Missions: Mark Woodward, Part 4

In Part 4 of his series, Mark Woodward argues that the local congregation should be recruiting missionaries from among its own members —

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.

Presently, most congregations do not intentionally encourage their members to become missionaries. However, the Christian colleges often work to develop missionaries and church planters from among their students. But most of our children don’t attend a Christian college. As a result, we don’t have nearly as many missionaries as are needed.

Now, my congregation has had several of its children grow up and enter the mission field, many for several years. We routinely send high school and college students on short-term mission trips, and I don’t think we’re unusual at all in that regard. Lots of churches are doing that now that travel costs are so much more affordable than when I was a teenager.

Several of our elders have gone on mission trips, both as workers and on oversight trips. We routinely visit the missionaries we support in the field. Again, I don’t perceive us as being all that unusual, but maybe we are. Many of our missions team members also make trips. An elder and the chair of the team recently returned from a week in Romania to become more familiar with the work there and to provide counsel, in coordination with MRN, on the direction of that ministry.

But we’re a big church, and we have the financial resources to do this. Moreover, we can afford to have a handful of our members leave to enter the mission field. If a church of 100 has a member enter the mission field, they probably lost one of their best Bible class teachers and a future elder. It hurts the local work when talent is lost, even if lost to a mission the church strongly supports.

And this is going to be a problem so long as our churches insist on dividing. The town I grew up in has at least four congregations all within 3 miles of each other, having divided over issues my children wouldn’t begin to comprehend. Merge them and they’d form a congregation of 400 or more, with the ability to recruit and send missionaries and do many other good works that they can’t support now.

I know it grates on many readers for me to speak in economic terms, but the fact is that there are economies of scale. A church of 400 will make better, more efficient use of the talents and gifts God gives them, freeing members to use their talents in the very best ways — and freeing up resources to reach beyond their four walls into nations around the world.

Five churches averaging 80 members will struggle to make payroll and pay the utilities. A church of 80 members will not want to see their most motivated, talented members leave for the mission field because they desperately need them at home. A church of 400 will celebrate the opportunity to send one of their own into the mission field.

Division is horribly destructive to the church’s ability to serve in God’s mission.