December 01, 1990 by

How To Follow Through on Mission Commitment

The following discussion took place October 18, 1990 among Rob Antonucci of Caleb Resources, Lee Purgason of the Perspectives Study Program, Neal Pirolo of Emmaus Road International, Steve Stuckey of InterVarsity Fellowship, Bob Sjogren of Frontiers, Don Marchant of Equipped To Go, Ralph Winter of William Carey International Unioersity and Rick Wood of Mission Frontiers.

MF: What would you say are keys to help a person maintain her or his mission commitment?

Rob Antonucci: I work with Caleb Resources in the Follow-Through Department. Two keys in maintaining commitment are discipleship encouragement from someone close to the person who makes the commitment and then wise counsel and guidance through a maze of possibilities of involvement. This advice and counsel on preparation needed, resources and opportunities must come from a fairly unbiased "generic" position in missions.

But probably the most important thing is determination on the part of the person who makes the commitment.

Neil Pirolo: The best way I could contribute something to this main question is to illustrate it with an appointment I had this very noon hour with a fellow who is in a church which is about a year old. Though he has a fulltime job in sales, this fellow has become the pastorâs right hand man, and he's taken on quite a few major responsibilities in the ministries of the church. But he's been feeling the tug of a desire to head for the mission field since he was a junior higher. His basic question was, "What do I do now?"

It's a bit uncomfortable for some individuals who have made a mission commitment to realize that there is more to the road from here to the field than jumping into training and going. Basically, I said to this friend, "To move forward now, there are several practical steps to take. First, get a supporting confirmation from your church ö from your Sunday School class, Bible study group, mission committee. There is safety in the Antioch model of support from the home church:

"Barnabas and Paul had just returned from Jerusalem ö from Urbana. As they shared with the church the challenges of the uttermost parts, the church fasted and prayed and the Spirit indicated, ÎI want Barnabus and Paul!â The church at Antioch heard the confirming voice of the Lord. Therefore Îthey [the church] laid hands on them and sent them away.â The next verse in Acts 13 then asserts that Paul and Barnabus were Îsent forth by the Holy Spirit.â " What a dynamic cooperation of the local church with God in world evangelization!

Next, begin to develop leaders who can carry on your local church ministries. It'd be foolish to dump these responsibilities on the local level so that you can suddenly go global. You're going to have to find and disciple someone to take the prison ministry, the Sunday School teaching and so on so you're not leaving a gap. This might take a long time.

"The next step is to begin building a support team around you, beginning with moral support. Then give serious effort in developing your prayer support team ö begin identifying those people who pray and will pray with you since you're going to face a thousand adversaries before you even get to the plane! The other four aspects of your support structure ö logistics, communication, finances and re-entry ö can wait a while.

"Then begin exercising your cross-cultural muscles. Take your family on some short-term trips and begin working with internationals in your own hometown. Develop a mission program in your church ö which now has no consistent emphasis on the global picture. Then be the first one your church sends out!"

Lee Purgason: Good advice, Neal. I think students can maintain a commitment partly by always keeping something on the front burner by not letting any kind of an impulse .that nudged them into missions lie dormant for very long. If a person is going to maintain some kind of a commitment to be a goer or sender, she or he needs to maintain a series of actions that never allow a lapse of more than six months. I use the six months rule-of-thumb because if you have a life-goal and you are not doing anything in six months toward that goal, you won't get there.

In the Perspectives Course we try to make sure alumni won't be comfortable letting their commitment lie dormant very long. We send them the Global Prayer Digest, something they can use daily. We get them on the Mission Frontiers list. We send them our Perspectives Alumni Newsletters every six months to keep in front of them opportunities and suggestions. We refer them to Caleb Resources for follow-up and encourage them to sign the Caleb pledge. We also urge them to link up with Cultural Awareness Training director George Patterson, who can be reached through the Center number (818/797-1111). His ministry career guide helps people take steps in
understanding what their role and gifts are and how they can team up with cross-cultural ministries.

