by Andy Johnson

MRN Director of Missionary Care

Everything – whether it’s a new car, a new phone, or a new coffee maker – has a life cycle to it. How it performs and what its needs are change depending upon when you stumble upon it. While missionaries are a bit more complicated than a coffee maker, how they function and what their needs are change depending upon what part of their life cycle they are in. Your role as a care provider at a sending church should also shift as their experiences and needs do. This month, I’ll be introducing in broad strokes the first half of the missionary life cycle; my good friend Mark Brazle will speak of the second half next month.

Recruiting and Calling

When a potential missionary begins to feel God’s call on their life, the community of believers around them has an important role to play. You can help by asking questions, by pushing them to dig deeper into why they believe they’re being called to missions. Listening together to the voice of the Lord – whether it’s in a season of prayer, a special prayer meeting, or even a time of fasting – enables the Spirit to speak and to confirm (or not confirm!) a potential missionary’s calling. 

Once a missionary candidate has listened to the Spirit and to the community of believers around them, we highlyrecommend they walk through an intentional assessment process crafted for missionaries. While there are a number of options available, our assessment process here at MRN focuses on four main areas, each examined in the light of spirituality, relationships, and general well-being:

• Calling: Does the missionary have a clearly defined, confirmed calling to the field? Challenges are certain to arrive on the field that will cause them to question why they’ve come; those without a clear calling are particularly vulnerable to leaving early.

• Relationship with God: Does the missionary have a thriving, growing relationship with God, as well as a plan to continue growing in it? Work on the edges of the expansion of the Kingdom makes them a target for the enemy. They need a solid foundation before launching as well as some idea of the practices that can sustain them on the field.

• Resilience: Can the missionary point to moments in their life when they failed, when they were punched in the nose, and they got back up again? While resilience can be learned, the greatest predictor of it showing up when needed is the candidate’s past.

• Interpersonal skills: Does the missionary play well with others? Mission work is too hard, too complicated, and too important to be done alone. That said, many missionaries leave the field early because of an inability to work with their teammates. We should send those with a track record of being good teammates.

In your role as a care provider at a potential sending church, you should work with the missionary candidate and the assessing organization to chart a way forward for growth in the different areas that the assessment brings to the surface.

Training

A few truths: the mission is God’s; only He can bring fruit; only He calls people to Himself. Those facts do not excuse us, though, from doing all that we can to send well-equipped cross-cultural workers. Every long-term missionary launching to the field needs to be prepared. 

Again, there are (thankfully!) a variety of options for missionary candidates to consider for their training. At MRN, we lean heavily into things like:

• Spiritual formation

• Team life

• Essential principles of disciple making

• Anthropology

• Support raising

• Safety training and theology of risk

I recognize that mission teams form in all kinds of ways. Some commit to each other and then discern people and place together; others form around a calling to a particular place or people group; some even form on the field as workers ‘find’ each other.  Regardless of how God forms the team, we recommend that teams walk through some measure of team building either before launching or as soon as possible after forming. Putting in the work to achieve a healthy mission team bears tremendous fruit down the road that far outweighs whatever early time commitment or cost it requires. 

A final element of training is helping the missionary to count the cost. Launching to the field as a missionary is an exciting moment – one that comes at a cost (several, actually). Make sure that you send out from your church people who understand the potential costs to them and to their family. Well-informed supporters can also help their prospective missionaries by giving them the space to mourn their upcoming losses well.

Arrival on the Field

Having walked through calling, assessment, and training, your missionary is now ready to launch to the field. As supporters the importance of your role only increases as they prepare to head out. The few months prior to leaving and the first few on the field are filled with opportunities for you to serve them well.

• You can help them process the emotions of goodbyes to people, places, things, careers, etc.

• You can provide opportunities for them to speak to your church or to smaller groups within it.

• You can take details off their plates. You can’t handle their visa applications or say goodbye to their grandmother for them, but you can help with the garage sale or make runs to Goodwill.

• You can facilitate a celebration for their launch (such as MRN’s Church and Family Workshop).

As your missionary hits the field, you should prepare for all sorts of ups and downs from them! They will likely experience all the highs of a honeymoon phase as well as the corresponding lows that come from (occasionally distorted) reality checks. They will need safe people in their lives who care deeply and celebrate with them that they finally managed to tell a taxi driver how to find their apartment in their new language or that they got that visa stamped in their passport or that they managed to tell a Bible story without messing up the details (remind me sometime to tell you about the time I told an entire village market about the elephant who tempted Eve from his perch in the tree). They also need people who will mourn with them that they cracked a rotten egg into their last brownie mix or that they missed watching the Super Bowl or that they had a senseless fight with their teammate.

All new missionaries will at some point experience culture shock. You can remember the stages of it with the acronym SWAP:

• Shock: something happens that completely throws them off. It can be major or minor (and might seem silly to you from the comfort of your own culture), but the point is that it shocks the newly-arrived worker.

• Withdrawal: usually this looks like withdrawal (or a desire to withdraw) from the shocking situation or culture, but it sometimes winds up looking like a withdrawal even from their family and friends back home. I remember once splitting an entire log of pepperoni with my bride while binge watching tv on a particularly bad culture shock day. Let’s just say I wanted to withdraw from just about everyone that day!

• Acknowledgement: the cross-cultural worker reaches a place where they are able both to acknowledge what’s going on in their new culture and in themselves.

• Progression: this new understanding of culture prepares them to move forward in functioning (and even thriving) in their new context, with the heights and depths of culture shock hopefully beginning to smooth out with each wave.

Pretending that they aren’t struggling with culture shock in an effort to maintain a façade of strength is dangerous. Give your missionary space to process their challenging moments (days, weeks, seasons…) and help them normalize the culture shock.

Newly-arrived missionaries should spend the majority of their time figuring out life in country, learning language and culture, building relationships, and praying. One of the ways you can serve them well is to keep reaffirming for them that, as their supporter, you expect them to be about the business of learning and praying. Friends, that is the early work of a wise missionary, and they will benefit from reminders from you that you know and affirm that. You could also continue to educate your church about asking the right kinds of questions. In the earliest stages, ‘How many people have you baptized?’ hurts and embarrasses. Asking about a new friend or a new skill or a new language or their new neighborhood blesses.

All of these things (and many more!) need to happen before missionaries hit their stride and enter into long-term effective ministry. Next month we’ll talk about what the second half of the missionary life cycle looks like.