by David Dixon
One of the key questions every team must ask is, “How will we know if we have succeeded?”
It’s a question that when answered well can lead to creativity and clarity in accomplishing the work of the team, but I wonder do we ask it enough when it comes to the mission of the church?
The church has a mission. This isn’t anything new. My guess is that you could go to the passages of Matthew 28:19-20, Acts 1:8, and many others that highlight that mission and engage in a conversation about it. The challenge comes not in understanding the mission but in engaging it. As a part of the Alliance family, we understand that part of our engagement is our involvement in the global work of that mission.
When it comes to our church’s engagement in Alliance Missions, how do we know if we are engaging well? How do we know if we have succeeded, so to speak, in helping our church to be a part of the global work?
While sometimes these kinds of questions can be difficult to answer or may even seem strange to answer because they can feel “business-like”, I believe that asking questions like this is important because it forces us to focus on what is most important. Taking the time to ask these kind of questions helps us to find simplicity in the midst of complexity.
With that in mind, I would like to share with you five ways that we can measure missions engagement in our churches so that we can answer those questions. These are not of my own design, but the five that I think answer the question of success or engagement best. I will also throw in some suggestions for what this could look like in a local church context.
Prayer – Consistent prayer is the foundation upon which any engagement in mission with God is built and cultivated. Prayer connects our hearts to the heart of Jesus. We cannot move forward in our mission as the church without the Lord.
Some ways that you can bring prayer for missions consistently into your church is to initiate corporate or small-group times of prayer specifically for Alliance missions. You can use resources like www.cmalliance.org/pray or updates from international workers. If your church has a regular communication like email or bulletin you can highlight one thing for people to pray for.
Promote – Promotion isn’t simply about giving, it is about informing the minds and hearts of people to the global work of the Gospel. Reminding people of heart of Jesus for those are far from him both in your community and around the world is just as important as informing them of what Alliance international workers are doing around the world. In promoting Alliance missions, we must connect the heart of Jesus to the work itself.
We can help people see this when we create habits for talking about mission in our church. These habits could be simple things like regularly using Alliance missions videos in your services, it could be missions emphasis weeks in your church, it could be regular communication with a district international workers, or it could be having a worker come to your church. There are so many ways to go about this, but the key thing is consistency. If you say it enough, people will eventually get it.
Building Relationships – Helping the church to build direct relationships with a particular field or specific international workers is important in bring the mission for “out there” to closer to home. Heathy relationships between local churches and our workers make the global work feel more real and provide context for bigger missions conversations. Relationship between churches and workers can grow through care, connection, and participation. As these relationships grow, they raise the level of engagement because now the mission has faces, places, and a people who need the Gospel.
Giving – The same is true for any individual, family, or organization: what you give your money toward demonstrates what is most important to you. Giving is an indicator of missions engagement because it demonstrates that the mission is so important that it is worth giving resources too.
You can help people engage with giving to Alliance missions by making it available to them. There are multiple ways to do this and there are a variety of resources to help communicate the needs that arise in the mission field. Some churches give a percentage of their budget. Some use faith pledge cards. Some have regular mission offering time. You may have to figure out which is best for your context, but no matter the way consistency and clarity are key.
Sending – Actually seeing what God is doing in another part of the world is an experience that engages people like none of the others. When you step off the plane, you are hit with the smells, the feel of the air, the languages of the people, the cultural differences, and the lostness of a people in way that cannot be replicated any other way. While short-term trips can be a lot of effort and require a financial commitment, there is no substitute for the visceral experience of being there and allowing God to engage your heart.
Sending people as a part of a team to serve in another country requires planning and more, but these are perfect opportunities to involved others in your church to be a part of the work. Many of our workers would be happy to welcome a team and would love to have you. These kinds of projects could also be done together with other churches and the district has a grant available to those who take teams from their churches to Alliance fields. You can learn more about that grant at www.epdalliance.org/grant.
How do we know if we are engaging missions well? We can measure our time in prayer, our consistency of promotion, the healthiness of our relationships with workers, our level of giving, and our people sent.
What I love about these four is that none of these things are complicated. In fact, they are quite simple, they only require the desire to engage and the intentionality to follow through.
My prayer is that all across our district our level of engagement in Alliance missions would increase exponentially. That our hearts would fall more in sync with Jesus’. That our call to global missions would fuel or call to local missions and vice versa. That as the people of God, even in these days, we would desire to engage all the more and pursue it with deep intentionality that leads to fruitfulness. The Lord has given all that we need to be successful in the mission he has given to us.
If you’d like to do a deep dive on this, there is a Missions Engagement Assessment Tool for your church’s missions team to work through. Also, if you would like to have a conversation about raising the level of missions engagement in your church, I would be happy to have that conversation with you.