The missions experiment

Ok, so I'm gonna let you into my office (which is actually my basement right now). This is a behind the scenes look at pastoral ministry.


Missionaries:

Missionaries are numerous but not plentiful enough (see Luke 10:2). Their job is going as sent ones of God to minister to peoples needs. But an enduring principle of life is "ministry takes money". So every 3-4 years they have to re-raise funds in churches to send them back to the field. This must be a very tiring and frustrating occurrence considering God called them to be missionaries not fund-raisers; that God called them to Go not Hang Around. So they spend their time calling and emailing pastors, attending events, and basically trying to nail down services where they can come share their heart and vision.

Pastors make it notoriously hard to be found. In general they don't return phone calls, emails, and avoid missionaries at meetings. There is a reason for this. I think it's that pastors feel bad saying "No". They're extended as far as they can be, and can't afford to support another missionary. So they hope that if they avoid the missionary support will come in from other churches and that lets the pastor off the hook.

Now calendar is important to me. My wife can attest to the fact that my calendar is planned quite a bit in advance. So this is what I decided to do yesterday. I made an email list of all the missionaries who have contacted me via email and those that are currently stateside and sent them the dates that I have scheduled for missionaries this year. It was kind of a role reversal, but all the missionaries really responded positively about my approach. A couple ended up only being available on the same day, so I'm bringing them both in, and we're gonna do a Q & A format with them both and give them each an opening statement about their specific mission. It's gonna be great.

So that's it. That's the experiment I ran yesterday. It worked pretty well, I think so far. We'll see.

--Ben