How to Prioritize Your Church's Mission Funding

I received an email from a pastor today: 

Reason for emailing: our church recently agreed to focus our missions support by reducing down from 13 organisations and individuals down to 6 (2 individuals and 4 organisations). We have for a long time given 10% of our income which is something we're intending to keep going.

My question is what principles you use to decide how you divide that 10% up, particularly with the individuals we're supporting? Have you got any advice you'd be able to offer?

This was my answer: 

I think that your prioritizing should be along the following lines:

1. Biblical theological factors: your priorities should reflect the centrality of gospel ministry that is in line with the Great Commission – pioneer evangelistic ministry especially among peoples who otherwise would have little or no witness plus those who support that and ministries that complete that (‘teaching them to obey’).
2. Historical factors: you will have relationships with people perhaps going back a long time. These should be honoured, though if people you have been supporting are simply giving out teddy bears in children’s homes I think you should look for ways to redeploy them in more suitable ministry rather than feel under compulsion to continue their support simply on the basis of relationship. Relationships are very important. But they are not absolute.
3. Global realities: mission is now from everywhere to everywhere. Are there folk from other places, including from previously ‘receiving’ countries, who are not connected with you, share your vision and priorities but don’t have sufficient support?
4. Missions mobilization: some money should go into growing the mission vision and wisdom of the church. That may include sending people for short trips to visit situations for that purpose.
5. Training: God willing, the result of missions mobilization will be people coming forward to be assessed for their personal long-term involvement. That should include training, which can be costly.

I trust you will be seeking to grow the vision and commitment of the church so that you can increase your giving in the future. At least one church in Wales I know gives 50% to mission. 

More Thoughts on 40 'Unreached' Places

Missions researcher Justin Long recently produced a list of the 40 global districts that are the most 'unreached'. I posted some thoughts on this list already. Here are some more.

4. Social Organization

Dense populations give rise to complex social organizations. This is so of necessity as so many people living in close proximity need to structure their relations tightly to make life liveable and enable society to function. The people in these 40 provinces, then, highly value the group as opposed to the individual. They are collectivist places, where few make a decision without looking sideways to see what their significant others think. Individuals are often not even in a position to make decisions for themselves anyway. A parent (even for an adult), a brother or a husband may be the decision-maker. There is no question of making up one's own mind for such people. Issues of ultimate allegiance can be perceived very strongly as constituting a threat to the very existence of the group, or even society as a whole, making the consideration of such a change a very serious thing indeed. Paul Hiebert and his daughter Eloise Hiebert Meneses consider social organization to be of such importance that they structured an entire book on church planting around social categories.

Serious study of social organization is absolutely essential to understanding the host communities among whom one is working. And it is important on a strategic level too. I have written an article ("Recasting Evangelization Ethnicity, Kinship, Religion and Territory: Identifying Communities in South Asia") which challenges the way the Joshua Project (and other such lists) handles the phenomenon of caste. The caste system (which is the social structure of South Asia and thereby of many of these provinces) is exceedingly complex and the sociological interpretation of caste highly contentious. Suffice it to say that in my article I argue that single castes groups such as Potters do not constitute a community and therefore should not be considered the strategically significant entity.

5. Cities

One might be forgiven for thinking that the great cities found in many of the 40 provinces, such as Delhi, Kolkata, Karachi, Dhaka and Beijing, are the product of recent modernization. But this would be far from the truth, although modernization and globalization have massively increased their size. These cities are the product of centuries of development that would not be possible were it not for the four phenomena I have outlined above. Cities are the cultural product of societies that have an excess of food to requirement, which can be traded and taxed and used to support large numbers of people who are not directly involved in food production. These are therefore free to innovate, organize others, create art, explore science, and develop systems of ideas, myths and rituals to make sense of it all.

Furthermore, the biggest migration in human history is going on right now in the massive move to the cities as the world's emerging economies like India and China increasingly become major players in the global market place. The cities in these provinces, then, have become places of enormous human suffering as well as amazing openness to the gospel. Sadly, however, missions have often been slow to adjust to this momentous shift. Today's gospel messengers must focus on the cities, and be serious to address the multiple needs of the urban poor who have flocked to form their great bastis and shanty towns. The quiet rural life, for most of this century's gospel messengers, is not an option.

