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Rethinking Mission Work, Part 11: A Chord of Three Strands

Posted in Christian Missions, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged Christian missions, foreign missions, missions on June 2, 2011| 6 Comments »

Separating money and power is the most critical action that Churches of Christ need to take to fix its broken model for mission work. That the current model is broken can be disputed, but is very difficult to refute in light of the following:

Too few new hopeful missionaries are willing to become full-time, church-supported, church-overseen missionaries.
Many new and current missionaries are replacing church oversight/support with funds from individuals and private foundations to sidestep the current church/oversight model.
Many churches are moving to mission efforts that are more “controllable”—which means they are either exclusively short-term missions, or much closer to home where local leaders can oversee more actively, or they are some form of humanitarian aid rather than missionary-centered evangelism .

A missionary society is one way that other churches attempted to solve this problem, but it is not an acceptable solution in Churches of Christ. In fact, another center of financial authority is really no solution at all, so I am not suggesting anything resembling a missionary society as a solution.

My suggestion for a new oversight/support model is based on the following primary characteristics:

Division of power
Division of responsibility
Gift-oriented tasking
Covenanted relationships

My suggestion is a tripartite model. Two of the parties have already been described at length: the Missionary and the Co-Mission support group. (See previous blogs for those descriptions!) These two begin and have their core identities within our congregational structure. Because the third member of this triad has no authority and exercises no oversight, it will work better as a missionary service organization outside of local church structures.

The single task of this third entity is to serve the Missionary and the Co-Mission group by carrying out their financial instructions. This organization would receive funds on behalf of the missionary and disperses funds to the missionary as instructed. I can also imagine that this organization could be extraordinarily helpful to Overseers and Missionaries by offering financial information like:

Cost of living information resources for specific countries
Best practices for banking in specific countries
Information of health insurance
U.S. tax information for missionaries
Foreign tax information
Best practices for accounting/reporting for contributions to missionaries

In no way is the missionary service organization involved in oversight or raising support, so there is no authority or control issue as with a missionary society. On the contrary, because of its neutral position in this triad, it is in a great position to serve those who oversee, those who support, and the Missionary equally well.

You may be a bit surprised that I have introduced the words oversight and accountability into our conversation. If I have not said it explicitly enough yet, let me say that I do not believe it to be biblical or wise for anyone to be without accountability in the body of Christ, not elders, not preachers, not members, and not missionaries. I believe strongly in the mutual submission prescribed by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:21, “Submit one to another out of reverence for Christ!”

What I am describing is a chord of three strands: the Missionary, the Co-Mission group, and the service organization (to be named later!) These three become accountable to each other by means of a mutually agreed upon Covenant, a Covenant which is built in stages.

Stage One of building The Covenant would be the commitments that the Hopeful Missionary makes with those he gathers into the Co-Mission group. And each time a new person is added, they would need to prayerfully commit to joining in the Covenant. As the First Decisions are made, the Covenant changes—but not unless both parties agree! How can two walk together unless they be agreed? (Amos 3:3)

Stage Two begins when it is time to start fund raising and when the services of the missionary service organization become essential. At that time both the Missionary and the Co-Mission group sit down with the service organization and create new descriptions of both financial commitments and service commitments. In others words, the Missionary and Co-Mission create the financial instructions to the service organization, and the service organization commits to the services it will provide and describes any financial responsibilities or tasks that either the Missionary or the Co-Mission group takes on .

The Covenant then becomes the physical description of the relationship into which these three parties have entered for the mutual benefit of all.

Perhaps in another forum, I can expand on what kinds of things should be in a Covenant, and later, I’d like to talk about the kinds of financial covenants that work best between supporters and missionaries, but for this series, I’ve said enough to get the broad parameters of a paradigm shift into the public arena for discussion.

I would like to conclude this series by suggesting a few very concrete actions in which some of you might be interested. If you will respond, then I will follow up in the future with action:

I would be happy to sit down with church leaders to talk about shifting their paradigm.
I would be happy to organize an exploratory meeting of some kind for open conversation
I would be happy to make an edited and expanded version of these thoughts available in print, so that they might be distributed and read by more people.

