Missionaries know that in order to reach people with the gospel, they must be willing and able to speak their language. This applies to reaching and equipping the upcoming generation as well. […]
“I don’t need much. I simply want to be someplace where I can serve. If I am working with the poor then I might want to live in their neighborhood, or if I’m working with students, could I have a national for a roommate?” This perspective expresses the heart of many who are looking at missions today. They want to live in the home of a national, or with a national roommate. They might see themselves living in a village, embracing the same lifestyle and facing the same challenges as the people living there. They are at a unique crossroads of personal freedom and have a strong desire to minister in challenging situations, such as living among the poor. They are ready to embrace life on the edge.
MTW’s new EDGE program will allow participants who desire a stripped-down missions experience to live more closely with those to whom them minister. Featuring lower support costs and hands-on ministry experience, EDGE is a two-year missions experience that will be offered in addition to current intern, short-term, and career missionary tracks.
However, EDGE will not be for everyone. We believe this ministry path will be most attractive to those in their 20s, just graduated from college, or singles who are free to travel and take risks. It may also fit for newly-married couples without kids, or even couples whose kids have moved out (provided the circumstances are right and they have a tolerance for risk). If someone is looking for hands-on experience and a service-oriented ministry, then this could be for them. A caution is that more than any of our other programs, EDGE will take participants to the extreme in terms of personal sacrifice. This is not to say that the opportunity to sacrifice is not present in other programs; in fact, on the surface it doesn’t look much different from our intern level of support. The difference is that this is a two-year endeavor, a lifestyle. It is embracing subsistence living over a long period of time as a means to connect. Click here to continue reading this article…
If you want to discover how you can serve God with the business experience He’s given you, the Missions in Business Weekend is just for you.
Who Should Attend:
• Business owners
• Business executives
• Retired businesspeople
• Entrepreneurs
• Spouses (special program)
• Young businesspeople who desire to be mentored
Missions in Business Weekend
August 19-22
The Cove
Billy Graham Conference Center
Asheville, NC
“Reaching the nations and the next generation.” That’s the mission of Global Youth and Family Ministry (GYFM), led by MTW missionaries Eric and Rebecca Larsen. GYFM provides support and care for MTW missionaries and their children—often referred to as Third Culture Kids—and ongoing training for those seeking to influence global youth culture. Following is an interview with GYFM director Eric Larsen.
Your path to youth ministry is personal. Can you talk about your own experience as a Third Culture Kid (TCK)?
I was a military brat, missionary kid, and PCA pastor’s kid. And by eighth grade, I was on my 12th move, eighth school, and third continent.
I had a really difficult transition from Australia to the U.S. after graduating from high school and moving to Covenant College. I remember sealing up my Australian belongings in a box and shoving it in the back of my closet; I stopped reading letters from my Australian friends; I changed my accent. I remember thinking, “I can’t continue to straddle multiple worlds when others can’t do that with me.” Click here to continue reading this article…
Joe Novenson and Paul Kooistra will be the plenary speakers at the upcoming PCA Global Missions Conference, November 5-7, in Chattanooga, TN. Joe recently sat down with MTW’s Global Support Ministries International Director, Brian Deringer, and shared about his heart for missions and raising up the next generation. This is the first of four previews from that time.
Missionaries know that in order to reach people with the gospel, we must be willing and able to speak their language.
The upcoming generation in our culture speaks a different “language” too, a language shaped by media sound bites, dynamic video, action-oriented extreme sports, and fast-moving technology like social networking, mobile web surfing, or texting.
We believe it is our responsibility to speak to this generation, to help them catch a vision for the world around them and begin to focus outside themselves.
In an effort to connect with them by speaking their language, MTW has created a new micro website, “Go Global,” showcasing young people who are engaging in missions. Read their comments about what God has taught them. Hear and see their stories in videos about missions and missionaries. You’ll even find a little humor if you look for it.
But, we need your help to spread the word: share it with leaders in your church’s youth ministry, post a link on Facebook, and mention it to your friends. Feel free to use your imagination.
MTW is featuring the work in Thailand at General Assembly this year. If you’re planning to be in Nashville, come by the MTW booth and pickup your Thailand gift to discover more about what God is doing in this part of Asia.
Here is a video put together by Team Thailand that tells a bit of the story:
Reaching a mountain peak basically requires two things: knowing where the summit is and having the means to get there.
