The Church’s Responsibility to their Missionaries
The pastor stared at his phone in shock.
Just five years earlier, his church had sent a married couple as missionaries to Central Asia. Now a representative from the missions agency was calling to let him know that they were being removed from ministry and they’d be returning to Canada with their marriage on the rocks.
“Where did it go wrong?” the pastor wondered. He hadn’t spoken to them in a few years, but he had briefly skimmed their prayer letters. Things seemed to be going fine. No one in the church seemed to have a clue about how one of their best and brightest couples had gone from frontline warriors to the spiritual ICU so quickly.
For generations, this sort of story has become the norm.
Churches that send missionaries often assume they have no choice but to completely hand over any authoritative voice to missions agencies viewed as the experts. It doesn’t take long before the church gets sidelined to doing little more than reading updates, praying, and sending money.
LOOKING FOR A MORE BIBLICAL WAY
In cases like this, I think it’s fair to ask how closely we’re modeling our missions efforts on the New Testament. In the 18th century, when the modern missions movements were born out of the work of men like William Carey, it certainly made sense for sending churches to appoint representatives to oversee the work of missionaries on the other side of the world. After all, if things started to drift, they wouldn’t even know about it until a year later when a ship carrying a letter could report the problem.
But given today’s technology and connectivity, there seems little reason not to reconsider how we structure our missions efforts. After all, in Acts 13–14, we see the church in Antioch taking a very authoritative posture towards the ministry of those they send.
In order to exercise this kind of biblical authority, sending churches must first define the task for which they will hold missionaries accountable. Once the task is defined, churches can begin the challenging work of vetting and equipping workers to accomplish it.
Here’s a real-life example: Several years ago, the elders at University Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, began to carefully evaluate their missions efforts. They began by establishing the theological and ecclesiological framework that would guide them.
This allowed the missions team to structure an equipping process that would help assure the missionaries they sent would be capable of engaging in church planting among unreached language groups.
Once sending churches take back the ownership and authority in missions, it becomes easier to care for workers and to avert crises by intervening at a much earlier stage. The leaders of the church can establish a care team for each of the missionaries on the field and delegate accountability to them.
The missions agency can then serve both the church and the ones the church sends, advising on technical issues like orthography, Bible translation, and visas, without usurping the church’s authority. Finally, the missionaries know that the church cares not only about them, but also about the unreached language group they are hoping to reach with the gospel, and eventually with church-planting efforts.
Another real-life example comes from The Chapel on the Campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Earlier this year, when a young couple sent by the church to Southeast Asia had a medical emergency, the church immediately sprang into action.
The care team connected with the missions agency’s contingency team, as the missionaries drove six hours to reach an airstrip where a helicopter could evacuate them to a hospital for emergency surgery.
While they were still on the way, the members of the sending church were on their knees, asking for the Lord to intervene. And even after the emergency was over, the church partnered with a counseling agency to debrief and help the missionaries biblically process the event.
KEEPING THE FOCUS ON GOD’S WORK, NOT MAN’S EFFORTS
Ultimately, the most important and perhaps most difficult change a church can make is reframing their missions efforts to focus on God and his work to accomplish the Great Commission rather than the missionaries they send. When our eyes are centered on him and on what he is doing among the unreached, then we can rightly view our job to support and care for those we send.
When sending churches see God perform miracle after miracle to use the broken, flawed people they sent to cast gospel seeds on the packed-down, rocky soil of a previously-unreached language group—and then for the power of his Word to break through and lead to a baby church—it inspires them to worship.
And it inspires renewed passion to send out more missionaries to see it happen again.
