March 01, 1998 by Rick Wood

Back to Basics?

For many of our long time readers some articles in this issue, like the one by Steve Hawthorne starting on page 9, may seem fairly basic, for example: “What is an unreached people?” But we believe that it is a much needed review. Even after 20 years of publishing MF, there are still many people in the church and mission community who still have questions about these important concepts.

In addition, we have new people receiving the magazine for the first time and an understanding of the foundational concepts of reaching unreached peoples is essential for future progress. Just since our last issue we have added 4,000 new students to our distribution. See the article on the next page.

For those who would like more advanced material, check out the “Six Spheres of Mission Overseas” article starting on page 16. This will provide a solid background on today’s diverse missions movement for student and seasoned mission executive alike.

Mission Frontiers Takes a Major Step Forward

As many of you know, since its inception in 1979 Mission Frontiers has never accepted paid advertising. This was done to maintain the independence of our message as we challenged the mission world to reach the unreached peoples.

But over the years a growing frontier mission movement has emerged which we want to do our best to support and promote. With the limited resources we currently have, we are unable to feature all of the frontier mission resources and opportunities that are available. We now believe that the use of paid advertising will enable us to promote these valuable resources and help us cover some of our costs. We want Mission Frontiers to be a one-stop-shopping resource for the best in frontier mission news and opportunities.

In the March-April 97 issue we asked people what they thought of this possible change in policy. Virtually all who responded encouraged us to move to paid advertising. You can read some of their comments on page 8.

As a result, we are announcing that we are now accepting paid advertising for frontier mission resources and opportunities. Because our focus is frontier missions, we are going to be very selective about who advertises in MF. The most important reason for this move is to make MF a better frontier mission resource, not just to help pay the bills. We will reserve the right to refuse any ad that we feel does not further the frontier mission movement. If you are interested in advertising in MF, you can give us a call at 626-398-2121 or E-mail us at [email protected].

We Still Need Your Help!

By announcing that we are now accepting paid advertising, we are taking the risk that you will think that we do not need your ongoing financial help anymore. Most publications get their revenues from a combination of subscription income and paid advertising. In our case, we give out MF freely because we want people to catch the vision for frontier missions before we ask them to help cover the cost of the magazine. But we still need those who believe in this ministry to come forward to help support it. It is likely that advertising income will not cover more than 50% of our costs for some time to come, if ever.

So, we are asking all of you who believe in this vision-sharing ministry to help us with a gift. Some of you may remember our effort to get people to send in larger gifts to cover the cost of sending MF to 70 other people in their area. We call these the “Companies of 70.” (See page 5 for more details.) One year we covered 50% of our costs this way. We want to renew our efforts this year to have you and your friends help us cover our costs with a gift of $149.80 or more for each of the 1,300 Companies of 70 in the US. The more help we get, the farther the vision will spread. Make checks out to Mission Frontiers. Thank you for whatever you can send.