On defining the word missionary

From a comment I left on a blog this week?

I’m going to break my own rule here and comment without having read this entire post. Just don’t have the time to today (unfortunately) but this is a topic I have strong opinions on. Probably no one will see this comment anyway, since this post is almost a year old now.

I used to be of the mind that everyone’s a missionary, wherever you are. I’m not any longer though, having served in missions mobilization for five years now (with http://mdat.org — just 80 miles east of Tulsa). The problem I see with this mentality is not so much with the idea that we’re all witnesses – “You WILL BE my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), whether you intend to or not — as much as it has to do with clarity in communication among believers.

To say that everyone’s a missionary waters down the term in the context of what is a very complicated endeavor, taking the Gospel to all Nations. I’ve come to realize we need to delineate different tasks simply to best understand the task ourselves. If we say that everyone is a missionary, it becomes much more difficult to clearly share the need for people to go overseas and engage the unreached people groups, which is still needed (Mal 1:11, Matt 24:14 et al). What do we call those people? Cross-cultural missionaries? Apostles (which, literally, means “sent ones”)? Neither of these really work as there are multiple cultures within a geopolitical area, and you can be sent without going overseas.

That said, I don’t exactly have a suggested glossary of terms to offer, particularly with respect to long-term missions. Here at M-DAT we’ve thought much more about short term missions (up to now, since we’re known for our website http://ShortTermMissions.com).

“Mission trip” has become the generic equivalent in the short-term realm that “missionary” has, well, other places. It would be so much easier for everyone involved if we distinguished between a service trip (construction or orphanage help) and a prayer walk or an evangelistic outreach. This isn’t to say that prayer and construction can’t be evangelistic (you WILL BE witnesses), but the simple fact is those trips aren’t geared to that end. I suppose doing this might be problematic to certain participants, who for whatever reason might feel less important if they were part of a “service trip” and not a “mission trip,” but IMO people with that mindset are approaching service from the wrong angle from the get-go.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. And, yes, to a degree it’s splitting hairs, but that’s what we do in missiology. I look forward to nosing around your website more, and if I can insert a shameless plug you might want to check out our new website, http://PreparingToGo.com, which likely addresses a lot of the same content.

10% to the church, or 10% overall?

While doing some research for an upcoming newsletter I ran across a missionary’s post talking about whether missions giving to individuals should be above and beyond the tithe. The premise is that the church has dropped the ball all too often, and not enough money is given towards taking the Gospel to every people. Instead it get sunk into sound systems and new buildings and salaries and insurance. Missions ends up, in the end, a small slice of the budgetary pie when it should be such a significant part of the institution’s agenda.

Read the article via this link.

Here’s another interesting church vs. missions giving article, something from Jews for Jesus dated 1985 via this link.

Here’s an article written by a journalist, formerly with YWAM in South Africa, who actually interviewed people by asking “Should missions giving be above and beyond a tithe,” via this link.

Fundraising in Mission Maker Magazine

I warned earlier this year I might be ignoring this blog. I wish I had more to add from this year but I don’t. We’ve done very little proactive fundraising, and have been very busy with work and personal travel. Our money will run out again in February or March of the coming year barring another large unforeseen donation, which is entirely possible by God’s grace.

Today I’m just going to point you to an article about fundraising in the recent Mission Maker magazine, which dropped just this week. Unfortunately the magazine isn’t posted online, so I can’t link directly to the story.

The article starts on page 38, and is set up as a conversation between a donor and missionary in the process of raising support. The two go through some basic rules of import related to fundraising. They stick to proven principles that I was taught and aspired to in our own support strategy.

What caught me off guard though was the article’s claim that you need to communicate (phone, letter, email, small gifts etc) with every one of your donors ever three weeks. Personally. Treat them like a friend.

That’s great, but over the top. I don’t treat my friends like that. Some of my friends I don’t see that often (however unfortunate this is). However, as a general rule I followed the rest of the advice which includes regular communication (with attainable goals outlined therein) and thank yous. We did these.

