Denominations – Are they better as long-term partners?

Perhaps denominational missions can teach us something about partnership

There is something I have noticed about denominations and how they do global missions that I think is worth considering. We have several members that I would call mid-sized or small denominational agencies. In many cases, not in all but in many, they are part of a global church denomination.

Often, these global members are much larger in number than their US or Canadian counterparts. Let's take for example a small denomination I will call “ABC”. ABC denomination may have 300 to 400 churches in the US but in Africa there are 3000 to 4000 churches. Because of the global connectedness and decades of fellowship, ABC denomination is in a wonderful place for mutual partnership.

These small denominations are punching way above their weight class. ABC can support hundreds and hundreds of missionaries, even though they may not be sent from the West. Sometimes, the partnership flows back to the US or Canada. Theological revival by their more conservative non-Western counterparts keeps a missions vision alive. There are many benefits to all sides in this sort of partnering.

Let's contrast this to the typical non-denominational agency. We can consider a made-up agency called Focus on Unreached Peoples (FUP). One of the things that they say proudly is, “We never plant FUP churches.” They are emphasizing a strategy in which indigenous leadership can form, without any sort of ongoing dependencies. This is a great strategy, of course. Yet, after 50 years of ministry by FUP, there are almost no churches that they can partner with that they have planted. In their desire to be culturally neutral and adapt to indigenous church planting approaches, FUP has not even maintained ongoing relationships with the churches they have planted.

I find the approach that denominations take, in which they plant churches that arise from their own DNA, to express a higher level of mutuality in the long run. While they may not have started out thinking that they were building a church that would someday dwarf themselves, ABC today has a great future. They are inherently “internationalized” movements.

FUP, meanwhile, tends to recruit not church partners, but missionary partners. By this I mean that their primary expression of internationalization is how they structure their own leadership. When they find potential staff members globally, they recruit them to lead teams and offices on behalf of FUP. Now you tell me, which model produces more mutuality and possibilities for multicultural leadership?

I don’t blame FUP – there is great pressure on FUP for their leadership to be multicultural. I am only observing that by planting denominationally affiliated churches, ABC has a big advantage over FUP.

As radical as this might sound, maybe FUP should be planting FUP churches. Alternately, FUP could look at innovative ways to foster ongoing relationships with the churches and movements they foster. Here is where some innovation might be in order.

As an aside, it might be that we esteem the “We never plant FUP churches” approach for historical reasons. During the days of missionary comity, denominations sliced up geographic territory and agreed not to tread on other’s turf. This led to independent agency members planting unaffiliated churches that had no stake in the comity agreements. The leftover sentiment that missionaries are planting neutral churches, not party to these agreements, lingers.

This is not, by the way, a Western problem. The Brazilian church is experiencing a similar dynamic. Numerous African movements, in sending missionaries to places like New York and Toronto, are also facing the question of how their churches will be associated with the churches “back home.”