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.
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I agree with you about the retirement part. I wonder if people are so bent on retirement plans because that is just the way it has always been done. My parents and Eric's parents do not have retirement plans. And my dad and Eric's dad still work part time, which is wonderful because when the body stops working and settles down, it starts to fall apart physically. This is a proven fact. And my parents and Eric's parents are doing fine. Neither couple is well-off and neither couple has excess. Each couple lives basically from month to month, but what is wrong with that? They are being provided for by God.
On the flip side, my uncle back in Missouri who worked his whole life for General Motors and is now retired, just lost his medical benefits and if the government did not bail out the car companies, he would have lost his retirement (and still may some day). He poured his life into GM in the assurance that GM would take care of him in his retirement. But, the money is going, going... So, where is his assurance of being provided for?
We can not hope inretirement. I am not saying retirement is bad, but if we hope in retirement and not in God, we are doomed anyway. And I also agree with you, Jeff, that we need to take care of each other in the body of Christ, and especially our own family. It is a command from God that we see all over the New Testament. If everyone is taken care of by retirement packages, where is the sharing and giving? Of course, that will never happen because there is always someone to help out. But you get my idea, I'm sure.
So, I think that your mission organization should seriously think about eliminating the retirement portion. If you'll never be able to get to Mail because of all the extras the mission tacks on, what's the point of retirement savings? Maybe that was a bit harsh. But I'm just thinking outloud as I type.
Well, there's my not-so-long answer. I wish I knew how to spell check.
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