passport. You must plan ahead for this! Also, always use a mailing procedure that allows you to track where your passport and/or visa is in the mail.
  2. If you are taking anything electrical (phone chargers, computers, etc), you will need a plug adapter at least and you may need a voltage transformer.  Fortunately, most of our gadgets and computers are built to transform their own current, so you just need a plug adapter. I recommend that you take nothing that has to heat: curling irons, travel irons, hair dryers.  Our experience is that they are likely to burn up no matter how careful you are—and they may burn your clothes or your hair!!  Buy one in the country where you are going to be!
  3. Speaking of phones, if you are taking your phone, especially if you have a smartphone, check for both call rates and international roaming charges where you are going.  There are many ways to make cheap calls—which will have to be another whole posting—but the one that you might miss is that all that internet usage that you enjoy in the States for a package price could cost you per MB in other countries. I have heard stories of hundreds of dollars of charges just for checking your email on your phone. Check this out before you go!
  4. Double check your itinerary.  For me that means printing out the confirmation pages from every flight and hotel I booked and every car I rented. I can’t tell you how often some little discrepancy has popped up—maybe because I changed our plans in the middle of booking things or maybe just human error—but it is so much better to catch those mistakes and fix them before you have to stand in front of a counter in a foreign country and try to work it out with someone there!

Have I ever told you about the time we had a flight booked from Antalya, Turkey to Frankfurt, Germany, via Istanbul.  It was scheduled to leave about 10pm—in foreign countries many flights leave and arrive in the middle of the night! We got to the airport in plenty of time—which I always recommend because things go wrong—and this time, we got there and could not find the counter where we should check in. We searched in the international terminal and then went to the domestic terminal. All kinds of people told us where to look, but we never found the counter where we should check in. The clock was ticking too. Our scheduled departure was less than an hour away!!

After trying to communicate with a number of people whose English was sketchy, we finally were informed that the airline that we had booked with no longer even flew out of this city! We had a worthless ticket to Istanbul! Our only alternative was to buy another ticket to Istanbul and connect with our flight the next day to Frankfurt.

This whole fiasco probably took two hours to work through and on a scale of problems was a fairly minor one—which is the only kind I wish for you in your travels!  But if you travel much internationally, you will eventually have these kinds of experiences.

–which brings me to my last piece of advice as you get to the final countdown for your trip!

5.  Get yourself into the frame of mind that things will not go as you planned them! Count on it! So you can either be flexible and take it as part of the experience, or you can wind yourself up, yell at the people who do you wrong, complain about how you were jerked around and cheated for the rest of your trip, and make yourself and others quite miserable.  And if you are a Christian and doing this, you should have stayed at home! You are not representing well that Name you are wearing.

If you tend toward the wind-up side of things though, you might want to consider fairly comprehensive travel insurance.  It might provide you with a little peace of mind. A good website that allows you to compare many plans is www.insuremytrip.com .

Soon—before you leave—I’ll give you a list of things to do during the last twenty-four hours before you go!  No, you are not procrastinating, but there are some things that just can’t happen any earlier.

Don’t begrudge preparation!

I love the quote from Abraham Lincoln on preparation: “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”

 

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The Best Mission Field Ever?

Posted in Christian Missions, tagged , , , , on October 15, 2011| 7 Comments »

Campus ministries are perhaps the most undervalued area of kingdom work in spite of having the greatest potential for kingdom growth.

In the last week, Sherrylee and I have visited three different campus ministries. In a normal year, Let’s Start Talking will work directly with 15-20 different campuses. In our history we have probably worked with as many as fifty different campus works.

Here’s what you find on almost every campus that offers such great potential for the kingdom:

  • Thousands of impressionable people searching for who they are and what they want to become.
  • Hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign people who are eager to learn everything they can about American culture, including Christianity.
  • A whole community with a lot of discretionary time. (I know they don’t think so, but going to class 15 hours a week  in addition to preparations rarely comes up to the 40 hour work week, and they usually do not have family obligations.)
  • A whole community in a learning and experiencing mode.
  • A whole community in the age of challenging the values they received from home.

To me, all of the above describe a great mission field! If all of the above is true, then why is campus ministry such a neglected area of ministry?

One reason for neglect is that campus ministry is poorly defined! We aren’t sure what we are supposed to be doing—or what the best approach would be! Is the purpose of campus ministry

  • the protection of Christian students who might find their faith attacked by higher learning?
  •  outreach to Christian students who don’t attend your church?
  •  outreach to foreign students?
  • in-depth Bible study for the nurturing of believing students?
  • provision of a Christian environment for students?

