discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 184 184 Mobilizing the Local Church personal spending in order to free up more money for global mission. Believers need to encourage each other to live with great intentionality in employing all their resources—time, money, gifts, and abilities—for the task of world evangelism. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said the use of money revealed the focus of people’s passions, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Implied in that passage is the principle that the need for believers to give far exceeds the mission enterprise’s need to receive such giving. Many Christians will say they wish they could give more money to missions. Tragically, missions offerings too often get reduced to bothersome intrusions in busy church activity calendars. At the mention of a special missions offering, church members scramble to see how much can be spared from their bank account or from whatever amount of cash they are carrying at the moment. Sadly, what they wind up giving is often less than they would like for it to be. One way of enabling people to give to global mission in the way they would like has been a program called Faith Promise. That system of giving originated with Canadian pastor Oswald J. Smith who called on believers to make yearly commitments of what they believed the Lord was asking them to give to world evangelism. In the faith promise concept, missions giving—like the tithe—comes off the top of a person’s income rather than being scraped together from leftover money at the end of the month. The faith promise system has been successful because people find they give more to missions when they do it on a weekly or monthly basis rather than through one or two big offerings in a year. Churches that raise money for world evangelism through faith promise plan an annual missions weekend. During that special event, a special speaker (usually a missionary) will challenge people to commit to what they feel God wants them to give to world evangelism during the following year. These commitments are usually paid out on a weekly or monthly basis. People are urged to step out on faith, to go beyond what seems humanly possible and to make a faith promise. Often, in a moment of praise, the total of these promises will be announced at the conclusion of the commitment service. Occasionally faith promise has been promoted with the idea that God is going to provide extra money to be given, the implication being that if God does not provide the extra money, nothing needs to be given to global mission. That is a distortion of the concept. While faith promise time serves to gather financial commitments, it is also an opportunity for a local church to host a missionary or a missionary family as special speakers. It is also a chance to educate those who are being asked to fund a mission program as to where the missions money raised in that church will be going. It is even a good time to teach a new global mission song or two to a congregation.
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 185 Church leaders need to guard against falling prey to the temptation to add things to their faith promise budget, such as raising local building funds or paying other obligations. Trying to piggyback on the inspirational tide of a missions weekend to raise money for other purposes is a mistake that can backfire. The church leadership’s integrity may be questioned if the emotional pull of outreach to unreached peoples is used to solicit money for local construction projects. Faith promise is not, of course, the only way global mission money is raised by congregations. Many churches take special missions offerings during holiday seasons. For instance, the Women’s Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Church promotes the Annie Armstrong offering at Easter and the Lottie Moon offering at Christmas. Others take offerings for gospel broadcasting, missionary medical care, compassionate ministries, and global construction needs at special times throughout the year. Such offerings are not just a chance to collect money; they serve a mission education purpose. Raising Up a Mission-Minded Pastor Mobilizing the Local Church 185 In addition to an active missions committee or council, a mission-minded pastor is almost indispensable for a local church that wants to assume its global responsibilities. Missions committees, therefore, need to see that one of their primary jobs is developing mission-minded pastors. Once in awhile, people zealous for the cause of world evangelism will criticize a pastor’s level of enthusiasm for global concerns. Those critics need to understand that what they are doing is counterproductive. Pastors do not suddenly become mission-minded because mission committee members snipe at them. Lay mission leaders can take advantage of the voracious reading habits of most pastors by regularly giving them a book on global mission or sometimes a book on the place where people from the church will be going on a mission trip. Pastors who like to collect out-of-print classics may appreciate a copy of something like John R. Mott’s The Pastor and Modern Missions: A Plea for Leadership in World Evangelization or Andrew Murray’s The Key to the Missionary Problem. Though published a hundred years ago, books like these can still be found in second-hand bookstores and on Internet bookseller sites. Visiting missionaries can be asked to suggest book titles for future gifts to a pastor. In addition to the goodwill generated by the gift-giving, a mission committee may be able to transform a pastor’s thinking, praying, and preaching in regard to world evangelism. Sometimes that change will be the radical result of reading one book. More often, the transformation of a pastor into a truly missionminded leader will come through a series of small but incremental steps.
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