6. Religion and Culture

These provinces are most significant, then, as the cradles of the great global systems we call the 'world religions'. Though Islam was birthed in the desert a very high percentage of the world's Muslims are found in these 40 places. Likewise for Hindus and Buddhists. These places, then, are the great bastions of the three great religious systems that have traditionally been perceived by Christian missions as massive obstacles for their message. Moreover, efforts to differentiate between culture and religion in these places, in the hope that one might accept the one while rejecting the other, prove exceedingly complex and ultimately unsatisfying as so often the one turns out to be the flip side of the other.

As in the need to learn the host community's history the importance of in-depth understanding of their religion and culture cannot be overstated. It is only as the religious and cultural context is understood that careful contextualization of the gospel can be possible. This will inevitably lead to conflict as many Christians are not interested in such knowledge, preferring what they call the 'simple gospel'. Although I rejoice that such people are serious about sharing the Good News of Christ, I cannot but be deeply concerned for the long term health of any movement to Christ that emerges from such ministry.

The Local in an Age of the Global

I have spent the last few months on a semi-sabbatical so I thought I would write a few reflections. I  continued to teach (a light load) and to do some forward planning for the School but most of my administrative work was taken on by my colleagues (thanks Cor and Tibbie). I had grand ideas of writing a book but with hindsight that was exceptionally idiotic. Oh well, I am still learning. I did manage to write an article for Transformation as well as putting the finishing touches on another for the International Journal of Frontier Missions.

What made the semester so refreshing for me were the opportunities to travel that mostly came unsought after. After 8 1/2 years I took a trip to Nepal with my two eldest kids. We had a great time catching up with old friends and completed it with a trek up to Annapurna Base Camp and a couple of nights in the jungle at Chitwan National Park. A month later I was in Helsinki for a long weekend for meetings with the Agricola Theological Institute and United Community Church; my first time in Finland. Then last month I was in Lausanne, Switzerland at the invitation of Westlake Church for their first Global Mission weekend.

My first reflection is on the global/local tension that is everywhere the same and everywhere different. In Helsinki I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant talking theology with a handful of Finns, an American and a Canadian, in English. The restauranteur was Chinese and seemed at ease in Finnish and English as well as her native tongue. I suppose most of the ingredients of the dishes we ate were imported from elsewhere. At one point a song by English rock band Bastille was played on the hifi (thanks kids for educating me). All such restaurants and cafes in Finland have wifi - of course - so you can connect with anyone anywhere anytime.

Well, that may not sound so strange but just reflect on that a bit. Even a decade ago that would have been unusual. And it is not just highly connected countries like Finland that exhibit this phenomenon: we even got wifi half way up the Himalayas! This has huge implications. One of these is that if you have English a whole world of opportunity opens up as English is by far the lingua franca of globalization. When I arrived in Nepal nearly 30 years ago hardly anyone spoke English (unlike India where even illiterate rickshaw-wallas could ply their trade in the old colonial tongue). Now nearly everyone seems to be able to. Of course it is not always the Queen's English but the beauty of English is that even if you speak it badly most people can catch on to what you are saying. That is not true for all languages. (Not that I know all languages, you understand, but that is what I am told!)

I had the opportunity to preach in a number of international churches during my travels (more about preaching in another post). I am sure there are Korean churches and Chinese churches in most of these places as well but I am equally sure they don't have the incredible kaleidoscope of ethnic groups that the English-speaking churches have. One thing I am fascinated with is that a number of locals also worship at each of these churches. What makes them want to worship in English rather than their mother tongue? At least a part of the answer to that question is that for many locals at such churches the English language is the medium in which they have come to know Christ and in which they pursue their discipleship. That may not be very adequate from a missiological perspective but it is the ground reality.

But all this talk of globalization must not mask the continued significance of the local. Even while the world becomes increasingly homogeneous the local takes on even greater importance. Whether it is fondue and tress bread in Switzerland, or reindeer sandwiches in Finland (yes, really), or dalbhaat in Nepal there is nothing quite like home cooking, and the drive to connect with the other must never be confused with a denial of home. The most significant thing Joel Morris (COO of WEST) and I did in Finland was to brave the hottest sauna our Finnish host had ever experienced, taking dips in the ice-fringed lake in between sessions! Our reception by the pastors the next morning was about as enthusiastic as a group of phlegmatic Finns could get I would imagine. Shaun Rossi, Director of OM Europe Church Planting, reckons that a number of church planting efforts by expatriates in Finland have foundered because the workers have not taken to the sauna. If that doesn't demonstrate the significance of the local in an age of the global, what does?