Another reason for neglect is that there is no specific educational path to become a campus minister. Virtually all of our Christian universities have majors or emphases in Youth Ministry, I know of none who have such a program for campus ministers.  This absence may be because of lack of demand, but I suspect it is something else. The result, however, is that potential ministers don’t know how to become one and churches don’t know who is qualified to be one—not a promising situation.

These questions are all inter-related, aren’t they! If a church doesn’t know what they really want the campus ministry to do, then they don’t know who to hire. The potential ministers don’t know how to prepare, and the colleges don’t know what to offer—if anything!

In the meantime, thousands of students are left on their own spiritually. We vaguely hope that those who are seeking will come to our church on their own, find a group of peers that they will like and who will like them, and listen to our sermons.  That seems a pretty poor way to reach out to what could be the most receptive community of people in our neighborhood!

And my worst fear is that we are negligent in this area because of the economics of campus ministry. Students have two big black strikes against them:

  • Students have little money, so they do not contribute; they just take.
  • Students don’t usually stick around to become long-term members of the local church, so they are a poor investment.

So why should a local congregation invest in reaching out to them?  Of course, you will recognize right away a business model for growing a congregation, not a Spirit-led model for growing the kingdom of God!

Students are also a little messier. They test values, they challenge tradition, they lack “proper” respect for authority, and worst of all, they don’t dress appropriately!!

Here are a few suggestions for your church to think about:

  • If there is a campus near you that does not have a campus ministry, at least determine the demographic of the students and see if you don’t currently have resources enough to do something with some part of that campus!  If there are international students, could you start a FriendSpeak program to help them with their English and share the story of Jesus with them?
  • If you see great potential on your campus, contact one of the churches with a vital campus ministry and ask them to mentor your leadership!  Do this before you go out and just try to hire a campus minister. Know what your purpose is first.
  • If you have a campus ministry and/or a good campus minister, make part of his/her job description to mentor emerging campus ministers.  Provide the necessary time and money for this task of multiplying and training new workers.

The common statistical wisdom is that most people experience conversion to whatever religion they will choose between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five!

 If this is true, we Christians have no choice but to focus on all those unchurched people in this age group—and lots of them are in college.

Going into all the world is pretty easy when the whole world is next door to your church building on a local campus! 

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The Professor Who Dreamed In Russian!

Posted in Christian Missions on September 20, 2011| 1 Comment »

 In  the mid-nineties, we visited with a well-loved professor at one of our Christian universities . He really didn’t seem like the “missions” type. He taught in the liberal arts, very scholarly, quite creative, but all who knew him knew that above all he was a very committed follower of Jesus—so that made him the genuine “missions” type!!

In the course of one of our conversations, we discovered that he had this burning desire to go to Russia.  In fact, he had been studying Russian on his own for fifteen years!!  That means he was learning Russian when no one thought the Berlin wall would come down, and when no one dreamed that the Soviet Union would disintegrate like it did in 1990/91.

Professor J was a quiet man, wry sense of humor, tall and thin, and if you stood close enough to him you could hear the mechanical valve in his heart clacking.  He had all kinds of jokes about that!

He volunteered to lead a team of students from his university to St. Petersburg, Russia the following summer. In spite of his position and his many responsibilities, he participated in all of the training and truly participated as one of the team members.

Finally, the summer came and he was just as excited, if not more so, than any of the students.  He had been waiting for this opportunity for fifteen years—if not longer.

Every day for six weeks, he read the Gospel of Luke with Russians, from whom the Gospel had been withheld by Communism for seventy years.  He helped people with their English, but sneaked in some practice for his Russian as well. The Russians loved him for that!

For six weeks, he served the small church that was hosting his group. They even asked him to bring the lesson on the last Sunday that the team was supposed to be in Russia.

That last Sunday is always a hard one.  Saying good-bye to people with whom you have talked so intimately, shared subway rides with, walked the streets of St. Petersburg with, it’s hard to say good-by and there are often hugs and tears all around.

Professor J stood that morning in front of the little church, speaking for the whole team, he told both their readers and the church members good-by.  But even in the poignancy of the moment, Professor J brought their attention to God by saying, “We will probably never see you in this world again, but our prayer is that we will all be together again someday in heaven before the throne of Jesus.”

That very evening, that little mechanical valve stopped clacking and Professor J went on ahead to his rest.  From the streets of Russia where he had so longed to visit, from those streets he departed for the streets of Heaven, where he so longed to spend eternity!

