discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 55
Doing Mission Together 55
funding has been a characteristic of global mission from the beginning. The
apostle Paul put together a mobile missionary team that was partially funded
by existing local churches. For instance, in Romans 15:24, when Paul said he
hoped to have the Roman Christians “assist me on my journey there,” he
seemed to be asking for material help for a planned trip to Spain. However, according
to Acts 18:3, the missionary journeys of Paul and his group were funded
in part by their own tentmaking work.
Some of the first Protestant missionaries were sent out by government
money. In the early 1700s the Danish Halle mission was initiated and paid for
by the King of Denmark. That was not an infinitely reproducible model.
While Danish government sponsorship did get Ziegenbalg and Plutschau and
others to India, government funding had obvious limitations and would today
be unthinkable for Christian missionary work.
The Moravians did things differently. Most of the early Moravian missionaries
went out as tentmaker missionaries, earning much of their livelihood with
their own hands with limited dependence on the brotherhood back home. It
was a system that enabled the Moravians to send as much as 10 percent of their
total membership into missionary service. The word tentmaking is used because
the apostle Paul, as has been noted, earned some of his living making tents on
his church-planting missionary trips. Using that tentmaking model to finance
world mission ventures reflected Moravian ecclesiology because that movement
did not have a professional paid ministry even in its home churches.
The 1800s saw a wave of start-ups of faith mission agencies, many of them
taking inspiration from Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. These were independent
mission organizations not tied to a denomination or group of
churches. Though faith mission is a bit of a misnomer since all mission groups
plan and run by faith, the name has endured. In almost all faith missions, individual
missionaries and often even headquarters personnel have to marshal
their own financial support. Very few actually follow Taylor’s principle of never
asking anyone for money, something he picked up from his contemporary
George Mueller. Mueller is famous for praying in support for his orphanages in
England. Believing that mission is ultimately God’s work, Taylor’s support
principle became: “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.”
3 Those faith groups that follow Taylor’s principle never mention their financial
needs; they talk about their work but leave it to the Holy Spirit to
touch people’s hearts to fund their ministry.
Denominational missionary organizations generally fund their operations
in one of two ways: individual support raising or a cooperative central fund.
Those that use individual support raising follow variations of models used by
faith missions in which individual missionaries raise their own support. In one