Misaligned Missions Musings

At least one reason why missionary agencies and churches fail to connect

Photo by Edz Norton on Unsplash

In my role at Missio Nexus, we use “personas” (a tool from design thinking) to better understand the various people that we serve. We did this for seven different “customers” of Missio Nexus (like field staff, agency staff, CEOs, and so on). We translate this programmatically into events, book summaries, our “idea stream,” our theme, research, and so on. It provides a helpful rubric to evaluate our service offerings. I recently was going through them and noticed a significant problem that we face within agencies and churches.

For CEOs, the primary need from Missio Nexus was, “Keep me informed of things and people I should know to lead my organization.” That is what they want from our team. But their overall goal or driver was the mission statement of their organization. These are almost always outward-facing, as they should be. They are rarely about the organization, and this is how it should be.

We also serve churches. When we drew up the persona for a church missions leader, something interesting popped out. The primary need from Missio Nexus was to, “connect me to the bigger picture of missions.” They want both relational connections and to be informed about what is happening globally. But the driver for the work was the shocker. It was, “I want to engage my church in global mission.”

[By the way, I prefer using the term “church missions leaders” instead of missions pastor.  This is because many of these leaders are women and therefore do not get the title “pastor” in many of the traditions we serve. Thus, “church missions leader” better describes who we serve.]

Pause and consider this driver for church missions leaders: “I want to engage my church in global mission.” I believe it correctly frames what I hear from most church missions leaders. They want the average person in the congregation to be impacted by missions. Nothing wrong with this, of course, in fact – it is a great objective. But it is also inwardly focused on the church. I propose it would be better as an outcome or 2nd tier objective.

Consider, for example, the emphasis on many churches to do short-term missions. If we are honest about what happens on these trips, they are most often impacting the goers more than the people who are receiving these teams. When you put it in the list of drivers for church missions leaders, that makes a lot of sense. Churches often bring in child sponsorship organizations and see this as missions (which is very suspect from a missiological standpoint – this could be another article). Why? I think it is this same driver. They are trying to make missions participating achievable by the average congregant for a few dollars a month.

I think it is fair to say that even the emphasis on immigrant ministry has been influenced by this inward focus. Churches often center immigrant ministry inside the church rather than via a missions thrust into the immigrant community (you can read more about this push/pull dynamic at this link).

Engaging the average church attender in global mission is a good goal (and one that most church missions leaders should be working toward), but it is not a great missions goal. It might be a steppingstone on that path, but it falls short of obedience to Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to the nations.

People have asked me, “What is the biggest problem in US and Canadian missions?” My view is the lost opportunity that has arisen because senior pastors at MOST churches (no, I am not saying that this is true for ALL churches) do not have a vision for reaching the nations. Senior pastors have a tough job, I know. But they often seek to align all their staff and team objectives around internal growth, internal teaching, internal discipleship, and even the outreach is about growing the local congregation. Missions, which calls for an external investment that may never show up in the church’s analytics, defies this sort of alignment.

My anecdotal experience (and those of you who work in churches can chime in on this and correct me) is that senior pastors and church boards are holding church missions leaders accountable to report on congregational engagement instead of external goals, outside of the congregation.

Yes, I know, there are exceptions (some agencies are internally focused, and some churches are externally focused). I would go even further and say that the churches that are members of Missio Nexus are the ones most likely to be exceptions. Yet, from a macro perspective, we have a serious misalignment problem in the “eccliosystem.”

One way to see this dynamic is to look back in time. Back in the 1970s, few churches had missions pastors. Today, there are probably a couple thousand of them. We should be able to trace this development into field success. I would suggest that, with a few stellar exceptions, this has not occurred. I would further suggest that it is not the agencies that need to change to meet the need here, but churches.