But I feel that, as Rob has already stated, relationship is really key to commitment. You've got to have people around you who are regularly saying, "How's it going with your plans?"

Determination can lie stale. A tough semester or some kind of family problem might take a lot of time and energy. And it's easy to get stalled on the way to fulltime going or sending unless that friend, that peer, that church leader, that mission committee chairman or other mentor just keeps coming back and saying, "How's it going now? Have you been able to read t book, connect with that mission age cy?"

Steve Stuckey: Working with about 2200 students here in Southern California, I think I'd have to say this fir question of how to maintain mission commitment is a context question for us. In our Inter Varsity ministries, two terms that describe the context student commitment are dysfunction and diversity.

The breakdown of the American family is having a very significant e feet on our whole society, but especially on college students. It has affected their ability to make decisions; it affects how they relate to authority fig ur~ it affects their ability to enter into intimate relationships with fellow workers or mates.

This background of family dysfunction affects their motivations. I think for many of us on staff, when a student says that he wants to be a missionary, we get suspicious right away about their motivation. Perhaps he's driven as a co-dependent to "fix the world," and this desire may have more to do with personal problems than with Christ's global purpose! Probably half of the students we work with come out of Adult Children of Alcoholics backgrounds. We find a high percentage of our leaders have pursued leadership positions as a means to finding worth and self esteem. Usual ly on the mission field that lasts about two years, and then you have a major counseling crisis on your hands.

We find background dysfunction also affects commitment itself. Students from dysfunctional families has an especially tough time trying to maintain commitment over a long period of time.

The other factor in the context of student commitment is diversity. There is a philosophical diversity or pluralism on the college campus and in American society which basically says everything is acceptable. Of course, it usually says everything is acceptable except believing in absolute truth! The challenge is that believers seem to be increasingly in the minority on the American college campus, so helping the Christian student remain committed to absolute truth and at the same time be effective in a pluralistic environment is a definite challenge.

There is also on the campus a significant ethnic diversity as a result of urbanization. Dr. Winter said there are about 127 different ethnic groups here in Southern California, and that has affected studentâs definitions of "going and sending." When students have this many nations of the world on a college campus, they can of course take advantage of cross-cultural ministry opportunities; but they might also become a bit disoriented as to where they're heading ö whether God is sending them overseas or stateside!

Bob Sjogren: Let me re-emphasize some of the points you guys have made, the key things we have found in getting a person from "the pamphlet to the plane."

One of the things is simply consistent contact by the mission agency. Of course, there is a limit to constituency. I remember the first recruit I ever followed up on. Later she told me that I called her too much; she got a little nervous that I was always calling her. She did end up coming with Frontiers, though, and it might have been that over-eager contact that helped out.

Another crucial element in maintaining a global vision is to keep in touch with like-minded individuals. I often speak with individuals who are very serious about sending. Everybody in their church and Sunday school think they're crazy living off less than 40% of their income so the other 60% can go to frontier missions. The lack of encouragement and understanding wears on them, so often these senders end up traveling quite a distance to regularly get together with like-minded individuals.

Other keys include keeping consistent in prayer about this vision, this goal. Anyone making a commitment to world mission needs to map out the possible next three, six, eight or ten years of her or his life to visualize how to actually make it from here to full-time involvement. People committing themselves to God's global Cause have to keep up-grading their knowledge.

The more they know of God's Word and of the world, the more they see the priority of their mission. Studying the world is critical to visualizing how God can use a person in sending missionaries or in going to a foreign people group. I was just with a couple in Santa Barbara who had been challenged to go to the Middle East. Just talking about what it is like over in that area of the world helped them envision going; and they have now sent in for an application form!

Another key element is, as we've mentioned, developing their own accountability group. I encourage people to go to their pastors and say, "I want to be on the mission field by 1994 in the fall." Then the pastor can ask, "Why are you dating this person in light of your goal? He or she doesn't seem to have much mission vision! Why are you buying a new car with five years of payments? Why are you buying a home ö how is that going to fulfill your goals?"

