November 01, 1989 by Greg Livingstone

A Church Planter Appeals For Balance

No one has been more encouraged than I as the Association of Church Mission Committees, the U.S. Center for World Mission and others have been used of God to focus mission-minded churches on priorities in their mission budgets. However, too often we have been noble in loving God with our hearts, yet found wanting in loving Him with our minds!

Asking Hard Questions

Truly, mission committees are doing right to ask the hard questions. It is important to understand what you're doing in missions as a local church. It is helpful to ask what percentage of your mission effort is directed toward overseas work, and what percentage is concerned with ministry in your own country. How many missionaries do you have who are focusing on people who are already saved? How many are doing pioneer evangelism and church planting? Etc.

In the past decade, some churches have been amazed to realize that many of the missionaries they support are actually living in North America, working in the administrative offices of mission agencies.

At the same time, as the desperate need for pioneer church planting has come to the focus of God’s people, mission executives whose agencies specialize in breaking new ground have greatly rejoiced to see mission committees giving priority to missionaries who are doing pioneer evangelism and church planting.

The Pendulum Effect

As a result, it may now be that the pendulum has swung too far! Suddenly “home staff” have become less valuable than the local church custodian in the eyes of mission-minded Christians! People working in home offices who seek missionary support are finding door after door slammed in their faces. Never mind the fact that a “home staffer” might be working 60-hour weeks, battling against a higher cost of living and spending his or her time entirely focused on Afghanistan, Angola or the Aceh of Indonesia.

Mission committees understandably ask what an agency candidate does and how that contributes to the priorities of that church. But some committees get focused on where a candidate lives. If it happens to be in the home country, it doesn’t seem to matter to the committee how vital that home staffer’s contribution might be. Does this make sense?

Would anyone actually argue that it’s more strategic to support Joe and Susy going off to Arabic studies in Jordan as rookie missionaries than Ralph Winter, general director of the U.S. Center for World Mission or Dr. Robert Douglas, executive director of the Zwemer Institute for Muslim Studies? Some of us live and work in a sending country because our brethren have felt this is the place from which we could make the most significant and strategic contribution to the task. So in submission to the brethren, in following the Lord as a servant and in being committed to the overall task, “home staff” people are at home because that’s where they’ve been asked to serve! In fact, if a mission agency can’t get recruiters, personnel department people, church and donor relations, media and finance staff supported by local churches, then we must bring missionaries back from the field in order to stay in business!

Taxing Field Missionaries

When I once asked a pastor of a large church in Philadelphia to support a long-time church member who was North Africa Mission’s director of candidates, he challenged me with “Why don’t you just salary your home staff?”

“How are we supposed to do that?” I countered. “Few people want to give to a general fund for staff salaries. Where are we supposed to get that salary from?” Certainly local churches object to a mission agency “taxing” the field missionaries at a higher level so that they can pay home staff salaries!

The fact of the matter is, in our great spiritual warfare (as in an earthly one), there must be recruiters, processers, logistical people, administrators and supply people to keep the frontline soldiers moving ahead in triumph.

Support home staff missionaries? Don’t let them live under a curse! Think it over—again!