On the few occasions that Penny wondered whether her church was actually making a difference, she would remember its mission work. Penny liked her church including its preaching, songs, membership, studies, facility, and worship. But her church’s missions programs and activities were what most encouraged Penny. She had once been a member of a church that only looked inward. That church had seemed to Penny to be lacking something essential, indeed to be missing the main point for its existence, which was to point the whole world, not just its own members, to the Lord Jesus Christ. Penny’s present church made missions a priority, locally, regionally, and around the world. And as long as it did, Penny knew that she wouldn’t be leaving.
Missions
Missions are indeed at the center of a church’s ground for existence. Christ didn’t commission the disciples to sit around tending to one another’s needs. He instead sent the disciples out to make disciples of all nations. Churches properly care for their own members. But they also properly care for the poor, hungry, weary, and foreigners, for those at the margins of society and on shores beyond. Churches have traditionally answered Christ’s Great Commission through missions activities and programs. A church without a healthy and active commitment to missions is a church without a proper fire in its soul. A church with a strong and vibrant missions program is a church that understands its true nature, world destiny, and proper role. Help your church see missions not as a luxury to pursue out of its surplus of funds and energies but instead as the spark that ignites the fuse. Seek the lost, and you will find and heal your own soul.
Partnering
Missions work can be sufficiently challenging, complex, specialized, and expensive that sharing it with other churches and entities can certainly help. Denominations can operate sophisticated and effective missions programs, funded and supported by local churches. Your church may be small enough or lacking in staff or financial resources to operate its own missions program. Participating with your church’s denomination or regional body, or partnering with another local church or consortium of churches, may be your church’s best approach. Nonprofit organizations associated with denominations or regional or local church consortiums, or simply of Christian faith, also pursue fruitful mission work. Your church may find it wise to partner with one of those organizations to train and send missionaries out of your church. Local churches wisely partner with sophisticated and impactful mission programs designed and pursued by others. Missions can be especially complex, costly, and long-term work, of the kind that benefits from collaboration and partnership.
Direction
Your church may be wise to employ a missions director who knows and may already have participated in missions. A director can help recruit, form, and empower a volunteer missions team of church members with missions experience or a devotion to missions. The missions team can guide and support the director, while helping the director recruit volunteers, solicit donations, and draw other resources to the church’s missions effort. A missions team can also help the director communicate the church’s missions work and its successes and challenges to the whole membership. The missions director can bring to the advisory missions team opportunities for local, national, and foreign missions for the team to evaluate against the church’s budget, other resources, and interests. To invigorate your church’s missions program, help your church identify, retain, and empower a missions director and surround the director with a volunteer team with a passion to promote missions.
Budgeting
One way to ensure that missions work doesn’t become an afterthought is to provide amply for it in your church’s budget. Budgets tell where the church’s commitment lies. Budgets tell priorities. A missions budget can be a difficult thing to fund. Churches need to pay a pastor, office manager, and custodian. They need to keep the lights on and the heat or air conditioning running. Affording a missions director and funds for local, regional, and foreign missions, perhaps on top of missions shares sent to a denomination or grants made to a mission partner, takes genuine commitment. Help inform your church’s pastor, governing elders, operations director, and others who influence the budget of the priority of missions work. Compare the percentage of budget that your church devotes to missions to the percentage other churches devote, to ensure that your church is at least doing its part. Use that comparison to help the membership commit to greater funding of missions out of the general church budget.
Designations
Funding missions out of the general church budget can be difficult enough that special solicitations of members with the heart and means to fund missions may be appropriate. Your church may decide that in addition to devoting missions funds out of the general budget, designated funds should also fund missions. Churches generally have two accounting categories. One category accounts for the church’s general budget. The other category tracks designated accounts outside of the general budget. Tithes and offerings go into the general budget. Donations with special designations go into the designated accounts, one of which may be for missions. Well-heeled members whose passion is for missions may provide substantial additional missions funding, beyond the general budget missions account. Help your church attract and manage special designations for missions.
Sending
One way in which a local church can carry out missions work is to send members on foreign missions. Many churches have individuals, couples, or families so devoted to missions work that they will live overseas for months or years at a time to carry out those missions. They may earn income at their missions site but more likely will depend for the bulk or entirety of their support on donations from friends and family members, and local-church funding out of the general budget. A church may have one, two, or several families on foreign missions at any one time, largely or entirely funded out of the local church, while trained, sent, and supported by a special sending organization. The church’s missions director may coordinate missionary support, while the church’s missions team provides additional aid. Help your church be a supportive home for missions individuals and families.