For missions leaders to reach the summit of their own ministries, they must know the goal of their efforts and develop the means to get there. God’s word is clear on the goal: the church of Jesus Christ growing and taking hold of all cultures. A mobilized congregation is the means missions leaders can contribute to that end.
When church members are committed to world missions and their efforts are directed towards the growth of nationally-led churches, the missions ministry begins to reach the higher elevations. Mountain climbers know that this is where the journey becomes the most strenuous and the steps upward come more slowly. Every component must be in good working order. And these components must all work together. Moreover, climbers will encounter issues at these elevations they didn’t encounter earlier. Everything must come together.
Integration is similarly a key principle for more seasoned missions ministries. Your missions leaders may have been able to develop an active ministry by sending two-week project participants, generously supporting missionaries and holding exciting conferences. Further growth, though, is not simply “doing more of the same.” Build on your foundations, ensure all the key components are in place, get them working together, and consider how you will address special issues facing your ministry.
Ensure You Have All The Right Components
Through formal and informal consultations with missions leaders, Mission to the World has identified essential characteristics for a strong missions ministry. These elements form the basis for the questions in the Window to the World diagnostic tool and are included in the following pages. Missions leaders will certainly have a longer list of their particular emphases, but healthy ministries typically share these twenty components. Have several leaders from your church complete Window to the World, compare their results and determine areas for growth.
Get The Parts Working Together
It’s been known for centuries that horses yoked together and pulling in the same direction can pull more than the sum of their individual abilities. Synergy literally means “working together” and it occurs when the various parts of your ministry are more effectively pulling toward a common purpose. One way to create synergy is to interconnect the various components of your ministry, resulting in internal integration. You can also connect your external ministry sites for greater impact. The articles on integration will help you consider ways to create synergy in your missions ministry.
Address Special Issues
When your missions ministry was in the early stages of development, you likely focused on the essentials, such as forming a missions committee, pulling together a conference, and learning how to support missionaries. Now that this foundation has been laid, your ministry will benefit by considering special issues that affect how you support ministries crossculturally.
The more personally connected you are to ministries overseas, the more you will need to be aware of the issues facing missionaries and national leaders. Articles relating to themes such as sustainability, contextualization, and holistic ministry will help you think through some of the most challenging issues in missions today so that you may be a more effective partner.
Lead Others
Lastly, as a more mature missions ministry, you have an opportunity and responsibility to mentor other churches in your area. Being a peer to leaders in other churches provides you a significant platform to positively influence them—often in ways no one else can. The suggestions in the final article can help you multiply your own contribution to the Great Commission by leading others to be more active participants in missions.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Under the titles of the following articles, the “theme” refers to one of the essential elements of successful missions ministries listed in Window to the World. This list is included in the following pages. A fruitful exercise for your missions committee would be to evaluate your ministry according to each of the twenty themes and begin to strengthen undeveloped areas.
You may also want to refer to the articles in the rest of the Window to the World series:
Laying the Foundation encourages churches to focus on the essentials: developing their missions leadership, creating a vision for the ministry, and developing a missions conference to mobilize their members.
Setting Your Sights explores the importance of the Church and national church planting movements as the visible goal of a missions ministry.
Setting the Pace offers practical help on how to mobilize your church for world missions.
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.
The material in Setting Your Sights is intended for churches that are mobilizing their members for missions while the ultimate goal of their mobilization may not be quite clear or consistent. Churches in this position may find themselves supporting a wide diversity of ministries that have little in common. Or they may be sending out members on short-term projects, who return with a great love for the people they encountered, but are uncertain about the project’s lasting impact. The premise of these articles is that there is indeed a goal for missions, and the most fruitful missions ministries will be oriented in that direction.
THE GOAL OF MISSIONS
Simply stated, the goal of world missions is the Church of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures are clear that Christ intends to build His kingdom by establishing His Church—not a physical building or an institution, but His bride, His body, His people. By definition, a Christian is a member of a larger body, of which Christ is the head. The Christian life is meant to be lived out in community with other believers. The Bible calls that community the Church. Thus, effective Christian ministry contributes to the expansion and building up of this new community of faith. Consider encouraging your world missions leaders to grow in their understanding of the Church, or ecclesiology. The articles in Setting Your Sights and similar materials would be a good starting point.
Given that the goal of missions is the Church, a natural conclusion is that church planting is the primary method of expansion. And if so, that expansion should multiply, such that churches are starting churches, which in turn have a vision for further church planting. And if that is to happen, these churches will need a growing number of trained indigenous leaders, who understand how to apply ministry principles to their context. And given the need for so many national leaders, the role of the expatriate missionary begins to shift towards facilitation of the overall ministry. These conclusions are what is meant by the term national church-planting movement.
