20 years ago I started hearing: “We only support mission efforts that we can take our kids to easily on mission trips.” Now I’m hearing: “We only support efforts by our members.”
The preacher at the congregation I attend recently moved after being here for 28 years. One of our elders will serve as “interim minister” for a year, when a new man will be hired. If we did things the way many churches now do their mission work, here’s what the elders would have announced:
“While we fully support the idea of full-time ministers, our eldership feels that we would get more for our money by letting our high school students do the preaching from now on. They get to do all the things the preacher does: counseling, hospital visits, weddings, funerals. This will be an excellent experience for them, building their faith in a way that merely sitting in the pew can’t. Plus, we feel that they will be more supportive of preaching in the future after having this experience and some of them may even decide to become full-time preachers.”
It won’t happen, of course. We feel the need for having trained men who have dedicated their life to this work. Do we consider foreign missions to be so much simpler that we need less? We’ve traditional sent our youngest, least experienced ministers to the mission field, while sending our most experienced men where they are surrounded with lifelong Christians. Now we’re going beyond that, sending more short-term workers and fewer long-term ones.
I’ve never been accused of hesitating to drive a subject into the ground, and I’ve probably said too much on this one. But it’s something I feel strongly about. Let’s put the emphasis back on long-range mission projects and career missionaries. Let’s use short-term missions as support for those efforts, not a replacement of them.