The Pentecostal Messanger: March 1999 edition

Recruiting a World Class Missions Team
By: Dr. Howard Foltz

In the Church local pastors are the commanders for present-day victories for the Kingdom of our Lord. The worldwide harvest is ripe and greatly needs mentors for an influx of harvesters-in-training. No matter how large or how small your congregation, every minister is in a position to facilitate the enterprise. How? By input into the leadership style, direction, recruitment and vision for missions in the congregation.

The pastor of a world class church we know led a team of his church members for on-site research of the largest unevangelized country in the world. The Lord soimpacted his life that he took a sabbatical in order to stay there for three months doing lifestyle evangelism. When he returned from that Muslim city, he and the church leaders prepared to mobilize their assembly to reach that unreached people.

Can a "mere pastor" lead a group of everyday Christians to successfully use the resources of this world to reach a people with news of the Kingdom? The pastor mentioned above led an assessment ofthe congregation's resources, and they discovered a remarkable degree of computer experience in their midst. In addition, a second research team had found business possibilities in that country. Starting with these findings the Lord gave them powerful entrepreneurial vision. This pastor and his church of 900 were led to start both a computer business and an import-export business in the capital city. These ties provided the means to send eight to nine workers, "tentmakers," with the means to successfully establish, by God's grace, a house church in this unreached nation!

Dear reader-friend, because of your vision for the world you are one of the several kinds of missions coaches in your church. Just as there are head coaches, assistant coaches, paid and volunteer trainers, you may be the senior pastor, assistant pastor, missions director or a lay missions activist. In any case, as one kind of coach, your knowledge and interest make you an important contributor to the team.

Building a Winning Missions Team

Having a Missions Committee is one key to mobilizing your local church. Not just another department in the church, the missions committee is instrumental in orienting all aspects of the local church life toward its Great Commission involvement, and its successful operation is crucial.

If a church does not have an established Missions Committee, a good way to build one is to start by establishing a missions prayer fellowship. If you had only two members in the congregation who have ever expressed interest in the world or in missions, you would still have enought people to approach with the idea of praying together. This group would meet primarily for the purpose of praying for the world, for missionaries, and for the local church's involvement in missions. Once a prayer fellowship is established, those "closet" missions activists who have been distracted by other matters will be drawn to the group. The opportunity, even for just one hour per month, will give prayer and learning an occasion to generate increasing vision for the Kingdom work in other nations. our of this larger group will most likely come candidates fo rthe missions committee.

To have a positive impact on the whole church, it is important for the missions committee to be set within the existing church government. The committee and other church leadership need to work in unity and cooperation. The committee should never become a maverick group working apart from or in opposition to the overall vision and structure of a church.

Take spiritual giftings into consideration when choosing committee members. The committee needs a variety of gifts, such as leadership, administrative, teaching and serving to enable them to be missions mobilizers.

The missions committee fulfills a leadership role in the church, leading the church in accomplishing its mission as a sending church. The missions committee is not just a group of people who control the purse strings for the missions budget - if that is the motivation, nothing significant will be accomplished. Rather, the missions committee leads, guides, and inspires in the area of missions with the goal of seeing the church strategically carry out a missions vision.

Other factors that help qualify candidates for the missions committee are their proven ministry in the church and their demonstration of attitudes of service and commitment to the church. If a person has not proven these attitudes over an extended period of time, he or she should not be considered for the missions committee.

The missions committee must have some missions training. When one pastor confessed that his missions committee, being primarily preoccupied with controlling money, was more of a hindrance than a help to the church, we recommended that he require each member to receive missions training within the year if they wanted to stay on the committee, plus go on a short-term missions trip. Committee members need to have knowledge of missions principles, history, and strategies in order to exercise leadership in these areas.

A type of practical training which committee members should have is cross-cultural experiences. They should go on at least one short-term trip, or at least work in a cross-cultural setting locally, such as with international students. This type of experience will give members a greater understanding of and stronger vision for missions. Before going on a short-term trip, a person should also have training (the AIMS Short-Term Missions Training: Keys to Success is a manual designed for that purpose).

Summarizing then, successful committee members must be qualified in the areas of spiritual giftings, proven commitment and training.

Now let's look at the types of things a successful committee does. Number one on any list is, of course, prayer. No matter how gifted, committed and trained a group is, they will not succeed without prayer. Praying themselves and mobilizing others for prayer should be a primary concern of the missions committee.

A successful committee works in cooperation with other church leadership, never being in competition with others in the church, but should be supporting and serving church leadership in a way to best mobilize the entire church for missions. The committee should meet regularly, and as different members are assigned tasks, a regular system of accountability should be established. The missions commitee works in a variety of areas, such as education, prayer, conferences, missions budget, long-term planning of missions strategy, research and personnel.

Subcommittees for some of these areas may need to be established, with each subcommittee reporting back to the committee as a whole.

Finally, an important tak of the missions committee is developing a Missions Policy and Strategy Statement. Let's take a closer look at this task.

