Your church only does a couple of mission trips every year and very rarely even talks about missions. You want to launch missions to the next level, but it seems like a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be.
Over 7 years ago I started at a church that asked me to take their mission efforts to the next level. It wasn’t easy, and I made plenty of mistakes. But I learned a few things along the way that were successful.
These 5 ways to launch missions are things that you can easily do in your church with a little bit of effort and creativity.
- EDUCATION If someone forced me to only name one thing that is the most important to do in order to change the mission culture of the church, I would say, without hesitation, education. I have always believed that my church is full of good people who, if they only had basic mission knowledge, would rise up to the challenge. I have found this to be true. An invaluable book that I have passed out like candy to increase education is John Zumwalt’s A Passion For The Heart Of God. And the best class on missions is Perspectives.
- KEY INFLUENCERS You need to sit down and make a list of the key influencers in your church – not just those in formal leadership positions, but also those people who pull the strings behind the scenes. Heavily recruit these people to go on a mission trip with you. You know that short-term mission trips change the lives of those who go. If your key influencers go, they will come back and champion missions in your church.
- PARTNERSHIPS Don’t do a trip to a different, exotic location every year. Find missionaries or church planters to form a long-term partnership with. Make these incredible people family to your church. Treat them as the heroes they are when they come to visit. You will quickly find that people care more about missions when it ceases to be an abstract idea and becomes a real live family that are making real live disciples.
- REPORTING You have to tell the stories. Five years from now you will never remember your pastor’s finely crafted three points, but you will remember many of his stories. You need to use any and every means possible to get stories out, including videos, social media, newsletters, etc. One of the best things that we do is to produce a short (no more than 4 minutes) video every week to show in every small group. It is a lot of work, but has been well worth it.
- CULTURE Changes in culture don’t happen overnight. But they do happen slowly as a result of a lot of hard, intentional work. To launch missions to the next level missions has to be more than a separate ministry. It must become the heartbeat of the church. To see a culture change you must be willing to aggressively and persistently do all of the above. After doing these things, over time you begin to see subtle changes that indicate that the culture is changing, like the pastor talking about missions in his sermons, church members taking ownership in the partnerships, missions giving increasing, etc.
Launching missions is much like launching a rocket… there is a ton of preparation, but when it takes off, it is spectacular and worth all of the hard work to see it bring God glory!
God Call 