Time to talk about missions methods
With all due respect to our sainted forebears and to current career missionaries whom we love and admire, we must ask: “Is training and maintaining large career forces the best way to accomplish global missions today”
I think there is becoming a new trend in mission work today. The best way to get into many countries today is to be a career professional and then use that platform to share the gospel. I believe the Southren Baptist have the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church beat on missions. But again it is not a competition, and I hate the labels that are put on Christians anyway.
Could the way the SBC does it be ineffective? In independent baptist churches missionaries visit churches and raise support church-by-church. My sister goes to a large SBC church (2,000) and she has never seen a SBC missionary. They do take the large annual offerings (Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong), but perhaps independent churches give more (as a % of their total budget) because people are more engaged and challenged since they often have missionaries in their churches.
While you are looking at the number of missionaries be sure to findout if their number reflects the men or husand and wife as 2 or the husband/wife/children all as individuals.
I've known of mission boards to count a whole family as 5 missionaries.
This writer is a pastor and not a missionary. Though the USAF sent me to Honduras, Germany, and Croatia during a twenty-year career, I have never worked as a "professional Christian" overseas. My family and I have supported numerous missionaries over the years, some working for church organizations and others who are Navigator staff representatives.
In my experience missionaries with the Navigators and the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches are responsible for raising their own finances. A missionary or missionary family appears at a church or makes a private appeal. This doesn't mean that this is the best way, the only way, or even the "biblical" way, it's just the way it's done. The Southern Baptists have a centralized system of financing their missions efforts. A centralized system effieciently manages their missionary enterprise through economy of scale. This is logical considering that the Southern Baptists have more churches in the State of Indiana than the Grace Brethren have in the entire nation. Neither way is "correct." They are simply an expression of the realities facing each organization.
this might be a factor or not,b ut one could consider the amount of money it takes to support an american and a ministry overseas. recently read a friend's newsletter--new appointees to Spain or Germany, and they have to raise 10k/month in support. That's a heap of a lot of money for one family with two kids. I'm speaking as a missionary, too.
I know that there are problems with missionaries being undersupported (like no retirement, etc.), but we seem to have almost left behind the idea of giving up or "suffering" financialy.
I'm not speaking judgementally either, i see it in myself. maybe our accustomization to american wealth and not growing up in almost any kind of self-denial is a hurtful thing in this area.
Vitaliy, my husband, in ukrainian, and I'm american, and i have thought about this a lot b/c we don't have "enough" support logistically, and it has been extremely stressful at times, yet we are able to live and work, and God provides for us. it certainly is not easy for me to adjust, but i have and still am, but it took me a while to get out of the "poor me" syndrome comparing myself to my relatively wealthy american missionary friends. So I judge myself, and I am surprised by how much I was unwilling to give up and suffer for the gospe's sake because I was so used to a missionary system where missionaries have quite a bit of monthly income.
not saying missionaries should suffer here at all, I don't know what I'm saying, maybe we all should pull in our belts more from our lives of excess, but it's one factor in this equasion.
If the SB's have this # of missionaries:
Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, has announced the board is backing down from a record 5,624 overseas missionaries in 2008 to fewer than 5,000 by the end of this year.
Are there any reliable statistics on:
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