The New Testament is full of examples and principles for beginning new churches, and missions leaders should be aware of key concepts and issues. The articles in this series will introduce missions leaders to these topics so that they may consider how to elevate the goal of their own ministry towards the expansion of the Church. As they do so, they will need to ask several critical questions.
KEY QUESTIONS
Do the ministries we support have a biblical view of the local church?
Virtually all Christians would agree that the Church universal is the entire body of Christ, of which all genuine Christians are members. We are all committed to that. The challenge for ministry, though, primarily comes in determining its local expressions. For example, a missionary in Asia knows a man who claims to plant three churches a week. That’s 150 every year. If so, this ministry would seem to be worthy of celebration and support. But what does this church planter mean by “church”? When you ask about his ministry, he says he goes to a house and asks if he can pray for the family. Wanting to be hospitable, they typically invite him in and he prays. He then asks if he can return the following week, and they again agree. Who would refuse? The next week he asks if he can come back, and bring another family to pray for. If they say yes, he claims to have planted a church.
Are such accounts the best investment for your missions ministry? That depends on whether you conclude these are biblical churches. Missions leaders will need to develop their own conclusions on what is meant by the local church, and then ask probing questions about what the missionary has in mind.
How directly do the ministries we support grow the Church?
Establishing the Church involves many elements, such as training, evangelism, and mercy ministry. When these facets occur apart from the ministry of the Church, individual lives may be deeply touched, but the Church may only be indirectly built up—if at all. That’s not to say such expressions are wrong. However, the more such ministries are connected to the Church, the more effectively they contribute to the ultimate goal of missions: bringing people into a lasting Christian community where they can serve and grow.
The missionaries and ministries you support should be able to tell you how directly they are connected to church planting. Is ministry an expression of a local body? How will people be followed-up with? Is the real goal the perpetuation of an outside ministry or the establishment of the local church?
How do we re-orient our ministry towards church planting?
Perhaps the greatest challenge for a missions ministry that wants to emphasize church planting is making the transition. Long-term commitments have been made and relationships deepened. The article on transitioning to a church-focused ministry draws from the lessons of other churches that have faced a similar challenge.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Under each of the titles, the “theme” of the article refers to one of the essential elements of successful missions ministries listed in Window to the World and included here at the end of these articles. A fruitful exercise for your missions committee would be to evaluate your ministry according to each of the twenty themes and begin to strengthen undeveloped areas.
You may also want to refer to the articles in the rest of the Window to the World series:
Laying the Foundation encourages churches to focus on the essentials: developing their missions leadership, creating a vision for the ministry, and developing a missions conference to mobilize their members.
Setting the Pace offers practical help on how to mobilize your church for world missions.
Reaching the Summit helps more established ministries integrate their efforts with the entire church and with key principles for maximizing long-term impact.
The following is an article by Burt Boykin, pastor of Community PCA in Moody, AL. I asked Burt to write this article after recognizing a number of people out of his church who were going to the mission field. What I noticed was that these folks were the very leaders in Burt’s church. One was his associate pastor (his only associate pastor). So I felt like Burt could not only encourage us, but that he was a worthy example. Burt is a pastor’s pastor. Enjoy.
by, Burt Boykin
If you’re reading this article you’re surely one of those pro-mission folks who already has an above-average interest in and commitment to missions. I do too, I guess. But let’s admit that sometimes this missions deal gets just a little out of hand. Let me explain.
As a church we’re always glad to send some money to missionaries and even do it regularly. Most of us are even willing to support missions with our personal finances. And surely we pray for missionaries. In addition to sending money and praying, we frequently go on mission trips ourselves, taking a handful of folks to various spots around the world to get a taste of what the Lord is doing. And to put the icing on the cake of our self-righteousness, we even promote the idea of people considering missions as a calling. Sometimes we see our people seriously consider that call, occasionally pursue it, and once in a while actually end up on the mission field. There are always certain people we’d love to see go on the mission field, whom we approach and urge to consider missions, and whom we’re even willing to help support when they go. All of this is good and surely helps give our churches a more mission-minded look and feel. But, when your very best folks start lining up to leave the church, that’s when you start to wonder if this stuff isn’t getting out of hand! We’re just not one of those large churches that can afford to lose our leaders, our best people, our tithers! When we lose a “significant” family, it’s rather significant. (continue reading this article)