And we’ve still always fallen well short.

I started to think, then, about the missionaries I support. One couple is good about updates. We get weekly emails from them and bimonthly newsletters. A family in Thailand and couple in England both send monthly emails. Another in SE Asia communicates often enough but a little more erratically. Another Thailand family is very erratic, barely getting out three newsletters a year (and he’s a journalist!?!).

I also support my boss, who also struggles to get three newsletters out a year at this point in his life. And he’s the director of our small operation.

The rules are still good, but every three weeks is over the top. In fact, I might be annoyed if I heard from all of the missionaries I support that often, especially if there wasn’t much to report. What I want is sincerity and openness when we do communicate, even if it’s only a few times a year. And I also want a concerted effort to be made to see people face to face when on furlough.

Some donor/supporter relationships will be the kind that will naturally tend to very regular communication. Do everything you can to foster those. Some start out this way, others will become deeper over time, and can turn into this kind of relationships.

But our most significant donor by total gifts, is a couple we haven’t talked to once since the ask. They get our newsletters and donor thank yous, and we have (rarely) exchanged personal letters, and we have tried to have dinner or coffee with them when we were in their city but it’s never worked out. And still they give. And give.

This is one of the anomalies we were told to expect during our training seminar. We expect our friends and family to believe in us (if they’re Believers) and give, and are surprised (and sometimes hurt) when they don’t. Sure, prayer is important, but it’s saying something much more strongly when you back it up by putting your treasure into God’s work. We understand you can’t give to all of your friends and every opportunity. God will lead you into certain ones; you will follow the kinds of ministry that you’re heart chases after. But please tell us when this is the case. Don’t leave us hanging.

This very generous couple on our support roles, though, my wife and I barely know. This is the anomaly. Yes, do as much as is reasonable to keep up relationships, to make friendships with donors. But remember that you have to play it by ear too. Not everyone will need a phone call every three weeks. Not everyone wants one.

Short term mission trips

Mission trips.

They seem to become more and more popular every year, although no one really knows how many Americans take part on an annual basis. The more popular they become, the more churches and other religious institutions such as private universities organize and send teams abroad, making any kind of quantification of participants more and more difficult.

My day job is in missions mobilization, as I’ve made note of in the past. I do marketing and graphic design for a very small organization called Mission Data International (M-DAT). We’re known for the mission trip search engine ShortTermMissions.com, thus short-term mission trips are in my mind on a regular basis. I read articles about them from time to time and look at statistics from our website weekly. I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but I’m certainly more immersed in the “field” than most.

M-DAT has a policy (I’m not sure if it’s written or implied) suggesting employees serve on a short-term trip every three years. My wife and I have yet to do this, basically on account of our complicated support situation. We talk about it though, and occasionally we come across opportunities that interest us.

A few things from this Spring have me thinking still more about mission trips, and I thought I’d take some time to sort through my thoughts in a brief post.

What is a mission trip?
The phrase “mission trips” bothers me. It is applied much too broadly in modern Christendom, doing a disservice to all of us in the faith. More basically, the word missions is used in the same way, being thrown around in manner such that it more or less loses any specific meaning. It’s very popular to say that “Everyone’s a missionary.” I used to, in my infancy so-to-speak, be of this mind.

Before I go on with this section, let me make it very clear that I don’t consider a missionary in the traditional sense — that is, someone who goes cross-culturally and long-term — to be any better a person than any other Christian. It’s just a different part of the same work. The people who stay on the homefront and support the people who go, whether they be financial, logistic or prayer supporters are just as important to the Kingdom work as those on the front lines. More of us stateside folks need to realize this and take our support roles seriously.

