Changing Missions
Sometimes I’m tempted to
think the most radical church changes in the last 30 years have been in worship
but I think more changes may have happened in missions. Here are the changes
I’ve seen in the last 30 years, since 1980.
1. Collapse of the
“just-send-us-your-money-and-trust-us” mission boards.
Before the 1980s most missions boards simply raised money for missions. Churches
gave their money and the missions boards spent it sending out the best
missionaries they could find. This was virtually the only way
denominations raised missions money. Churches had
annual missionary conferences and raised “self-denial offerings” and sent
bucketfuls of undesignated money to their denominational office to spend the
best way possible. When missionaries did “deputation” they told specific
stories about their field but the offerings went into the general pot to
support all missionaries everywhere. This model has just about collapsed everywhere
with a few notable exceptions (Nazarenes?).
2. Growth of missionaries
raising their own support.
The trouble with the first
model for denominations was that eventually an independent missionary showed up
on the church’s doorstep and said, “Please support me—I am not like
denominational missionaries who get paid out of a common pot—if I don’t raise
my support I can’t go to the field.” Lots (and lots) of churches bought this
pitch and began funneling support to these “faith missionaries”–especially if they
were related to someone in the church. Denominations and boards with method
number 1 were simply forced to switch to individual missionaries raising their
own support or they couldn’t compete. Some worried that there would be some
really good missionaries who might be poor fund-raisers, or (worse) there’d be
some really bad missionaries who could raise lots of money, but most
denominational missions agencies in the 1980s or 90s
succumbed to this individual support-raising system. Now everyone is out there
raising support on the same basis—“help me or I can’t go.”
3. Merger of home
missions and foreign missions.
Even if denominations didn’t
actually merge these two missions departments, local churches merged them.
Churches dropped the “s” from missions and offered a single mission pot. The
mission now included everything over the ocean, over the state line, and across
the street. A church might still recruit a high powered missionary to give the
sermon on faith promise Sunday but when the money came in, it went to the local
Christian radio station, the town’s crisis pregnancy center, the city mission,
Habitat for Humanity, church planting in the district, supporting local
students at college, along with supporting foreign missionaries. To get a local
church’s support missionaries had to “apply” for it through a committee like
they were applying for a grant. Missionaries started recruiting money
person-by-person at this stage, and eventually facebook
and email began replacing church-to-church visits.
4. Preference for short
term.
In the earlier stages above,
almost all missionary money was channeled into long term projects—like paying
actual missionary support to a person who would move to country for a few
decades and learn the language. Increasingly many churches considered these
missionaries “overhead” or merely “denominational bureaucrats” and sought
instead whiz-bang short term projects that produced more excitement. It seemed
like you’d get a quicker return on the dollar of you supported your brother in
law to spend two weeks building a school in Zambia than just tossing your money
in the sack toward a missionary’s salary or pension. You got to see your
brother in law come home transformed and contribute something to your church.
It seemed sexier to buy a thousand pairs of shoes than pay the salary of the
person who would hand them out. Missionaries could more easily get people to
buy shoes, or fill shoeboxes, or drill wells than they could to raise their own
support to be an actual missionary. Missions was moving from people to projects.
5. Evangelism to social
ministry.
As evangelicals lost their
nerve to do evangelism at home they increasingly had less motivation send
evangelistic missionaries abroad. Evangelicals had wearied of “The Four
Spiritual Laws” and talking about “the lost” who are “headed to hell “ or having heroes who were “soul-winners.” In their
weariness along came all kinds of social ministries that were worthy—drilling
wells for life-giving water, rescuing AIDS orphans, establishing schools and
colleges, or fighting sex trafficking...and a score of other worthwhile things.
Evangelicals still expected people to get saved, but evangelism was not the
primary focus. It became a collateral
benefit. Professional missionaries plugging away at evangelism found less zeal
for their work on returning to the
6. Local church becomes
its own missions board.
The latest change is the
local church itself (especially large churches) becoming their own missions
board—doing missions direct and “cutting out the middle man” that avoided
boards “taking their cut.” Combined with all of the above, this final change
yields a totally new approach to missions since 1980: Raising money locally to
support local and global (“Glocal”) projects that are
mostly short term involving our own people involved especially in social
ministries. Smaller churches can band together as a district and do the
same—even launching and supervising their own mission fields sometimes in
“partnership” with the former centralized missions
boards.
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This week I’ll be thinking
about these changes. Which of these changes have been good? Bad?
What other changes have I missed? Are there “unintended consequences” of some
of these changes? Where does all this lead?
That’s what I’m thinking
about this week.
So, what do you
think?
The
discussion of this column is on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=161502633
Keith Drury
www.TuesdayColumn.