His words that Sunday morning now proved to be prophetically true! We were sad, but the impact of Professor J’s life on that little church full of old Communists and new Christians will only produce joy!

May the same be said of your life and mine!

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19 Traits of A Missional Church–Maybe 20!

Posted in Christian Missions, tagged , , on August 29, 2011| 6 Comments »

Missional is one of those fuzzy buzz words that one hears at large church gatherings. You think you know what it means, but maybe you don’t—and you can’t ask anyone because everyone else knows what it means except you!

Simple definitions leave a lot of us asking questions, so here is my attempt to give you concrete pegs on which to hang your understanding of missional .

A missional church is

  1. Where YOU show up, not God. A missional church is joining God in His work, not inviting God to be a part of your work!
  2. Where the members know that the Great Commission says GO, not COME!
  3. Where all of the members are missionaries, not just those out of the country.
  4. Where mission contributions are not special contributions.
  5. Where what happens out of the building is equally important—if not more important—than what happens in the building.
  6. Where “going to worship” happens every day, not just on Sundays.
  7. Where church leaders meet to pray for new work, not just to manage and control old work.
  8. Where members know their neighbors.
  9. Where the community would be diminished if the church closed its doors.
  10. Where no borders are recognized except those of the Kingdom of God.
  11. Where members expect to meet new people at church!
  12. Where members expect to have unbelievers at church!
  13. Where the church is God’s church, not “our” church.
  14. Where its children grow up wanting and encouraged to be missionaries.
  15. Where benevolence and evangelism are the same thing.
  16. Where there is no difference between my life and church life, my time and God’s time, or my money and God’s money.
  17. Where members are not afraid of being in the world because they see it as their mission field.
  18. Where members are motivated by love and gratitude.
  19. Where members extend grace and mercy, speaking the truth in love.

I feel like there ought to be a #20! What if I leave that open for you to fill in. Leave a comment and share with us what you understand a missional church to be!

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Summer Mondays!

Posted in Christian Missions, tagged , , , on July 18, 2011| 4 Comments »

Lost Luggage

Summer Mondays are the most exciting day of the week at Let’s Start Talking!  Beginning the first Monday of May and extending through the last Monday of August,  this first day of the work week is a day when we try to make sure that all LST staff members are totally accessible—and, if they are not out of the country on an LST project, they should be in the office.

We discourage taking comp days or vacation days on Summer Mondays.  This year the 4th of July fell on Monday—but the LST office was open!

Summer Mondays require our full attention at LST because Summer Mondays are big travel days, and travel days can be very unpredictable.  Let me explain.

This year LST will organize approximately 120 different short-term mission projects to 25-30 different countries.  Between 60-70% of these projects will happen between May and August. It used to be even more.

For the first twenty-five years, LST was primarily working with university students, so summer months were the only times they were available for short-term missions.  About five years ago, however, we started focusing on recruiting from churches. Not only was the pool of potential workers much larger, but adult church members were not locked into the summer months as the students were, so many could go in the Fall and/or Spring!

In 2010, LST sent twice as many adult church members on LST projects than university students!  In 2011, LST will have recruited, trained, and sent approximately 500 workers, with about 160 of those being college students and the rest being church members.

In spite of this demographic shift, the summer months are still the heaviest travel time.  And because Monday is not only the day of departure for teams, but also the day that all of the student teams return to the U.S., it is the day when things go wrong!

Just a few weeks ago, a campus minister was traveling with his team to China. They flew from their homes to Los Angeles, where they were to catch their international flight.  When you check in for an international flight, the agents always make sure you have a valid passport and the proper visa—because if the airlines take you to a country and you are denied entry, then they have to fly you back immediately at their own expense. (That happened to me once on a flight from Rome to Tirana, Albania, shortly after that country opened up!)

The campus minister and his team made it through security and all the way to their gate, but while they were waiting to board their international flight, someone stole his passport which contained his visa to enter China!  He, of course, could not continue, so they called LST—as they should have—for help.

Well, the team went on without him, but we were able to help him replace his passport and get a replacement visa from the Chinese—and re-book his ticket, so that he was able to fly out on Wednesday—just two days late to his project.  That’s a typical Monday issue for LST.

