About 2/3rds of the missionary agencies that are Missio Nexus members utilize personal support raising as a means to funding ministry staff. For the uninitiated, support raising (which goes by a couple of other names) is when a person asks other to support their work financially, giving a designated gift toward the work they are seeking to do. Support raising has enabled hundreds of thousands of people to fund their ministry over the past century and a half. I myself have raised most of the funding for the ministry I have conducted over the past 27 years of ministry. Yet, it is not without its detractors.
Criticism of support raising has been around since its inception. A few of the reasons why it is critiqued include the following:
The next generation will never go for it, changing cultural paradigms includes an aversion to support raising.
It creates a field ministry issue since the support raised missionary is not a part of the workforce (like everybody else in culture) and therefore creates a harmful cultural dichotomy.
It is too hard to do, takes too long, and creates a roadblock to people who otherwise would be great cross-cultural missionaries.
It is not biblical. There is no evidence for it in the Scriptures.
It only works for affluent, white church attenders. As long as missionary agencies utilize it, there will be fewer minorities participating in mission.
I could write about each of these five points, agreeing and disagreeing on various they raise, but I want to focus my attention on this last point. Is support raising racist? I do this in part because I think there is a lesson to be learned about innovation in ministry from this question.
Before diving into this, I should note that there are a lot of ways to fund ministry. These different methods all impact ministry outcomes in some way. Support raising is no different. There are valid criticisms to be made for each method, but there are also advantages each offer. Trite critiques of fundraising are rife. For example, some say that George Mueller never asked for financial support as if that is the model we should follow. Of course, he did not need to because Charles Spurgeon was doing it for him. Similarly, Hudson Taylor had Moody and Scofield. Both great men of God, but their stories are sometimes used to say that fundraising is somehow a dirty corner of ministry. Paul asked believers to provide financial resources at times while assiduously avoiding it at other times. This is a complicated area.
I recently attended the National African American Mission Council’s annual event. I sat through a couple of workshops. One presenter said that “support raising will never work in the African American church.” The reasons given were 1) a lack of financial support in churches, 2) pastors who only make a small salary cannot be expected to fund a larger missionary salary, and 3) there is no tradition of support raising like this in the African American church. In a discussion after the presentation, he went further and said the current system of personal support raising by missionary agencies was racist in that it limited the participation of African American in mission.
At the risk of being a proponent of institutionalized racism, let me suggest that a review of the conditions that led to support raising might reveal a rebuttal to all three of these arguments.
Prior to the late 1800s, support raised missionaries were out there, but not at the levels we see today. If you wanted to be a missionary your best route was through a denominational agency which provided training in a seminary, vetted candidates, and sent them out with a salary in the same model used by ministerial staff in churches. This was a small, elite group of people. It was not likely that you would qualify for such service, and it took a number of years to get there. If you were a part of a small upstart religious movement your chances were extremely slim. Many of these had lay pastors, no seminaries and no tradition of sending missionaries.
These were the conditions that created the move toward support raising. The limited opportunities among the “conciliar churches” (established, formal, traditional churches) created a gap. People in smaller, more fundamentalist and Bible-motivated churches wanted to go and could not. The adoption of support raised missionaries started slowly, like all innovations, but eventually became a torrent. It was slow because 1) there was no tradition of support raising, 2) these churches were mostly in poor, rural areas and lacked financial resources, 3) the structures to do it were not yet built, and 4) there was opposition among the established clergy. Today, full-time missionaries are more likely to be a part support raised paradigm than those sent out by salary paying organizations. Support raising was, at one time, a means to break the institutional deadlock that was in place.
So, the question for the African American church is this; has support raising itself become the institution that needs to be overthrown so that more African American missionaries can go? Or alternately, does support raising provide a means to overcome the lack of involvement by African Americans in mission by providing a source of funding that is currently not being utilized?
The most common answer I hear from African American leaders is the first, that support raising is an institution that discriminates against them. Sometimes this is indirect. I often am told that tentmaking, working a secular job in the new culture, is the answer. I would note that tentmaking is a great strategy, but it has a long way to go as a replacement for full-time, supported missionaries in the current global missionary environment. I know well the arguments in favor of tentmaking. Alas, I rarely see tentmakers successfully doing the “big three” (evangelism, discipleship and church planting) as effectively as full-time missionaries (perhaps I will write about this in a future post).
[Please do not misunderstand me, I would love to see thousands of new tentmakers go. But I do not see them as a replacement for full-time, supported missionaries who can fully focus on cross-cultural mission, whatever that might look like in a particular context. There is need (and room) for both. The arguments about which one is better is a waste of time and represents “either/or” thinking which often kills innovation.]
The same conditions that birthed support raising in the late 1800s are in place in the African American church. There is a lack of financial resources, pastoral opposition, few sending structures, and no tradition for it. I think there is great opportunity here to see the innovation occur again, but it will take time. New structures are needed, a change in local church leadership’s attitudes regarding giving must occur, and we need a re-awakening of African American missionary vision. These can happen but will take time and concerted effort.
From an innovation perspective, we are in the early adopter phase of seeing African American churches use support raising as a means to missionary deployment. The potential is huge. It might be sidelined if we continuously beat the drum of “that won’t work here” or conclude that support raising is racist.