EDITORIAL: Time to talk about missions methods

This summer on this page, we’ve been talking about the most significant topics facing Texas Baptists. We must:

• Prioritize the Baptist General Convention of Texas budget so we fund vital ministries for excellence, even though that means operating only ministries we can afford.

• Acknowledge our state’s seismic demographic shifts and emphasize Hispanic churches, Hispanic ministries and Hispanic leadership development.

• Recognize the only way we will reach Texas with the gospel is if we start thousands of churches and pour our energy into calling out and equipping church planters—mostly bivocational ministers—to lead them.

These are vital issues, but we also must think beyond our borders. We need to talk about how Baptists conduct missions in other countries. We need to consider changing how we organize, fund and implement missions.

For more than 200 years, career missionaries have been the vanguard of Baptists’ efforts to propagate the gospel around the globe. If Baptists declared saints, the pantheon would be populated by foreign missionaries, from British pioneer William Carey, to American trailblazers Adoniram and Ann Judson, icon Lottie Moon, martyrs Bill Wallace and Archie Dunaway, and Texans-turned-Brazilians Buck and Anne Bagby. Their faith and passion epitomized the best of who Baptists are and hope to be.

But traditional missions methods are experiencing unprecedented challenges. Among the most significant is the expense of training and maintaining overseas missionaries. This crisis even transcends the politics that divided Baptists during the past few decades. Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, has announced the board is backing down from a record 5,624 overseas missionaries in 2008 to fewer than 5,000 by the end of this year. Meanwhile, Daniel Vestal, coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, said CBF may have to recall missionaries next year.

In both cases, money—or, more precisely, lack of it—is the culprit. “People are always saying ‘Why don’t you appoint more funded missionaries?’ The fact is we don’t have the money,” Vestal said. Even though the IMB would like to deploy more than 8,000 missionaries, “we will … have to restrict appointments and restrict our missionary force” due to costs, Rankin reported.

Southern Baptists have launched the Great Commission Resurgence to raise more funds for missions, and Fellowship Baptists have pleaded for more funding from their faithful.

Certainly, Baptists could bankroll many more missionaries if we were so inclined. But we also need to think about how we can make our missions money go further. With all due respect to our sainted forebears and to current career missionaries whom we love and admire, we must ask: "Is training and maintaining large career forces the best way to accomplish global missions today"

We must be strategic about how we spend missions money. We must consider the possibility that the best use of most missions funds may be training and supporting indigenous pastors, who are native to their countries and culture, who are trusted locals and who will raise up new generations of Christians from their own people.

We may deploy selected U.S. missionaries, particularly gifted ministry teachers and those who have invested many years developing relationships and identifying and cultivating those indigenous leaders.

We also may utilize short-term volunteers and mission teams, sent specifically to serve and encourage the indigenous leadership.

This will be a tenuous, even tender, conversation about missions. But for the sake of the gospel, we must talk.

Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard. Visit his FaithWorks Blog.