Trips
Another way that churches commonly support missions work is to plan, promote, and conduct regular missions trips. Missions trips may be for youth, adults, or a combination of youths and adults including whole families. Your church’s missions director may work closely with the church’s youth director, adult groups director, or other ministry leaders to plan and coordinate the trips. The travel may be regional, across state lines to a disaster site or impoverished area, for a long weekend or few more days of service work, supporting a sister church or faith organization, and local witnessing. The travel may alternatively be out of the country, to a remote or impoverished area, for a week or longer, where the group may dig, build, paint, or do other service work, while worshiping, teaching, learning, and praying with a local body. Churches can develop strong and vital relationships with foreign mission sites and their local bodies and members, with trips, visits, grants, and cultural exchanges, enriching both local bodies. Help your church pursue regular missions trips as a significant part of its missions work.
Serving
As the prior paragraph intimates, serving can be a key aspect of missions work. Christians share the good news of Jesus Christ through their love. To love in the name of Christ can mean to help with whatever skills, aid, and other resources one can. Your church’s membership likely has substantial skills of several different types, all of which a missions site may need. Indeed, your church may choose the missions site because of the ability of your church’s members to meet those needs. Your church may, for instance, have doctors and nurses who can provide medical services, lawyers who can provide legal services, accountants who can provide financial services, and builders who can build, painters who can paint, seamstresses who can sew, and adults and youths who can love and care for orphaned kids. Help your church identify missions sites where members can exercise their skills in the love of Christ.
Sharing
The core aspect, though, of missions work is to share the good news of Jesus Christ. Your church should direct all missions work toward proclaiming the gospel message in the manner most likely for others to receive. Service performed in the course of missions work can itself be deeply meaningful. But service is still primarily to open the hearts of others to the gospel and to welcome those others into relationship with Jesus Christ. Help your church identify missions sites where members can sow the good news deeply and draw a rich harvest, too. Do not partner with secular organizations that will limit or contradict your missionaries’ gospel witness. See that your missions teams receive training to help them share the gospel appropriately and effectively, on whatever mission trips they go. Don’t send out teams of builders and painters without reminding and equipping them for their bigger act of love and service, which is to share the good news of Jesus Christ. Encourage participants to bring home testimonies of that witness to share with your membership, and celebrate those testimonies in services and other gatherings, and on your church’s website and in social media.
Local
Don’t overlook local missions in your church’s missions work. Sometimes, the missions field is right at home. Your church may be in a community filled with individuals who do not know the good news of Jesus Christ and who at the same time need a helping hand. Or your church may have a neighboring community a short drive away that could serve as a rich missions field. Local communities can even have pockets of populations that have a distinct culture, may speak a foreign language at home, and may face significant isolation and economic deprivation, along with related social ills. Don’t hesitate to make your local community or a neighboring community your church’s missions field. The greater cost of foreign missions work is in the travel and forgone income while away from employment. If, instead, your church can offer members local missions work, members may be able to invest substantially more of their free time and resources in the work itself rather than in the foreign travel. Your missions director may also be able to better assess needs in the local area and make more-reliable and effective local partners to carry out the missions work. In a longer-term local relationship to which your membership devotes greater mission service, you may even see the satisfying local fruits of your church’s labors over the long term.
Reflection
What are your church’s primary missions fields? Does your church have a sound mix of foreign, regional, and local missions, or does it need to rebalance its missions work? Does your church employ a missions director or have a lead missions volunteer to whom members can look for direction? Does your church have a volunteer advisory missions team guiding the missions director and supporting the church’s missions work? Does your church’s general budget include a proper percentage for missions? Does your church welcome special designations for missions? Does your church support members on long-term missions? Does your church plan regular mission trips for youths and adults? Do the mission sites your church visits benefit from your members’ service work? Are your members effective at sharing the gospel in the course of their missions work?
Key Points
Missions carry out Christ’s Great Commission, central to the church.
Partnering with other churches and faith organizations eases missions.
Employ a missions director and build a missions team for better work.
Allocate a proper percentage of your church’s budget to missions.
Solicit designated giving to further fund your church’s missions work.
Send your church members and their families on long-term missions.
Organize regular short-term missions trips for youths and adults.
Plan missions to provide meaningful practical service at missions sites.
Plan missions to effectively share the good news of Jesus Christ.
Include local missions among your church’s missions works.