I think there are three main reasons evangelical believers aren't making it to the mission field. One is a lack of prayer in the Body of Christ. Second is a lack: of examples; missionaries are overseas, and the examples students have in front of them are campus ministry staff members, pastors or youth pastors ö so they want to be like those individuals, A third reason is simply due to a lack of knowledge about what God has said about His unchangeable global purpose and about what He's doing across the world today.

One last thing: I would encourage individuals to keep that vision by teaching it to others. As they teach it to others their own vision for the world will be reinforced many times over.

Don Marchant: Our organization called Equipped to Go Ministries gives seminars in the Third World to motivate and train nationals to become missionaries to the unreached. Basically, to encourage them to maintain commitment, we point them toward mission agencies in their country or not too far away that we have confidence in.

We recommend that regular, daily prayer be a part of a growing mission vision; so we advise students to use the daily unreached peoples prayer guide, the Global Prayer Digest.

We also see to it that a leader among the people we're teaching be designated to initiate follow-up training. This is usually a pastor, and with that built-in accountability system of the local church structure, maintaining the commitment to mission vision becomes an integral part of local church life.

Ralph Winter: I would like to go to the second point before going to first point just to give a context. The second question is "What are the best ways to obtain a commitment?"

Now, it seems to me we have too many people who are already committed, and we can't take care of them. So what is the use of producing any more? I figure there are about 40,000 younger people who are in college or just out of college who in some kind of a structured situation such as Urbana have made a very definite commitment to follow through in their mission vision.

If we suggest ten things they can do to help maintain their vision, they'll do everything they could possibly do and yet not one out of a hundred of these 40,000 will ever get to the mission field! Why? Because we in the local church aren't ready to give them the support needed ö the prayer support, financial support and so on.

So while I am delighted that Urbana and other marvelous programs like that are going strong ö and I am not objecting to them in any way ö and I guess it isn't terrible that there are more people committed than can go. But it seems that we ought to also focus a little attention on what I would call the "cold crib syndrome." Young people are making these global commitments against the mood of the moment into the teeth of opposition in our culture, but are like seeds thrown out on hard ground. I hate to say it, but maintaining commitment isn't so terribly important if there is no potential in the local church to support what these young people would like to do!

I don't know if it quite fits in here, but a second observation is that I feel the biggest problem in even getting people's attention to go or to send is an artificial awareness of doom. Our culture and we in the church know more about what is wrong in the world than any generation that ever lived. We seem to focus on negative and hopeless things to the point that it is pretty hard to hope. The greatest thing I think we can do for the young people is not to encourage them to make more decisions or even to maintain the decision they have ö which is of course valuable. 1t is to tackle church life itself, but not on the level of commitment.

It seems to me that information is one of the biggest problems of the local church. I don't mean to say there are no spiritual factors, but when everything a church member is confronted with is wrong, is a half truth or a partial picture, it is very unlikely that he or she is going to survive the trauma of the world's hopelessness enough to take the young people seriously who come streaming back from Urbana with stars in their eyes.

Neal Pirolo: What churches need to do is establish an "exercise room" for the cross-cultural members of their local body. Many pastors that say we don't have anyone interested in mission are not providing an exercise room for these people, and therefore the cross-cultural parts of the body of Christ aren't being identified; they're sitting there in atrophy. And so there needs to be that exercise room, a mission fellowship, if you will, developing cross-cultural involvement on the local level.

For example, God has brought to the doorstep of every church in America internationals left and right. As cross-cultural members of the church exercise in ministry to such students and workers, they can learn how to follow through with commitment and the church can grow with them in vision. A mission fellowship is a vehicle through which a church can get to the unreached peoples of the world.