Just a couple of weeks ago, one of our church workers in Asia  fell and hurt her back enough that the week before she and her team were to return, she could not sit or walk at all. She actually conducted her reading sessions while lying flat on the couch!  But how does she get to the airport with her luggage, sit in Economy seating for 15-20 travel hours in order to get home from Asia??  To make this particular problem even more interesting , our staff member that was coordinating with her team was in Rwanda, Africa, on her own project. Nevertheless, she did a great job staying in touch with the worker in Asia and our office, so that we were able to get this worker home with minimum discomfort.  That’s a Summer Monday’s work for you!

Flight cancellations for storms or mechanical difficulties are just pretty routine on Mondays. The LST team doesn’t even break a sweat for those blips on the screen, we have faced them so often! Lost luggage and lost tickets are a cake walk!

Right now we are dealing with a harder situation with a new LST site, hosted by American missionaries to an island in the Mediterranean.  We felt like this new work was going to be difficult from the beginning because the church was very small and the avenues for recruiting Readers very limited, so we asked two of our most seasoned workers to go first and try to work out the difficulties. They have done a fabulous job—but it has still been difficult even for them. Many Readers are refugees, others are just short-term visitors to the island, so few of the Readers have been dependable about keeping their appointments.

In addition, the host missionary’s wife has had to have surgery on the island for a pretty serious condition, so both he and she are not able to do all for the project that they certainly had intended to do. Next week a student team of five is scheduled to go to this site, so we have spent the last week trying to decide if they should still go. Today, Summer Monday is the day that we will meet and make that final decision.  Pray that we are wise! If the team does not go, much preparatory work and effort seem lost, and there will be people on the island who do not hear the Good News!

Summer Mondays are great days to watch God work!  

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How To Change An Engine With The Airplane in Flight!

Posted in Christian Missions, tagged , , on July 11, 2011| 4 Comments »

Building a new airplane is easier than changing out an engine while the airplane is flying! For existing churches, shifting to a new model for doing mission work is more like the latter than the former.

I recently had a lengthy conversation with the minister of a new church plant about how his church could adopt a new paradigm from the beginning of its existence; I also have been approached by a person wanting to do missions that would like to explore establishing a different way of doing support/oversight.

I’m eager to continue these conversations and work on the very practical questions that arise when building a new plane—but I’m also scheduled to talk to a couple of established churches in the near future who have established mission programs, but who feel the need for re-thinking the way they do mission work.  This is the more difficult–but not impossible— task!

A Plan for Transitioning

Step One:  Reach consensus on the desire for a better model for the church’s missions program.  If the call for change is coming from the elders, perhaps the preacher, then it is easier for the mission committee, the current missionaries, and the members of the congregation to be persuaded.  The lower in the church hierarchy the call for change begins, the more difficult it will be to reach consensus.  The most resistant person/group is likely to be where the most ownership/control of the mission program currently lies—unless they are the ones calling for change! 

Step Two:  Establish the goals and the broad parameters for the new model.   For instance, if a church wants to adopt a greater member-driven, relational model as I have been suggesting, then the goals might be something like these:

  1. 80-100% of the total membership of the church will be actively involved in mission activities, including local outreach of every kind, short-term missions, youth missions, internships, and co-mission groups that support missionaries with prayer, oversight, and financial support.
  2. All future missionaries will be raised up from among our members.
  3. Current missionaries will transition to support from a Comission* group over the next three years.
  4. More members will contribute more funds to support more missionaries than ever before.
  5. The church’s Mission Committee will be transformed into a group whose sole mandate is to achieve the mission goals of the church as stated above.

Step Three: Begin to educate and to implement!  Start by reconstituting the Missions committee—perhaps with new people, but not necessarily. The most critical factor in reconstitution is that the new Mission team is 100% on board with the new model.

This is the team who is now responsible for educating members, for instance, about Comission groups. These are the people who will need to work with the preacher and ministers, and especially with the youth and adult education program to encourage a vision and a desire for missions of all kinds from all members.

It might be that those on the earlier Mission committee who are closest to the established missionaries would be enlisted to help them understand the change and to assist them in developing a plan/strategy for building their Comission group.

Yes, there is a process of deconstruction that is occurring; the old engine has to come off. The biggest fear, I suspect, is that in the process of attaching the new engine, the plane crashes, that is, the current missions efforts disintegrate.