I look forward to your response—privately or publically.

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Rethinking Mission Work, Part 10: First Steps To A New Paradigm

Posted in Christian Missions, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged Christian missions, mission support, missions on May 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

To summarize my previous posts, the primary issue I see with the way churches of Christ support and oversee missions are Selection, strategy, financing, and spiritual/physical care are all in the hands of a small group of men who have no firsthand knowledge of missions, who do not have personal relationships with the missionaries, who at best have limited exposure to mission theory, and who often have a broad palate of other responsibilities in their congregations to compete for their attention.

I must repeat: these elders, deacons, and mission committee members are good men and well-intentioned. The system, the model is what is flawed. I would like to put some ideas out there to start a serious conversation about a new model for missionary oversight/support that would have the following characteristics:

Make relationship a greater part of the formula
Open the system so that the people who care the most about a work can be more directly involved.
Determine leadership according to gifts, not by who controls the checkbook.

Let’s suppose that , because of the inspiration received through points of contact with this church and because of participation in short-term missions sponsored by this church, this member of our church wants to become a full-time missionary and announces this to his/her fellowship circle at the church.

Because this happens often in this church and because this church is of moderate size, the church has appointed two or three people with gifts and training in what Scripture calls discernment to help this person be sure of their calling. If a congregation is small or lacks such gifted people, then they reach out to other congregations or to mission organizations that could provide this service for them.

After having worked through this phase and if both the applicant and the church still agree on the calling, then the Hopeful is asked to gather a group of spiritual supporters to walk with him/her through the First Decisions. These spiritual supporters should be prayerful people, people who already have a relationship to the Hopeful, people who are supportive of the Calling, and people who are willing to commit themselves and their gifts to the Hopeful.

Now, the task of the Hopeful as well as the entire spiritual cohort is to prayerfully make those important First Decisions: selection of field, selection of type work, developing a team (if appropriate), and making preparations by filling the gaps of knowledge, skills, and spiritual formation. Following the advice of the Apostle James, if the group finds it lacks wisdom—or any other input needed for these important First Decisions– they should ask for it, first from God and then from people whom He has prepared with such wisdom. That list might include current and former missionaries, missions experts, people with cross-cultural experience—whomever God has gifted with experience or information that might be helpful in making these important First Decisions.

After the Hopeful and his/her Co-Walkers have prayerfully agreed upon a plan, including the path of Preparation, the financial resources to implement the Calling must be addressed.

Most probably, the cost of the Preparation itself will be the first financial question. I would assume that the later cost to finance the mission itself will be something that is learned later during the preparatory period as more information is gathered. Working to estimate and raise the cost of Preparation is probably a better first step toward the Calling than trying to start with the larger financial needs that will certainly come later.

And how should these first funds be gathered? Those with the most invested already will likely be the first to commit financially. The Hopeful’s spiritual support group has walked this far already, has prayed intensely for the Hopeful, has invested time and gifts in the Hopeful—I can’t imagine that these people will not be interested in supporting this Hopeful financially.

And if that is not enough, then who will ask others? Who will vouch for the selection, the path for preparation? Who will be more persuasive in asking others to join them in supporting this Hopeful than his/her Co-Walkers?? And won’t this all happen rather naturally? And won’t these requests be between friends as opposed to our current model that sends Hopefuls out alone to strangers?

Certainly the home church would be asked, but the difference is that as with individuals, so with churches, contributions do not come with an assumption of oversight. Oversight of this Hopeful is in the hands of his/her Co-Walkers. They know the person, the needs, and the plan better than anyone else in the world. They are invested spiritually, emotionally, relationally—and now financially–in this mission!

No accountability is lost in this model. The Hopeful is accountable to his/her Co-Mission group. The individuals in this group are still accountable to their elders! Perhaps not all of the Co-Mission group members even belong to the same congregation. That is not a prerequisite. It would be not only be foolish, but difficult and inappropriate for a set of elders to micromanage the group by reason of authority.