Contrary to popular opinion, everyone is not a missionary. Saying so confuses the Biblical task before us of presenting the Gospel to every nation (Matt. 24:14, 28:18-20). A missionary is best likened to an apostle, or “sent one,” working long-term in a cross-cultural environment. This is, for me, more a matter of denotative clarity than personal preference. I believe we need to use language as specifically as we can in order to communicate as clearly as we can. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Hence, when talking about what we commonly call “mission trips” I would like to encourage us, as others before me have done, to use more specific terminology. For instance, call a group of people helping put up a building called a construction trip, or at the least a service trip. Refer to an excursion cleaning up after a hurricane disaster relief. You get the idea.

Not all mission trips are a good thing
In the flurry of trips being created and executed by sending organizations, churches and other entities, quality control takes a back seat at times. I was reminded of this — hardly a new observation — when I spoke with a friend back in March. My friend has an intimate knowledge of India (for a Westerner), estimating that he’s been there more than ten times just in the last five years or so. He told me of a local pastor who took members of his congregation to India to work on a construction project. This bothered my friend who knew so many people in the country desperately need work. So in essence, the team took jobs away from the people they were trying to help.

The desire to take one’s students or church members into another culture to broaden their Biblical perspective or serve the orphans and widows are, of course, commendable. We are insulated in America from much of the world’s needs and woes in our bubble of wealth, materialism, consumerism, affluenza, etc. Watching news reports or reading newspapers don’t get us close enough to the suffering for action-inducing comprehension in most cases. Such trips expose us to a reality rarely if ever in our minds, and otherwise never in our experiences. Mission trips, in theory, are a good thing.

Other common problems to watch out for include not tying a trip to a long-term effort, going because your friends go or going with a vacation mentality (I’m very skeptical of “Adventure” trips). See some standards set up by people with strong ties to the industry intended to curtail such things at the Standards of Excellence in Short Term Mission website.

So what makes a good mission trip?
As my wife and I peruse opportunities from time to time there are a few things we look for. We hope to find a trip that allows both of us to put our gifts and interests to work (which, as it happens, doesn’t seem to be all that easy in our case). This will allow us to be and feel more productive than if we just tagged along on any old short-term trip to an orphanage or construction site. We both prefer to serve in Southeast Asia, and neither of us are very excited about the more common and very short 7-14 day excursions. Student Volunteer Movement 2 suggests that people actually consider two year opportunities; short-term trips are technically classified as anything from one week to three years. SVM2 rightly points out that this will allow you to get over the “honeymoon” period of the service, give you time to learn the language (to a degree) and grant you time to see the fruit of some of your efforts.

What we’re looking at now is a 1-2 year service in Southeast Asia. The opening relates well to my own interests in art — the best I’ve ever found in the context of strategic mission — but we don’t know exactly what my wife would be doing, if she’d have to be doing anything specific. It’s not our favorite location either. The climate is hotter and more humid than my wife would like (although on a temporary basis she would manage), and with the humidity comes mold which I’m pretty allergic to.

We’ll see if any of this materializes. The contact for opportunity I just described has been very slow about getting us any kind of details.

I could probably elaborate on a number of these points, but since it’s a tangential topic to this blog I’ll conclude here. Please choose carefully when considering a mission trip. There are many creative ways to make them work in the Grand scheme of things, but there are also a lot of pitfalls that participants and leadership need to be aware of.

Adding: I forgot to talk about one aspect of mission trips my wife and I have discussed recently that seems not to come up very often: Missions as learning. It is valuable to go as a cultural learner. Some will certainly say that this is a waste of money (but remember, some waste is worship), however that argument will always be made by certain people in the missions world who advocate sending money to nationals — a topic I’m always interested in but am not going to broach here. Suffice it to say I don’t agree with that mindset in its purest form for a number of reasons.

