Missions on Point

Business As Missions (BAM) has been the darling and the bane of attempts to reach "closed" countries with the Gospel. As Greg Livingstone has said, "You are either a job taker, a job maker, or a job faker." Most BAM out in the wild is job faking. While there is good work to be done by sincere Christians creating God-honoring businesses, they are rarely aimed at the end goal of establishing and strengthening indigenous local churches.  However, we all need to understand BAM to interact with it. We've got more in Missions on Point and Propempo.com on BAM.

Church-based missionary training is a huge, paradigm-shifting undertaking. But, if you don't want your sent-ones to be cannon fodder, you'd better wake up and take note. Sound church-based, guided missionary training will make the difference between burnout and longevity, between frustration and effectiveness, between being crushed and thriving. Listen and learn.

Imagine you had to train someone from your church to become your associate pastor. Then add layers of training in church planting, cross-cultural exposure, leadership training, and becoming an elder. There you have it, in a simple form; that's how you train a church member to become a missionary. This episode will guide your thinking. Look for lots more on Propempo.com, SendForward.org, and the Missions on Point episodes' history.

We actually address the issue of candidate identification in other series of the Missions on Point podcast. This one is the first of four in an overview of sending, equipping, and shepherding missionaries.  I maintain that having a constant stream of equipping and leadership training in your church is absent in most churches. That's why it's so important to begin to address it. The answers to finding and equipping missionaries from your Church are parallel to those for leaders in your Church, whether elders, pastors, or deacons. We need a thoughtful, well-known process for identifying and training, and putting in place, those leaders.  Missions on Point will help you do that.

This episode, featuring The Best of Missions on Point, looks at episode 79. The "Missiology You Need to Know" series continues with The Missionary Must Reproduce Himself. This seems as obvious as the nose on your face. However, missionaries tend to copy the forms of the churches in which they grew up and don't learn because of the absence of emphasizing this in ministry training schools.  This principle is essential for achieving the desired result of indigenous local churches. BTW, a church plant is not indigenous if the missionary is the lead pastor. The fact that this principle is so little or poorly practiced is damning to our Western missiology.