Here are some of the bad scenarios that could occur:

  1. The people with power won’t give it up! It could be an elder or elders, it could be a missions committee chair or person, or it could be the missionary the church has supported for thirty years!  If they cannot be persuaded, then either they have to be removed from their position of power or the plan to change has to be abandoned.  There is no workaround here!
  2. Supported foreign nationals are virtually unknown to the local members.  National evangelists on American support have to be put in a different category from American missionaries on church support. We cannot lightly abandon people who have no other obvious means of support. The American church has a moral obligation to help their national worker find a new means of support and to continue helping them until they do. (This is one reason I’m almost always opposed to national preachers getting American support.)
  3. Members are not willing to support a current American missionary.  Since we are talking about moving to a relational model of support/oversight, an American missionary that has no relationship with Christians in the U.S. is going to have great difficulty building a Comission group.  Since relationships were not originally a prerequisite, I do believe a church would have to provide a missionary ample time and opportunity to establish new relationships before moving them out of the budget.

I’ll close with some lines from Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll that seem somehow appropriate here:  How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle! 

Next, I want to address one of the strongest criticisms addressed to me in the course of these latest posts: “Mark, you have a very low opinion of the church!”  What do you think?

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50,000 Unpaid Missionaries??

Posted in Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged , , on June 27, 2011| 2 Comments »

Paradigm shifts are always resisted! I want to address today some of the resisting comments that have been posted about Re-Thinking Mission Work!

I said that our system is broken because we require our missionaries to first be good fund-raisers. Some argued that the skill set for fund raising is similar to that of a good missionary, so it is a legitimate filter.  If they can’t raise money, how could they be a good missionary?

No doubt, good people skills are a prerequisite for both raising funds and missions. Other broad skills like perseverance and the ability to communicate would certainly fit both tasks, so this argument is not farfetched. However, here’s a short list of skills necessary for a good missionary that are not necessary to be a good fund-raiser:

  • Prayerful
  • A thoughtful student of the Word
  • An effective teacher of the Word
  •  A vision-caster
  • A team builder
  • Cross-culturally sensitive
  • A lover of language—often, the ability to learn a new language.
  • A lover of people, not just a manipulator of people
  • Extreme faith and trust in an all-powerful God

I said that we need greater access to better pre-mission training for more people!  Several suggested that our Christian colleges offer plenty of good preparation.

They are right about the quality of training that our Christian universities offer. It is excellent! But access is the real issue.  The general mission preparation is designed for 18-21 year old, full-time students working toward a bachelor’s degree.

  • What about the 90% of young people in churches of Christ who do not attend a Christian college?
  • What about the young professionals who are called to the mission after graduation?
  • What about families—Dad, Mom, and kids—who are called to the mission?
  • What about those who can commit only two years? Is it reasonable to ask them to prepare four years for two of service?
  • What about early retirees and mature Christians?  How will they be trained?

I know about summer seminars, but how many short courses would it take to prepare a novice missionary?

I am happy to report that the idea of required apprenticeships resonated with many of you! It is an idea that I will try to flesh out more in a future posting!

Several readers pointed out the benefits of supporting national workers instead of Americans.  I’m a firm believer that American missionaries should all be temporary and that training nationals to reach their own people—and to send their own missionaries—should be given high priority.  I am strongly opposed—with rare exceptions—to putting national evangelists on American church support.  The problems created by supporting nationals are immense!  Sending money is not a substitute for Going!

I have not called for any kind of centralized organization, but some of you who commented did! Several suggested that the historic stand against missionary societies was never well grounded.  I believe that we can achieve our goal of better mission work done by more missionaries without a centralized bureaucracy—but not with cooperation.  I doubt that we Americans can create a centralized organization that would not succumb to wielding big financial, political, or personal bludgeons, so that’s not the direction I would like to see us go, even if we could get beyond the doctrinal issues.

Look around! The Mormons have over fifty thousand unpaid, full-time missionaries!  All of their missionaries go through several weeks of training at one of the seventeen Mission Training Centers, located throughout the world! Mormonism—which began in the U.S. about the same time as the American Restoration Movement– continues to be a growing world-wide movement with over 14 million members!

What other models for supporting and overseeing mission work are you aware of? Can the current model among churches of Christ  be improved by learning from other religious groups?

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A Missionary Letter!

Posted in Re-Thinking Mission Work on June 25, 2011| 6 Comments »

In response to my series on Re-Thinking Mission Work, I have heard from a number of current missionaries who felt like I was touching on their story somehow.  This last week, I received an especially moving letter from a couple whose story is just so familiar that I asked them if I could reproduce it while protecting their privacy.