Going as a cultural learner is a good first step into long-term missions. It gives the goer the opportunity to put down his or her ethnocentrism and learn from the beginning to love the people and their culture just as God does. Some mission trips do this. My wife’s time in Cameroon some years back more or less was as an observer. But from what I can tell, most trips are planned with something much more concrete in mind, be it medical service, orphanage work or the all-too familiar VBS. We are, as stated in the Waste as Worship post already mentioned, a very efficient people. To plan something without a quantifiable agenda can seem against our nature, and putting specific goals to a “discovery” trip is more difficult.

Let’s get over our need to account for every last penny and quantify everything we do in concrete terms. Let God woo people to himself, in the words of C.S. Lewis. And remember that we are witnesses whether we intend to be or not (again, Matt. 28:18-20), wherever we we live and love our neighbors.

A new way to ask for support

Via YouTube, of all places, a personal appeal from a guy who was heading to Japan (and since posting the video late last year actually is in Japan now):

He has a number of these addressed to some of his close friends that he posted. I like the idea, but I’m not sure how certain potential donors will think of it. Younger generations will probably be fine with it for the most part; my one concern is that, being in such a public forum (you may be able to restrict access, making the video private to your friends), it may seem like an attempt to guilt a person into giving from the perspective of certain personalities.

As I already said, though, my own personality finds this creative and commendable.

Three observations from the NRB convention

I just returned from a convention where three things stuck in my mind after conversations with people. I’m just passing my observations along, not necessarily with commentary.

* I had dinner one evening with a group of people affiliated with a well-known youth ministry. I had spoken earlier to three of the younger people in this group and we hit it off pretty well. At dinner, though, conversation with the ranking brass among there group was a bit discombobbled. In part, we didn’t have time to tackle the topics that were brought up, and secondly I never really understood where he was going. We were talking about missions, and he suggested that the largest “unreached people group” were the youth of the world. I have heard this before; it wasn’t a new idea to me. However, this just doesn’t fit into the way people groups are delineated, and I have to wonder if people working to evangelize youth aren’t just trying to latch onto popular missions terminology to further their own cause. And their own cause is worthy, I’m not denying this. I just don’t like to muddle such definitions which deserve and warrant as much clarity as language can give them.

Surprisingly I ran into one of the gentlemen I most respect in ministry, a man I was privileged enough to grow up around. Two things in our discussion over ice cream stood out to me.

* Pertaining to fundraising (and thus the topic of this blog), he recently stepped down as director of the Bible camp as I’ve known him for decades and assumed the role of CEO of a newly created group of para-church ministries. Essentially, he sees himself as the fundraiser for these ministries now. He told me about a challenge he learned of at a fundraising event recently where millions of dollars was at stake. From that he created his own less daunting challenge, aiming to get 100 people to each give $100,000. Since he established this goal he has seen the largest donations come in since the beginning of his tenure with this ministry (some 30 years ago). None have been single donations of $100k yet, but he is encouraged!

* He also relayed a brief anecdote about a short-term mission trip a pastor led some of his congregation on to India. My friend, via his own congregation’s work in India, has been to the country more than 10 times at this point and lovingly too issue with the nature of this particular mission trip. The pastor and his team, apparently, paid to go to India to pour a foundation. My friend’s time spent in India allowed him to suggest this was a gross misuse of money. There are in his experience many people capable but out of work who could have performed this task. Essentially, a few Americans traveled overseas (airfare probably more than $1,500 per person) to do something the locals were perfectly capable of and needed as employment.

Mission trips are an integral part of long-term missions strategy, but to do them well is important and takes time and research. See the Standards of Excellence as a good starting point to quality and relevant STMs.

Mailing list

Recently I’ve been wishing our mailing list was smaller.

We were encouraged in support training to create as large a list as possible: Christians, non-Christians, lovers, enemies, family, friends. So we did. And in some ways it’s paid off. As I’ve mentioned here before, a couple of people started giving just by our sending them a newsletter.

But newsletters are a ton of work for us. Some larger organizations seem to have office people to do the mailings for staffers once the letter is created, but in our smaller non-profit we each write, address, fold, stuff, stamp and seal ourselves. My list is about 450 individuals and churches; we send 5 newsletters a year.

