Sending Cross-Cultural Missionaries

While every Christian is technically a missionary in their community, cross-cultural missionaries have specialized needs.

Send cross-cultural missionaries as soon as you have the resources for it.

  • Equip that missionary with as much moral support, information, prayer support, and finances as they need.
  • Missionaries receive support proportionally to how much you share that ministry with the congregation.

Focus on the most unreached portions of the world, not the most logistically convenient or affordable.

  • At this point, most of the groups that haven’t heard the Gospel are small, remote communities that require significant cost to send cross-cultural missionaries to.

A missionary’s job is very challenging, and their support network is responsible to support them.

  • Members often give support before the mission, but they must help as frequently as possible during the mission as well.
  • Advertise what they’re doing, and give members plenty of opportunity to personally correspond with them.

Helping Other Cultures

Don’t make impoverished people groups’ situations worse.

  • Our sin nature makes paternalism (doing what others can do for themselves) a constant threat.
  • It’s very easy to over-reach efforts and leave that culture worse than when your missionary workers showed up.

There are levels of foreign aid involvement:

  1. Community Initiated
    • Agenda – locals make, then outsiders respond
    • Decisions – locals decide
    • Work – locals do it, outsiders give moral support
    • Resources – locals provide, outsiders occasionally help
  2. Co-Leading
    • Agenda – locals and outsiders together
    • Decisions – locals and outsiders together
    • Work – locals and outsiders together
    • Resources – locals and outsiders together
  3. Cooperation
    • Agenda – locals and outsiders together
    • Decisions – outsiders decide
    • Work – locals and outsiders together
    • Resources – locals and outsiders together
  4. Consultation
    • Agenda – outsiders ask locals’ opinions, then determine
    • Decisions – outsiders decide
    • Work – outsiders direct, with locals doing
    • Resources – outsiders control it
  5. Compliance
    • Agenda – outsiders determine
    • Decisions – outsiders decide
    • Work – outsiders assign locals tasks, usually with incentives
    • Resources – outsiders control it
  6. Coercion
    • Agenda – outsiders determine
    • Decisions – outsiders decide
    • Work – locals submit to outsiders
    • Resources – outsiders control it

Secular organizations tend to enable poor countries’ citizens to stay poor:

  • While secular organizations solve physical problems, they never address the sin condition, the need for God to transform them, or how to give people meaning and purpose.
  • Many citizens stop farming or developing skills because they simply wait for the aid helicopter to drop supplies.
  • Focus more on rehabilitation and development than giving relief.

Healthy boundaries requires outsiders never move beyond Co-Leading.

  • Since work won’t get done nearly as quickly, it can be very challenging to simply assist from the side.
  • However, without their own people running things, they will slowly become a second-class participant of your project.
  • At its most extreme, the discrepancy in power over time will devolve into a slavery-like condition.

Deeply involve the people group you’re helping in every stage of assessing, designing, applying, tracking and evaluating systems:

  1. Fully understand their situation, capabilities, skills, and resources.
    • As much as possible, look for resources and solutions inside the individual or community.
    • God has given poor people and communities many possibilities, so don’t treat them as victims merely because they have less than you.
  2. After assessing everything available, make the appropriate response.
    • Only respond when the local people or organizations can’t or won’t meet pressing needs.
    • Don’t give resources, spiritual guidance, knowledge, labor or management they can provide themselves.
  3. Impartially prioritize assistance by vulnerability and need.
    • Aid workers must be qualified, have the right attitude and experienced enough to run the correct programs.
    • Bringing in too much or too early will sabotage everyone’s ability or willingness.

After the Mission

Supporting missionaries does not only apply for when they’re serving their tour.

  • Across a mission, that worker will slowly adopt a “third culture” identity where they merge their serving and home cultures.
  • When a missionary returns home, formerly familiar objects become alien through their new perspective, so they require help reintegrating.

They will not be the same, so don’t expect them to come back to the lifestyle they knew.

  • They’ll find offense at “normal” things they used to do, and will have problems with daily life.
  • Their opinion on those small social rules is very important, since it will show blind spots in the Body.
  • However, expect their differing opinions to create conflicts, especially among the more tradition-minded members.