But who collects and handles the money? Not the Hopeful! The Co-Mission group. It volunteered for spiritual duty, not funds collection and management. If you leave it in the church coffers, the money/power problem remains! So what do you do with the money practically to avoid power issues?

That’s the next post. Stay tuned!

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Rethinking Mission Work, Part 6 – Strategic Planning–Or Not?

Posted in Christian Missions, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged Christian missions, mission committees, mission planning, mission strategy, missions on May 20, 2011| 3 Comments »

When our team went to Germany in 1971, we carried with us a written twenty-year plan, describing what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and when we would accomplish it. This strategic plan was the product of our coursework at Harding, input from our guiding professor, and the impressions that we gathered from our four-day visit to Germany—before we had even selected Germany as our future mission site!

Our plan was not ill-conceived, it was prematurely conceived! We did not yet know the language, so we did not know the people. We had met two or three workers in Germany, but we did know who was wise or whose work was effective. We did not even know if we were visiting growing or dying congregations there.

I know missionaries who strategically planned on getting jobs in their new country, only to discover when they arrived that local law would not allow them as foreigners to obtain work permits. I know of missionaries who planned on doing house churches, only to learn that apartments are too small and large gatherings are not allowed in private buildings. I know missionaries who have selected a site for a new church plant without even knowing that there was another congregation already there!

And churches have sent all of these missionaries! With support and oversight! What’s wrong with this picture??

I’d like to suggest that the problem is not with making a plan! No, I believe in strategic planning—well, with flexible strategic planning! But I suspect that most mission plans are done prematurely, that is, before enough experience and information has been gathered to even produce a written draft, much less a concrete plan.

And yet, I would suggest that the vast majority of those wanting to be missionaries have a plan in their hands that is premature. Why is this?

The answer to this question begins to touch on the core of many problems: Anyone wanting to be a missionary has to have a concrete plan in order to convince one or more congregations to agree to support their work! (I think they might get oversight without a plan, but not support—which says what about this process????)

So just think about the preposterousness of creating a mission plan based on what will sell to our congregations! Imagine with me some of the more “critical” bases that would need to be covered:

Plan for a field that is popular right now. (In the 90s, you could get support to any country of the former Soviet bloc, but now the results are not as exciting, so better try China!
Plan for a field where the cost of living is low. You can forget getting support to a country where the cost of living is higher than the U.S.
Plan for a field where you can establish a self-supporting congregation within five years. Churches do not want long strategic plans.
Plan for a field that is accessible to the supporting church. Plane rides should neither be expensive or overnight! Churches should be able to send their teenagers in the summer.
Plans should include some kind of humanitarian effort or community involvement because these are always successful and are great emotional touch points for future reporting.
Don’t project building projects or home purchases for long-term works. You don’t know which American mission committees are for them or against them.
Try to have something new in your plan that other missionaries in your field are not doing! Mission committees have heard all the old ideas before. (Think about that for a moment!)
Plan to use the latest method that is currently being promoted, Use current buzz words! This will let potential supporters know that you have done your homework.

Conclusions

Good plans are essential, but good plans will be made with the integrity and efficacy of the mission work itself in mind, not for the promotional benefits!

I’ve said twice already that most plans are made prematurely. I want to suggest in the next post that planning belongs to the time of preparation and is, in fact, part of the preparation—and that one of the biggest, most radical changes that we need to make in churches of Christ is in how future missionaries are prepared.

This series is generating lots of comments. Many current and former missionaries are jumping into the conversation—which is just great! Be sure and take time to read what these people with firsthand experience are saying!

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Rethinking Mission Work, Pt. 4: Changing the Selection Process

Posted in Christian Missions, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged Christian missions, missional churches, missionaries, missions, selecting missionaries on May 18, 2011| 4 Comments »

With the exception of the Antioch church sending out Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13), we really have no model of missions being initiated by a local congregation. Persecution drove Christians out of Jerusalem, and certain people moved between early churches, working as evangelists, but even to the very conservative among us, it should be clear that there is no explicitly prescriptive revelation about how congregations should organize, support, or oversee missionaries.