Charting Your Course

The Missions Policy: The Missions Policy, also known as the missions Strategy Statement, is a document produced by church leaders which provides guidelines for all aspects of that congregation's missions program. It is not meant to be a legalistic list when inhibits the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it is a flexible document, developed with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which provides policies and goals related to how the church "does" missions. there are at least five key qualities of proper development of a good missions policy, as follows:

Prayer and Teamwork: The most important part is the prayer and teamwork in the process of creating the Policy and Strategy. When developing a Missions Policy, the missions committee members must stay in prayer and be willing to work as a team, with one another and with other church leadership. The process is just as important as the final outcome, as committe members interact wtih one another and with God.

Philosophy: the Missions Policy represents the unique philosophy of the individual church. Every church should strive to be a mobilized, "world class" church; however, each church may approach missions from a different angle due to the unique callings and giftings in that body.

Strategy: The Missions Policy reflects the strategy for missions of the church. Your desire to adopt an unreached people group is an important consideration here. Having a 1, 3, and 5-year plan, and even a 10-year "forecast" shows a commitment to growth and allows fo rthe accomplishment of goals which require an ongoing commitment.

Mobilization: Out of the policy and strategy should flow a plan to take specific steps toward investing in the expansion of the missions vision of the church to accomplish the goals set. It will involve ventures in prayer, learnign and giving by individuals, small groups and the whole congregation.

Flexibility: Finally, flexibility is a key. It must be reviewed each year, and must never become a stale document which rules the missions program. As your church grows and changes, and as the Spirit reaches and guides in new ways, the policy must also change.

In addition to the above characteristics, a mission policy may include the following components:

Statement of Purpose: This statement summarizes the overall purpose of the missions program and how it impacts the whole of the church body.

Structure of the Missions Committee: This section would specify the requirements for committee candidates, responsibilities of the committee, subcommittee structure and length of service for committee members. Just remember that as you set structure, let the structures serve, not inhibit the work that needs to be done.

Financial Policies: The policy will set guidelines for financial goals and priorities. We recommend that every church dedicate a minimum of 10 percent of the total church budget for missions (cross-cultural only), with a portion to work among unreached people groups.

Policies on Missionary Care and Support: Is there a limit on th epercentage of one missionary's support the church will provide? How are missionaries accountable to the church?

Mission Education Planner: This portion would lay out a long-term plan for implementing missions education into all facets of the education, children through adults. This section could also spell out guidelines fo rthe annual missions conference.

Long-Term Missions Strategy: This section would set long-term goals and the steps needed to reach those goals. The strategy should fit in with the philosophy of missions of the church.

Strategy for Closure

As you ponder your congregational missions strategy, consider the 13,000 groups that have been reached with the gospel and the 11,000 that have not been reached. This state of affairs has great strategic implications. If all the Christians around the world witnessed to everyone in their own cultural group, nearly half of the world's people would still not hear about Jesus. Why? Because they live in one of those cultures that has virtually no knowledge of the gospel.

Your grapevine will not produce a vineyard in a neighboring state unless you carry seeds or plantings there, especially if there is a mountain between the states. We must intentionally aim to prevail over the cultural walls and the language barriers. Without cross-cultural evangelistic enterprises, without bothering to target unreached peoples, we can make more disciples but we will never "reach all nations" for Christ.

We need to wake up to the need of the forgotten peoples as we allocate new resources for missions work that your church may be called to do, but it is time for a prophetic call to challenge the Church to steer toward closure - completion of the Great Commission, the final harvest.

More and more congregations are accepting responsibility for an unreached people group. We call this acceptance of responsibility for the spiritual needs of a group "adopting the people group." God has surprises in store for churches that adopt an unreached people. Consider the experience of one church of about 1,200 members that already had a good missions program, including their own homegrown career missionaries. They had developed a missions committee, a regular prayer program, short-term teams, and they are probably giving 30-40 percent of their total revenue through faith promises and other fundraising methods for cross-cultural missions. And yet, a few years ago, God did something really new when he laid on their hearts a burden to adopt a specific unreached people group.

They started a prayer team of 8-15 people who would meet weekly to pray for the thno-linguistic clan they had adopted, a group in a Muslim country. There were reportedly only five or six believers in Christ among a population of six million people, and what was worse, that country was completely closed to missionaries. The prayer group researched and networked with several other churches to see if they could send a team to this country - skilled people who go as professionals or tradesmen who share the gospel as they practice their trade or profession.

Because a prospective member of the tentmaking team has an undergraduate degree in health, she was able to get an entrance visa for herself, her husband, and six other workers! They began the salt and light process of sharing their faith in lifestyle evangelism to reach Muslims for Christ. That local church caught the vision for our collective worldwide task. They began praying for it; they stimulated other churches to catch the vision; and now god has established a work there. Today, years later, I'm glad to report that there are several hundred converts meeting in house churches.

Getting into the Game

I believe that the local church is the key to God's plan. And you are a key to your local church. All missionary work should be firmly rooted in local congregations who intend to reproduce themselves in congregations they plant and strengthen throughout the world.

The Church needs more leaders who see this vision. The Church needs shepherds, commander-coaches if you will, to mobilize God's people according to their gifts and ministries to become Great Commission Christians to go to the ends of the earth from their missions base - their hometown church. As our churches accept their role as missions bases, the church will exercise a much greater spiritual force in the earth - provided we have the humility to link together.

For reprint information, please call the AIMS publication office at (757) 495-5850 or email the editor at aims@aims.org.

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