Fruitful Partnerships: How Mission Agencies Can Serve Sending Churches

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STATEMENT

Churches have the primary responsibility to send and support missionaries. Agencies can be fruitful partners in that task. Churches may enlist the help of agencies in areas such as financial management, field logistics, training, care, and facilitating partnerships. Churches should help missionaries partner carefully with agencies to ensure that biblical convictions and proper church authority are not at risk. A healthy partnership necessitates clear communication and agreements between the sending church, agency, and missionary.

Are mission agencies essential? No. Are mission agencies helpful? They certainly can be!

Four years into our time overseas, my family moved to a country that made visas hard to access. We couldn’t live on general tourist visas and certainly didn’t have access to a ministry visa. The one real possibility of long-term access was through a residency visa issued by a business. The problem: we needed a business to issue us that visa. The solution: start a business.

Our sending church in the US offered essential support to our ministry overseas. They were competent to help in many ways. Helping us start a business in a Middle Eastern country was not one of them. Our primary sending mission agency lacked the expertise as well. Thankfully, we connected to an agency specializing in helping missionaries develop businesses in underdeveloped and hard-to-reach places. With their help, we were able to start the business and, eventually, saw a church planted in this country.

Our sending church was well-resourced and could do some really important things well. They played an essential role in our ministry among the nations. They discipled well. They gave generously. They attentively cared for us. We wouldn’t have had the same ministry without them, but we couldn’t have had our ministry with only them. How many local churches can help a missionary set up a business in a hard-to-access country, facilitate global financial transactions, offer proper language and cross-cultural training, and have people placed in difficult areas ready to provide logistical and spiritual assistance to new missionaries? I’d guess very few.

Where will a church or missionary find this kind of help? Usually, they find it in a mission agency. Mission agencies are great resources for the Great Commission but must be used with wisdom. Churches and missionaries considering a mission agency partner should consider whether a partner is necessary, who would be the best partner, and what that partnership should look like. Those questions are best answered when a church knows its role, limits, convictions, and partners well. But, first, a word of caution.

Too Much of a Good Thing

We love mission agencies. Again, they can be an instrumental partner in global missions. However, churches risk abdicating their God-ordained role in missions when they rely too heavily on agencies.

Schools can help parents raise their children. A good school can help educate, discipline, and so much more. Yet, schools don’t raise children. And it would be unhealthy for parents to expect it. Similarly, agencies can significantly help churches send and support missionaries. Yet, agencies don’t send missionaries. Churches send missionaries.

Mission agencies are parachurch organizations—” para” meaning “beside”; organizations that are not the church but stand beside her and aid her in her mission. Therefore, we should understand agencies as organizations that assist the church in sending and supporting missionaries.

The temptation for churches, especially small resource-strapped churches, is to offload their responsibility onto the agencies. A small local church in the US sent a family to do church planting in Europe. Over the years, the family struggled, and it became clear that they needed to come home. The agency, which was getting its administrative cut of the fundraising, was ambivalent to the family's struggles. Fortunately, the small church stepped in and had some hard conversations. 

Too many churches would not have stepped into that conversation, assuming that the agency was handling things. The problem could have gone on for years, if not decades, harming the missionary family and poorly stewarding missions money. It is vital for churches partnering with mission agencies to understand their role clearly and do it.

The Church Should Know Its Role

It is incredible to consider that Paul, one who Jesus explicitly set apart as an apostle, was sent as a missionary by a local church. Through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the local church appointed Paul and Barnabas by laying on of hands and sending them on their first missionary journey. (Acts 13:1-3) The church has a God-given role in sending missionaries, and the church needs to know this role. The role includes preparing and assessing missionaries, two things often outsourced [1].

We often think about missionary preparation in terms of anthropology, language, and culture. Certainly, mission agencies are frequently more adept at these things. However, there is a greater need for theological training and godly living. I received helpful training on cultural distinctives and doctrinal Christian living. It was the latter that proved most necessary on the field. It was the latter that was most glaringly absent from fellow missionaries. The latter was cultivated in the context of a local church over years, not in a seminar over days.

A young man came to faith after the tragic death of a family member. The transformation was startling. His zeal for Christ was unquestioned, but his spiritual maturity was unproven. He was eager to go to the mission field. Church leadership had reservations, but he found an agency that would send him and many church members to support him. He went. Within two years, he was back home, frustrated and questioning the church, his call, and all things ministry. The reality: he wasn’t ready. Could the church have stopped him? Only the Lord knows. But they should have done everything they could have to try. He wasn’t prepared, and preparation is primarily the church’s role.

How do we know if someone is prepared? Hopefully, they are being assessed. One might examine several things regarding sending a missionary or missionary family. You can assess a person’s health, finances, personality, family, etc. All of these can help predict a person’s effectiveness and longevity on the mission field. None of these are as important as spiritual health and sound doctrine.

Churches have the unique position of truly knowing a potential missionary. They see a person’s character tested over time. They know a person’s doctrine. They see a person’s giftedness. They know a person’s ministry if one exists. It is amazing how many people desire to “go” who aren’t practicing evangelism and discipleship in their local context. The church, not the agency, has the best opportunity to know these things.

