Some day... I'll play.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Leaving on a Jet Plane
At I talked to Eric over a simmering pot of chanterelle soup, he told me that one of his pastors (from a church that supports us) talked about a new way of sending missionaries. It would involve a large fund to buy one way airplane tickets for those who felt called to foreign missions.
Now, it would take that church over 22 years to buy my family airplane tickets to Mali at their current support level. So it doesn't sound to me like he was proposing a well thought out solution to reaching the world with the gospel, but I think I can see where his thinking came from.
I know I wrestle with the disparity between our family and the families we want to minister to. We support missionaries too. I know it's hard to see how it is better to send missionaries, at great cost, to cross cultures instead of sending the money to believers already in these places, except of course in the cases where there are no believers.
Here is where I stand now. Money is not the most important part of this equation. Obedience trumps sacrifice. It is imperative that we, the Body of Christ, strive to reach all ethnolinguistic people groups (a fancy way of saying everybody reflecting Matt. 28:19). We must respond to God's call to go to Mali. Giving is good. Giving a lot is great. Giving all is obedience.
Here is what we have done about our beliefs. We have contacted people on the field and asked them how much it costs them to live there. We coupled that with our beliefs that saving for retirement has the potential to steel the joy of the church in caring for it's elders and some other stuff like that, and we have a proposed budget for our support that is about 60% of what the mission originally told us to raise.
I can also see how cutting our support has the potential to cut the number of Christians I am driven to reach with the good news about the grace of giving and the joy of spreading the Gospel around the world.
Let me hear what you think. Trying to figure all this out humbles me and makes me look young and inexperienced in my own eyes.
Now, it would take that church over 22 years to buy my family airplane tickets to Mali at their current support level. So it doesn't sound to me like he was proposing a well thought out solution to reaching the world with the gospel, but I think I can see where his thinking came from.
I know I wrestle with the disparity between our family and the families we want to minister to. We support missionaries too. I know it's hard to see how it is better to send missionaries, at great cost, to cross cultures instead of sending the money to believers already in these places, except of course in the cases where there are no believers.
Here is where I stand now. Money is not the most important part of this equation. Obedience trumps sacrifice. It is imperative that we, the Body of Christ, strive to reach all ethnolinguistic people groups (a fancy way of saying everybody reflecting Matt. 28:19). We must respond to God's call to go to Mali. Giving is good. Giving a lot is great. Giving all is obedience.
Here is what we have done about our beliefs. We have contacted people on the field and asked them how much it costs them to live there. We coupled that with our beliefs that saving for retirement has the potential to steel the joy of the church in caring for it's elders and some other stuff like that, and we have a proposed budget for our support that is about 60% of what the mission originally told us to raise.
I can also see how cutting our support has the potential to cut the number of Christians I am driven to reach with the good news about the grace of giving and the joy of spreading the Gospel around the world.
Let me hear what you think. Trying to figure all this out humbles me and makes me look young and inexperienced in my own eyes.
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