Essential Elements of Successful Missions Ministries
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
- Missions Committee: An active, organized committee that coordinates the missions ministry is absolutely essential. The committee should not see themselves as the ministry, but rather as a leader that involves the entire congregation and all its ministries.
- Ecclesiology: The Bible teaches us that God loves His Church, and has commissioned it to be His primary means and end for advancing the kingdom. Missions leaders need to develop a biblical understanding of the Church and emphasize efforts that help establish churches around the world. Inso doing, it is important to discern the difference between a lasting church and a temporary gathering of believers, as many ministries claim to be committed to church planting.
- Short Term: One of the most effective ways of mobilizing members for missions is to send them on local and global missions projects. All participants will return with a greater heart for God’s world, and some will begin to pursue missionary service. Select projects that best fit with your church’s long-term vision.
- Prayer: The need for more laborers was Christ’s only prayer request. Churches should reflect our Lord’s heart for a needy world by meaningfully and regularly including prayer throughout the ministries of the church.
- Sustainability: While churches in the West should give generously to missions, they should consider how to avoid national churches’ becoming overly dependent on outside resources. Dependency can stifle growth and innovation.
- Theology: It is both stimulating and challenging to engage godly Christians who have developed different convictions or expressions. While encouraging the interdependence of the global body of Christ, missions ministries can also affirm a natural emphasis on planting churches that share their theological convictions.
- Vision: A seemingly limitless number of opportunities will come before the missions committee. Determining which ones to pursue requires a clear sense of direction. The vision of the ministry should be carefully developed, written, and embraced by church leaders.
- Contextualization: No church ministry will be more exposed to the diversity of the larger body of Christ than the missions ministry. This is cause for celebration of God’s love for all peoples and affirmation that the ministry of churches in other cultures can be expressed in biblically valid and culturally indigenous forms. Missions leaders need wisdom and experience as they encounter these different expressions.
- Giving: Compared to the rest of the world, churches in the West have been blessed with tremendous resources. The message of Genesis 12:3 and elsewhere is that God blesses His people so that they will be a blessing to others. To that end, churches should be sacrificial in their support of world missions.
- Partnership: When churches collaborate with other sending churches towards shared ministry goals, far more can be accomplished. More importantly, such partnership expresses the interconnectedness that Christ desires for His body. Churches should consider how they can contribute their experience and resources to other churches, as well as grow from the relationship.
- Word and Deed: As missions ministries determine which efforts to support, they should have in mind the kind of churches that are being developed. A biblical church necessarily requires a commitment to both ministries of the Word (e.g. evangelism, preaching, teaching) and deed (e.g. mercy and justice).
- Multiplication: Churches should actively be involved in planting new churches. Multiplication refers to the process of beginning new churches not simply by the occasional addition of a church, but through a movement of churches planting churches, that in turn reproduce. Effective missions ministries should look to support ministries in other cultures that share this commitment.
- Participation: Christ has laid the task of world evangelization in front of every believer. Thus, missions ministries should not be seen as a separate department but as leaders of the entire congregation. Church members should see the Great Commission as their personal responsibility and have some relationship with someone serving in cross-cultural missions. Mobilized churches will be identifying members to consider missionary service, who would be sent out and supported in prayer and finances by the congregation.
- Emphasis: In order to maximize the impact of the missions ministry, churches should identify special areas of emphasis for long-term participation and concentrated support. Churches with such focus sites typically continue to support other missionaries. However, a higher level of promotion, recruiting and funding will go toward these emphases, as well as repeat site visits and short-term projects.
- Church Planting: If the Church is God’s Plan A for establishing His kingdom—and there is no Plan B—then church planting is the means of expanding that kingdom. Moreover, studies have shown that church planting is by far the most effective method of evangelism. Therefore, a majority of missions resources should be directed towards church-planting efforts.
- Facilitation: Increasingly, missionaries are being sent not as primary evangelists and pastors but as facilitators to indigenous leaders. Many such leaders are looking for a peer to come alongside them for counsel, resources and connection to the global Church. Although their ministry may not be as visible as other missionaries or the nationals they serve, these new missionaries can have enormous impact and deserve to be strongly supported.
- Church Leadership: A significant factor in determining the success of a missions ministry is the support of church leaders, and in particular the senior pastor. The strongest ministries describe their church leadership as champions of missions, through their personal participation and public commitment.
- National Leadership: No matter how long missionaries live in another culture, they will never understand the context as well as a national. Practically, church multiplication requires the development of indigenous leaders and their primary role in the local church. Missions ministries should look to support efforts that emphasize national leadership.
- Education: While an annual missions conference may be the most visible event to promote missions, churches that are the most mobilized create opportunities to educate their members about missions throughout the year. The congregation should be regularly learning about missions through such means as sermons, presentations and missions courses.
- Commission of Church: God has called the Church to be His primary instrument to evangelize people, extend mercy, and transform the culture around it. Missions ministries should consider whether the efforts they support are primarily based in the local church or are separate ministries.
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