Some of the best, most effective missionaries I know were assessed by agencies and rejected. Some of the worst, least effective missionaries I know were sent without an actively involved sending church. This isn’t a swipe at agencies. They aren’t in a position to ultimately assess the qualifications of missionaries. By the nature of their size and complexity, big agencies can’t consider unique circumstances and make necessary exceptions. All agencies lack the necessary experience and relationship with prospective missionaries to assess them accurately. Therefore, the church, the entity appointed by God to know us, should be the body that evaluates our preparedness.

Churches will partner better with mission agencies when they do the things they can do best and let the agencies do what they can do best.

The Church Should Know Its Limits

Not all mission agencies are created the same or for the same reason. Different agencies come beside the church to assist the church with different needs. Some agencies try to be full-service, while others specialize in niches. Some agencies are global, while others focus on specific geographic regions. Therefore, selecting a fruitful agency partner is more than finding theological similarity; it includes identifying the need and who can best fill it. 

One good-sized church in Texas intentionally placed many missionary units close to one another in a specific region. They visited regularly to offer support and care for their sent ones. It was encouraging to have pastors and church members they trusted providing field care. In this case, the missionaries did not need an agency with a strong care component. However, they were serving in a region with a complex language to acquire, and here, the church’s limitations became apparent. The missionaries needed language and cultural training and support—something the church could not provide.

By recognizing their limitations, the church sought a partnering agency that could offer the needed support. In this way, churches and missionaries who understand where outside help is most beneficial are better equipped to partner effectively for the mission's success.

Small churches might think they cannot do anything to send and support. Large churches might believe they can do too much. An honest assessment of a church’s resources, and lack thereof, will help churches and missionaries find the right partnerships. 

The Church Should Know Its Convictions

The need being met by the agency can help a church or missionary know the necessary level of convictional alignment (i.e., theology, ministry philosophy, etc.). When we looked for an agency to help us get established in a country with creative access, convictional alignment was not essential. That agency was not directing our strategy or providing a team. In other circumstances, convictional alignment is paramount.

It’s reported that the number one reason missionaries leave the field is conflict with other missionaries [2]. That sounds right to me. One of the leading causes of conflict is a misalignment of theology and strategy.

Take hypothetical Jim. Jim wants to plant a church in a hard-to-reach area. He joins an agency with a team in that very hard-to-reach area doing what Jim wants to do: church planting. Jim makes the great sacrifice of going overseas to join this team and the work of church planting. Two months later, Jim learned that he and the team had different definitions of church planting. Devastating.

All the books in the world cannot hold the different ways missionaries can disagree theologically and philosophically. Shortly before we arrived on the field, there was a meeting of dozens of global workers in our new region. What was meant to be an encouraging time of collaboration was entirely discouraging for many. It turns out missionaries sometimes can’t even agree on the gospel. Yikes! But if you think about it, this makes sense.  Imagine if you got all the pastors together in your city and asked them a theological question, what disagreements would follow?

Fruitful and lasting partnerships that go beyond mere logistics need a high level of convictional alignment. In a pragmatic ministry world, it can be easy to underestimate the importance of convictions. Churches and missionaries should first strive to have clear, biblically founded convictions. Second, they should partner with agencies that share those convictions when possible. [3]

The Church Should Know Its Partners

Selecting an agency is only the beginning. Churches do not simply hand missionaries to agencies, dust off their hands, and hope for the best. A fruitful ministry partnership includes a relationship between the church, the missionary, the agency, and, hopefully, a field church. These relationships require clear communication and understanding. A memorandum of understanding can be a helpful tool for defining the terms of the relationship.  

An important area of understanding is who will exercise what authority. A family near us was experiencing fatigue on the field. They desired a more extended break than initially planned and one that broke from the agency’s policies. They sought counsel from their sending church, mission agency, and field church. Who had the authority to grant or deny their request?

Questions like these are not uncommon. Ministry becomes dangerous in a location. Who decides whether the missionary stays or goes? [4] A new ministry opportunity arises in another context. Who decides when it is right to move? A clear understanding of policies governing the missionary's service and what each party to the relationship does and decides are essential for a smooth ministry.

Conclusion

There are many more ways that agencies can help churches effectively participate in the Great Commission. They can help churches partner with other churches, develop healthy sending and supporting practices, and more. Nothing an agency does should minimize a church’s role in effectively participating in the great commission. Agencies are not a replacement for the church.

Importantly, all churches can do what is biblically necessary to send and support missionaries. Very few churches can do everything that is practically helpful to send and support missionaries effectively. Therefore, partnering with the right mission agency can be a wise decision for both sending churches and missionaries.

Footnotes:

[1] See GCC Articles “Who Makes a Good Prospective Missionary” and “Are They Ready?”

[2] Paul Akin, “The Number One Reason Missionaries Leave the Field,” Baptist Press, June 16, 2017, https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/the-number-one-reason-missionaries-leave-the-field/.

[3] See GCC Article “How to Choose an Agency”

[4] See GCC Article “Who Decides? Issues of Authority on the Field”.