Lee Purgason: Let's not get too discouraged about mission commitments not following through. I'm one of those people who made a commitment at an Urbana student mission conference. After college I was recruited to come work here. And yet I have to concur that it wasn't because I received such strong, consistent encouragement from my home church that I'm here mobilizing fulltime. Most of the people who knew me then would have been just as encouraging if I had said I wanted to join a big accounting firm, saying, "That's a good thing to do; we're glad you feel led that way."

I think an event like the Perspectives Course, a Destination 2000 seminar, Urbana or a good missions conference can get a person rolling and keep them going as they encounter some cultural friction such as the wind resistance of the local church. The resistance that comes is usually loving ö often the "We need you here" kind of resistance. "We need people like you to stay and help make us strong in the local church." It usually comes from people who don't clearly understand the greater picture of the local church's fit in God's global plan.

There is also the resistance of acquiring certain kinds of normal things like houses and cars, going on certain kinds of vacations. All those financial and material expectations blow in the face of a person's mission commitment, and they gradually slow him down. After a while it's easy to come to a stop and regress.

When Bob mentioned meeting with like-minded people, I thought of the like-minded group I had in my college fellowship. As if we were a cycling team, I could dry off them. The wind would come and we would take turns taking the heat or the wind resistance for the others.

Steve Stuckey: I mentioned earlier this issue of dysfunction students are coming out of. One of the things we are seeking to do is to get them into communities, into "families" where they can be "re-parented" and begin working through how to make and maintain commitments. We're seeing an increasing number of students moving into community situations like that.

The other thing that's helping us give a vision for cross-cultural ministry is drawing students into ethnically diverse groups. It's been said the 11:00 Sunday morning hour is the most segregated hour in North America. And that has also been true probably for most campus evangelical fellowships. But we are working to try and make our fellowships more diverse. It's going to be a long process. But we're finding when that happens, it gives students greater sensitivity to the needs and the history of peoples around the world because they've got somebody who they're friends with ö somebody who represents the world.

Bob Sjogren: One of the things that I have been taught by Greg Living-stone is the fact that people join people. People rarely join a mission or a cause. Yes, they may like what an agency is doing, they're committed to what an agency is doing, but perhaps the biggest factor in an agency's obtaining commitments comes when an individual has touched people's lives. When Greg and I started North African Mission Associates (NAM Associates), a number of individuals were surprised that so many people went with NAM Associates. Why did they? Mainly because they joined Greg Livingstone.

MF: Would anyone else have a comment on how we achieve that kind of mission discipleship?

Rob Antonucci: Let's face it: If the commitment isn't made practical and fleshed out, people probably won't do it. That's our understanding. They have to be given practical action points, a way to integrate that commitment before it will take root. If it's only on a monthly or yearly level that they're reminded of their commitment, they're probably not going to carry through. It has to be on a weekly, daily basis. And being discipled is probably the key that really puts the rubber to the road and makes the commitment practical in daily life.

Ralph Winter: When thousands of young people commit themselves to missions, it's no fault at all of Urbana that as they go home people say, "What? You did what?" Or they just smile pleasantly and look the other way.

I think the church is in shell-shock. Our churches are absolutely flabbergasted by the inroads of family breakdown, by the things that tear families and churches to pieces. And they're in a defensive mode. They're in the worst possible shape to be interested in missions. There are a hearty few oddball churches, of course, weirdoes on the fringe that are maintaining this vision. Now, it's not a meaningless fringe but, boy, it is not a very broad base. And only a few people will ever get from here at the point of commitment to there on the field under the present circumstances. So I'm hoping that maybe some of the revival in the northeastern part of the U.S. will overflow to produce some serious mission vision. You simply can't have mission vision without the health and the power of a revival movement. As committed young people return home from an Urbana experience to the presently un-revived church, it's like running into the accident ward at the hospital where everyone is doped and strung up in traction and saying, "Tennis, anyone?"

