Balance Your Mission Giving

By Rick McClatchey
Coordinator, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Texas

Churches today are discovering the importance of direct mission engagement on global missions. They are no longer content to simply send money to a mission organization and believe their task as a church is completed. Instead, churches are working directly with missionaries and indigenous churches to support the global mission effort with needed resources and short-term personnel.

This is a healthy development that enhances and strengthens the global mission enterprise. This healthy development has meant that some churches have stopped giving to mission organizations and channeled their funding to their own direct mission engagement work.

This is a short-sighted approach for our global mission strategy. Churches can do a direct-mission-approach strategy because a previous generation sent missionaries to establish the indigenous churches with whom they are now working. A direct-mission-approach strategy works now, because we have this older mission infrastructure to use.

However, how will we in the future evangelize the remaining 25% of the world’s population that is unreached with the gospel, if we do not have missionaries there to make the initial converts and establish churches?

To establish a foothold in these countries requires a permanent presence, and a direct-mission-approach strategy alone isn’t capable of doing that. The direct approach can greatly enhance what missionaries do, but it can’t replace them. Since most churches can’t afford to budget $120,000 annually for a missionary on the field, it means that cooperation with other churches through some type of mission organization is necessary.

Therefore, churches will continue to need to send funds to mission organizations for this missionary infrastructure. Churches in the future will need to keep mission giving in balance by investing resources in building the mission infrastructure through mission organizations and by funding engagement of their own direct mission engagement.

Both of these efforts can work in helpful symbiotic relationship, and both will require funding. Churches will need to channel more of their church budget into this expanded mission effort, and for that to occur, individual Christians must re-examine their giving to the local church. As individual Christians, we will need to simplify our life so we can give more to advance this new expanded mission effort. We live in a great day in which the whole church is engaging in global missions as never before, and to keep it going means we must cooperate and sacrifice.

February 2007