Without crossing the rather artificially determined boundaries of congregational autonomy, and while respecting our historical rejection of missionary societies , I believe we can improve our paradigm for missions considerably.

In light of the selection/support/oversight issues that I have discussed in preceding posts, I would like to suggest the following goals for any new paradigm:

A clear and accessible path through selection, first decisions, and training, allowing more people to become missionaries.
More Christians involved both relationally and financially in sending more missionaries.
Spiritual, personal, and financial oversight of missionaries by those people in the best position to know and understand both them and the work they do.
Elimination of control mechanisms used for mission work driven primarily by financial support.

If we can find ways to meet these goals, then I believe we can expect to be a fellowship that is sending many more missionaries better prepared to many more fields, better supported in both visible and invisible ways by many more people who themselves will be blessed richly, all of which will result in the spread of God’s reign on earth.

Improving the Selection Process

As I stated earlier, most potential missionaries self-select based on inspiration! That a person should strongly desire and feel called to missions, I would consider essential. But I do feel that we can do better in both the areas of selection and inspiration.

For decades, the World Mission Workshop for Christian college students has concluded with an invitation to commitment to missions. Literally hundreds of our finest students have responded—although only a handful has actually made it to the field. But what this tells me is that we have hundreds, if not thousands of people in our church buildings right now who have unfulfilled desires to serve as missionaries.

Let’s begin shifting our paradigm by making home congregations—no matter the size—the first place of inspiration and where the first opportunities for selection take place. What would it look like if it were the norm in our congregations for children to hear missionary stories, for middle schoolers to make short service mission trips, for high schoolers to move toward faith-sharing mission experiences,–but it didn’t stop there!

What if the college students were encouraged and enabled to do longer summer missions, and young families were encouraged to take their children with them on missions, if parents of teens did mission trips with their teenagers, and grandparents took their grandchildren with them.

What would it take for your congregation to make this kind of involvement the norm at your church (and, by the norm I mean where those who did not participate were in the minority!)?

Every church leader (yes, including ministers and elders) would need not only to affirm commitment, but lead from the front by going and supporting those who do!
Intentional planning at every age level for inspiration through every avenue at the church’s disposal.
Planting the seeds in the hearts of all new members who become a part of the congregation, whether through conversion or transference of membership.
Taking this stance as an ongoing way of congregational life, not a new program.

A church—regardless of its size– that created this kind of environment would expect to have many more of its members want to become missionaries! This church is always providing the first seeds of inspiration, and those seeds will be watered and nurtured for years with intentional love.

Now, not only is the pool of potential workers much larger, but the first level of the selection process would also be moved into a much more natural and advantageous position! The leadership of the church, the fellowship of believers, all are more intimately acquainted with those of their own who desire to become missionaries, so they can help them evaluate their own sense of calling and provide spiritual discernment that is often impossible to obtain from professors or missions experts who have little if any personal history with the applicant.

If the vast majority of missionary candidates were selected first by their home congregations, we could end most of the wanderings from church to church by missionary hopefuls who have self-selected. We would put an end to using the ability to raise support as the primary tool of discernment.

Wouldn’t that be better?

Some of you are already sweating heavily because you wonder where all the money is going to come from because your church couldn’t support all those who would want to go! Well, I’m going to just postpone that question for a while—but we will get back to it, I promise.

Next we will look at creating a clear path through decisions about which field, what type of work, and how to prepare for the mission.

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Rethinking Mission Work, Pt. 3: Why Educating Churches Doesn’t Work!

Posted in Christian Missions, Re-Thinking Mission Work, tagged Christian missions, missions on May 16, 2011| 12 Comments »

Although both of the first two posts in this series contain serious areas of concern with respect to the way Churches of Christ do mission work, today’s post is where we really want to get to the most critical issues of all!

In the first post of this series, I talked about the process in which those who want to become missionaries must prevail. In the second post, we reviewed the limited number of support/oversight opportunities available to the potential missionary in Churches of Christ.

Local churches Are ill-equipped to truly oversee foreign mission work.