The reason I’m wishing for a smaller list isn’t because of the labor involved though. I’ve been feeling a desire to cull from the list people we don’t really know. I was reminded of this again when a lady called asking to be removed from the list. She’s a distant relative of my wife, and even though we were at her husband’s funeral we’ve never actually talked to her. On the phone today, she didn’t seem to have any idea who I was. I didn’t make any effort to explain, either.

I think I’ve come to trust that God will put in place the people He has to be a part of our support team. That said, I’m still not ready — even though I’m wanting — to cull our mailing list. The balance between faith and action never seems to be very clear to me.

Pledgers who don’t give

You’ll always have some people pledge who never follow through.

There seem to be three categories of this kind of giver:

1) The person who pledges and never gives.
2) The person who pledges, gives a few times and then isn’t heard from again.
3) The person who pledges and gives seldom and randomly thereafter.

Of these, the first two are most common in my experience. Dealing with non-giving pledgers is tricky business. You don’t want to seem too eager to get their gifts by sending a slew of reminders, but some communication is prudent. Do take into account the personality and circumstances of the giver when deciding how to approach them. Some people have good and sincere intentions but simply forget, every month. Some people may be out of a job or lose a job after committing to a regular donation. If said donor is generally jovial, I’m more likely to approach them more often and more bluntly.

Two things I’ve leaned on are thank-yous and Christmas gifts. We’ve made a practice of sending donors small notes of thanks in the middle of the year, as well as inexpensive gifts around Christmastime. I use these as a reminder to people that they are a part of the team, although after a certain “point of no return” — that is, if a person hasn’t given for, say, 18 months or more — I’ll drop them from the thank you list.

In truth I don’t think this tactic has actually revived any of the non-giving pledgers. Even the two, that I can think of, “jovial” donors that I’ve given face-to-face or phone reminders to haven’t begun giving regularly, or at all.

Thus it seems to be a fact of living on support: You’ll always have some people pledge who never follow through. Plan on it when creating your budget and fundraising strategy!

Generous Giving Conference

I just received an email invitation to the Spring 2008 Generous Giving Conference. The conference is in Colorado Springs, at The Broadmore, 17-19 April. Registration is a whopping $1,700 per couple, or a grand for an individual. This, of course, doesn’t include lodging.

I won’t be attending the conference, but over the last few years I’ve really been glad to have the Generous Giving website to refer to. It’s a great idea with a lot of great information — even if their three day conference seems way overpriced to missionary types like me.

All of that to say visit their website at GenerousGiving.org.

Staying put and looking forward

So our house didn’t sell, and the contract on the house up north expired. Thus we will continue, gladly, working for the ministry we’re with for the next year as our new support allows.

We were hoping this year could be a more relaxing time, a year when we wouldn’t have to think about fundraising — for the first time in five years. But I quickly realized that if we completely ignored support this year we’d be at the same spot in six months as we were last year. I don’t know what to do with this knowledge, the knowledge that I “should” or “have to” keep on raising support this year. Sure, it’s expected that missionaries will spend 10% of their time every year maintaining full-time support, but when you’ve never gotten to full support the pressures are greater.

On top of this we lost $140 per month of support in the last two months of 2007. Two long-time (relative to our time in ministry) supporters gracefully discontinued their giving which totaled $200 a month, and we picked up new support to the tune of $60 a month from friends in Germany.

Last Friday we had dinner with friends on furlough. The friends relayed a very promising overseas possibility, serving in the same community they work out of for one or two years. This opportunity, though I have few details at this point, sounds very interesting to me. The regular support we do have now will go farther in this 10/40 window community, and we’re confident we could raise the necessary additional funds for an international short-term service such as this. The timing could be very good for us as well. I hope to hear back from the contacts our friends gave us this week; I sent them an introductory email on Monday.