Swarms

A mission agency as a mission platform

By Justin Long ⋅ May 28, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

There are a lot of mission agencies and missionaries in the world: more even than we commonly recognize. The Mission Handbook, for example, accounts for 825 agency listings in its latest edition—but misses out on a huge number of small agencies, church based agencies, and what I call “mom and pop” agencies. For example, the Mission Handbook doesn’t list the 501c3 agency some friends of mine have registered for themselves, and yet they were directly involved in mentoring workers in Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet who have played substantial roles in evangelism in those countries.

For a very long time, we have thought of a mission agency as a sending or support agency: someone that recruits, trains, deploys, cares for, and retires workers. But what I would like to think equally about is the mission agency as a “mission platform”: a network that specializes in linking, networking, training, caring for, etc. all sorts of missionaries who are already out there working but have insufficient help.

A number of agencies have goals to increase their membership markedly. YWAM wants to go from 20,000 to 200,000 workers. WEC has big recruitment goals. The International Mission Board wants to increase its membership. I submit that if we were to think of a mission agency as a platform, and use our resources and skills to identify and facilitate the work of people who aren’t with any agency, who are already on the field—we could bring an exponential increase to their resilience on the field as well as their effectiveness and efficiency, and we might be able to better hit the recruitment numbers desired.

What do you think? