We Don't Know That

One example of how counting missionaries is problematic

Before our family moved overseas to begin our missionary journey, I was a computer consultant in Minneapolis. I had a long commute and listened to the radio as I drove (these were the days before streaming, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth). One local talk radio announcer covered local sports and politics. I do not recall his name, but I remember that one of his shticks was to press the button that cut off the microphone of whoever he was interviewing, and a recording would say, “We don’t know that.” It was a brilliant way of fact-checking the current conversation.

I have always been grateful that nobody follows me around with a similar button. I am sure I would be interrupted quite a bit.

I have noticed a missions “fact” that needs the same treatment. It is the oft-repeated statement that missions sending from the West is in decline. We don’t know that.

I have heard this shouted from the rooftops since the early 2000s. It is part of what Wuthnow described as the globalizing narrative in which the global church takes over missionary work and the West, now forlorn and in dismay, becomes itself a missions field. There is a lot to like about the globalizing narrative, but there is also a lot to critique. One piece of the fallout has been to discourage missionary sending from the US and Canada. This discouragement has taken place mostly among senior pastors in local churches (yes, there are stellar exceptions to this).

It might be true missions sending from the US and Canada is in decline. In reality, we don‘t know that. The single best source on missionary sending from the US was The Mission Handbook. It was published every 5-10 years for decades and cataloged the size and placement of missionaries sent from Canada and the US. The last two editions were published by the organization I lead, Missio Nexus, so I know a few things about how the numbers were generated.

The Mission Handbook’s reputation was that it was a survey of missionary sending organizations. However, after Missio Nexus became involved I began to realize the fragility of this data collection process. The truth was the numbers were not completely generated from surveys. The “big number” (how many missionaries were being sent) was an extrapolation from known sources to the unknown, a guestimate or projection of how many sending agencies were not filling out the surveys. This is how other missions research projects come up with their figures, so tread carefully with other studies as you process their precise figures.

Our team decided to stop the practice. The reason? The assumptions were educated guestimates. Small changes in these assumptions made big differences. We felt it was more accurate to report the data we had.

I do not believe there is an accurate number of US and Canadian sending currently being tabulated. There are estimates, but I sense these are conforming more to the globalizing narrative than to the reality of sending. We just do not know. If you are going to make estimates, then we should be careful with citing that data. And we are not.

There are many reasons why missionary sending from the West (or anywhere) is hard to estimate. Take the membership of Missio Nexus for example. We represent established organizations. These are agencies with enough maturity to know that being part of an association helps advance their cause. Most startups do not have this sort of maturity. There are a lot of these startups today. If I were estimating the number, it would be in the thousands and while many do not send missionaries, many do (to be fair, “we don’t that”).. Additionally, established organizations may be in the declining phase of their growth curve. Even though we may be living in a time of startup ministries, the established organizations may be reporting declining numbers, leading us to conclude an overall decline.

On top of this are changes in how we send. There is now a large “grey market” of people who are sent directly from churches and who operate part-time or family-run ministry organizations. I am a part of the prayer team for our missions effort at church. Our church is backing dozens of small agencies. I have never heard of most of them. They work in places like Haiti and Malawi, reached places where the need for foreign missions has largely been met. These are places where, in my view, nationals should be front and center, dependency on the wane, and an ongoing need for missionaries would be in decline. Yet, the opposite is true. These small missions agencies are proliferating. Again, these are not going to be counted in the Missio Nexus survey.

Nontraditional sending is also on the rise. Business as mission, tentmaking, diaspora return, and non-resident missionaries are all on the rise. Add to this the fact that short-term teams are higher than pre-COVID levels (indicated by the number of insurance plans churches are purchasing for these teams) and you have further challenges in grasping the big picture.

I understand why we might assume missionary sending numbers are in decline. The US and Canadian church numbers are in decline. It only makes sense that missionary sending is also in decline. Well, maybe. We should not assume that a shrinking church inevitably means less missions spending and sending. It might, but the fallout might be some years off, or those that remain are more committed and we see a rise. It might be that churches catch a vision they have not had for global missions and we see a renaissance. Or, we might find ourselves in massive decline. Regardless, I don’t believe we can say with much confidence that we understand what is happening with missionary sending one way or the other. In time, it will be clear and obvious to us, but not right now.

Because, we don’t know that.