Typically, churches who agree to provide oversight of a foreign mission effort have very little idea of what they are really agreeing to. For most congregations, total oversight means they have hired another employee (the missionary) and that they have ultimate responsibility for the missionary’s

complete job performance,
all monies given by them, both personal and work-related funds,
all work-related decisions, including those made by the mission congregation.
all doctrinal issues and/or congregational practices
growth strategies, including types of facilities

Any serious differences in opinion in any area or dissatisfaction within the overseeing church results in loss of financial support, the premature return of the missionary family, and often the complete termination of the missionary efforts at that site.

The most common variation on the total oversight model above is financial oversight, which usually means the overseeing church simply provides regular financial support to the missionary and as long as no criminal or moral irregularities occur, they are satisfied and continue this relationship of benevolent neglect until one of the following occurs

the missionary chooses to return to the States,
the overseeing church loses interest in the missionary—often because of excitement about a new missionary, or
the mission site is not seen as one that excites the overseeing congregation any longer, often because a new site seems more appealing now.

Attempting to Educate Local Churches

Mission professors at our Christian colleges as well as several groups like Mission Resource Network (MRN) and Sunset (SIBI) have tried for years to educate churches of Christ about missions. In spite of valiant efforts, the truth is that most congregations are woefully ill-prepared to provide oversight of a foreign mission work—much less several works at multiple sites.

We need to seriously consider whether it is realistic to expect every congregation to develop mission expertise—and then not only to continually renew this expertise, but also to educate succeeding generations.

Here are the difficulties that battle against education as the solution to the serious flaws in our missions paradigm:

Very few congregations have members who have any personal experience in mission work. The most experienced have often only visited a foreign site for a few days.
Knowledge gained through expert instruction is secondhand information that too often becomes a mission template that may or may not be appropriate for a specific mission work or site.
Turnover in mission committees or elderships who oversee missions is enough that even if some members are satisfactorily educated, what about the new ones who replace them?
The education that our institutions offer must by design be general, that is, mostly general policy oriented. In the application of these general policies to a specific site, whose judgment prevails—the missionary on site or the overseeing church who now has been through the mission policy course?

In my opinion, Alexander Pope was right when he said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing!”

Responses

Recognizing the weakness of the church education model, many larger churches have responded by limiting their mission focus to only a few workers that they fully support in one or few sites for long periods of time. By limiting the number of workers and the number of sites, they are able to gain a degree of expertise and feel more competent about their oversight. With longer missionary tenures, overseeing churches are able to pass down this expertise more easily.

The challenge of this corrective measure, however, is that it puts a virtual cap on the number of workers on the field, limiting the number to what a relative handful of people in a few large churches feel comfortable managing.

Other churches deal with the oversight dilemma by limiting their active responsibility to financial oversight only—although they are often reluctant to admit this. As long as the missionary reports regularly and accounts properly for the funds, these churches are happy. They may or may not have any emotional relationship to the established church or mission site. They do not wish any further commitment as long as they can report to their congregation that they are doing mission work.

Smaller churches (under 500 members), since they do not feel capable of major financial commitments, are rarely willing to accept oversight responsibilities. They limit their involvement to sending checks to the larger churches and enjoying the visits of “their” missionaries, when the larger churches bring the missionaries home on furlough.

Conclusions:

Exceptions exist to every statement I have made, but Sherrylee and I have been involved intimately in missions in Churches of Christ for over forty years. If you will accept the general truth of what I have stated, then these are the necessary conclusions!

Most missionaries self-select and quality of preparation/training varies widely!
The number of missionaries that Churches of Christ can send to the field is limited to those that large churches can and will both oversee and financially support.
The number of Christians directly involved in sending missionaries is virtually limited to the number on mission committees in large churches.
The oversight of missionaries is done primarily through financial control, usually by people with even less training or experience than the missionaries themselves.
Spiritual oversight is grossly neglected.
The number of missionaries in Churches of Christ is limited to those who either have good large church connections, and/or good fund raising personalities—neither of which are essential qualities for doing good mission work.

In the next posts, we’ll talk about alternatives to the current paradigm, but my suggestions are out of the box—just warning you!