With their permission, I want to share this letter with you, not to condone every decision, every comment, or every emotion, but so that you can get a glimpse into the frustration that our current system creates and what it does to many of the people who try to work their way through it to the mission field.  You won’t enjoy this letter, but try to put yourself in the position of this couple and see what you think!

Dear Mark,

I hope you really meant it when you wrote that you wanted to know more about our experiences, because here goes. Our first full-time missions experience was in the Czech Republic. Our sponsoring church at that time was the  X Church of Christ in Texas. We had been members there for 2 years and were on a team prepared by [Missions organization]. My wife and I have teaching degrees from [Christian college]. The team we joined spent about 4 months at [missions organization] preparing together. The [sponsoring] church made a 5 year agreement with us and provided half of our support. The rest came from various other individuals and churches. We worked in the Czech Republic for 5 years and helped to establish a small congregation that still meets today without the presence of missionaries. During that time, the [sponsoring] church never once sent anyone to visit us and at the end of the 5 years they were done.

We reluctantly came home and resumed teaching . . . . We cried through every worship service for 6 months, but the Christians at the Church of Christ were really great and very understanding. We moved the next year to [city] so that I could resume my secular career and so that our children could attend a christian school.

After 2 years, we felt called to return to missions. We had become aware of the need for the gospel in Slovenia during our last year in [Czech Republic]. We spent a year preparing at [Christian college] and looking for teammates. This time, the church in [small city] made a 3 year agreement to sponsor us. They had been one of our contributors while we were in [Czech Republic]. We had become close to one of the missions committee members during that time. When we returned, he told us that when we were ready to go back (because he knew we would) to contact him and so we did. [This church] had never been a sponsoring church before, but they wanted to give it a try. They provided half our support. We never found teammates, but went to Slovenia anyway.

During our 2nd year in Slovenia, the dollar tanked against the euro and we began to struggle. We went into debt so that we could continue to do the work there. During the 3rd year, we began working with a small group of Christians from a former International Church of Christ. This was, of course, after [the decentralization took place]. They were eager to have someone to help strengthen them after all that had happened. We also meet ICOC Christians from Croatia, Hungary, and Bosnia during this time. [Our friend] was the only person from [our sponsoring church] to come and visit us during the 3 years we were there. He and his wife came for one night while they were visiting their son who was doing a study abroad program in Europe.

At the end of 3 years, there was a new missions committee head at the [Sponsoring] Church who decided it was fiscally irresponsible to continue being a sponsoring church. We were preparing to come home again when an opportunity to become self supporting missionaries came up. We took jobs with [international schools] and moved to Bosnia. We knew that there were Christians here and were eager to help them. We worked there for a year and a half and decided to return to Texas to resume our teaching careers and build up some retirement.

After 3 years back, we met a young couple looking for teammates to go to the Czech Republic. We felt like God was once again presenting us with an opportunity to serve the Czech people, so we once again began looking for a sponsoring congregation.

During the past year, we have been turned down for the following reasons:

  • we are too small to take on a responsibility like that– our current congregation;
  • we just had to take on more support for the missionaries we already have, and we prefer to support missions that our members can go to on mission trips;
  • we feel that our congregation will get more excited about a mission to Africa;
  • we feel it is more fiscally responsible to support the X Bible Institute (more bang for the buck).

It’s the last one that hurts us the most. If you look on their website, you’ll see that they have 3 missions listed: Christian Service Center- benevolence, not missions; a work in [foreign city] which we were told they are phasing out; and the X Bible Institute- preacher training, not evangelism or church planting. Not only that, but when I was there, they announced that in addition to the 4 ministers they already have, they are hiring 2 more, a communications minister and a family life minister.

I was so hurt that I wrote an email to [our contact person] and asked him to forward it to the elders but have received no reply. My family has been associated with this church for more than 30 years. They used to be known as a sending church. So, here we sit in a hotel room [in a small US city], waiting to be interviewed and try out for a preaching job.

So sorry, people of the Czech Republic. Be warmed and filled, the churches in the US would like to do more, but you are not high on their list of priorities. Can you tell that we are discouraged and frustrated? Some have said that it must not be God’s will that we go. Maybe, but what if God calls these churches into account one day for not reaching the Czech people. They may say to Him, “when did you tell us to go to the Czech people?” and He will say, “I sent you [this couple], but you ignored them.” It is our hope and prayer that someone will pay attention to you [people of Czech Republic] so that others that go after us will have more success and the gospel will reach even those places in the world that are difficult and unexciting.

I hope this letter is a small window into the experience of trying to become, to be, and to remain a missionary in our current system. MW

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