MF: With so many mission-minded students at graduation with school or consumer debts to pay off, with a wobbly cultural framework resisting mission vision, are we going to be able to field the mission force necessary to establish a church for every people by the year 2000?

Ralph Winter: I think that now we are lagging less in recruiting and placing than we are in funding. People spend a year, two, or three raising support to get to the field. But I think if the church were healthy enough, we would see teams leaving weekly to engage unreached people operations.

And it can happen. For example, a subset of the Presbyterian Church has gathered loose change and now has money waiting for people to apply who are qualified to go to work among the unreached. I think that is evidence there is enough health in the system ö in the American branch of the Body of Christ ö to expend energy beyond maintenance and repair. If evangelicals begin to give more than two and a half percent of their income, if they nudge it up to three to four and a half percent, we would have a phenomenal influx of funds to do the sending.

Don Marchant: I think more goers would be there if it weren't for the process of developing support. It is so laborious and a lot of people I know say, "I am interested in doing missionary work, but I don't want to have to raise support." They have heard horror stories.

Now, support-raising itself can develop a lot of internal strength, can broaden a prayer base and so on ö elements of going that I think can't be compromised. But there have to be other ways to develop these advantages without taking three years of your life trying to develop financial support. Rob Antonucci: Are there going to be enough missionaries? I think the question is not whether there will be enough missionaries, but enough agencies ready to recruit and send them. I think many mission agencies need to change their tactics in recruiting and training. What are they offering? Is there a structure in their bureaucracy that ensures they are and will be outmoded in their outlook in creative ways of reaching the unreached? There is a generation gap between many agencies and their candidates.

I think the young people are there, and they are waiting for the right buttons to be pressed, the right challenge to be given, the right channels to go through in linking with a frontline mission  agency. Then I think there will be enough missionaries on the field.

Don Marchant: I'm not sure how to phrase this, but I know underlying  all our thinking is the fact that God is going to do some mighty  things when His people pray. Nearly every place I go I see a lack of  conviction about that. It seems to me that the mentality of the  average American Christian--and even elsewhere in the world-- is that  prayer is the least you can do. "At least you can pray!" is the attitude.

The reality of it is that if God's people will pray, God Himself will do everything that needs to be done. He can do the job, but for some reason we don't understand, God is looking for people to pray. So involved in all of this getting enough missionaries on the field to plant churches in every people group by the year 2000 is the simple and clear command to pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth
laborers.

Ralph Winter: It might be interesting to note that in Asia just a few days ago there was a major first in history--the first time in all of history that Asian Christian leaders themselves initiated a major meeting on missions for all of Asia. Now this has never happened before.

Well, you might say that the Asian Church was not sufficiently developed. But there have been millions and millions of Christians in Asia for decades and decades, but they never got the idea that they could or should be missionaries. The same thing happened in Latin America, in the movement called COMIBAM. That group's first conference in 1987 was the largest evangelical meeting ever held in Latin America, and the topic was clearly missions. Now I don't see anything like this happening in the United States. And I'm just hoping that this overseas development will somehow flow back into this country.

Let's face it: A fresh North American mission force probably won' t get very far off the ground in this decade without the simultaneous revitalization of the church. It's with solid backup from the church that every one of the necessary mission candidates making commitments
at conferences like Urbana '90 can get from a decisive commitment to a lifetime of sending or going.

The Summary

Which way to the front? Perhaps the advice from the dozens of years of experience represented by these mission equippers could be summarized as:

1. Keep your commitment decisive. Just because the emotional atmosphere in which you made a commitment changes doesn't mean that the decision itself has waned.
2. Keep your commitment hot. Program your schedule to include activities that build your mission vision.
3. Keep your commitment accountable. No man or woman is an island. Get strength from a like-minded support group and mission mentors.
4. Keep you commitment linked. Work to instill mission vision in your local church to help keep it healthy. And begin now to correspond and track with mission agencies you can work with as a sender or potential goer.

And as Winston Churchill simply advised: "Never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up."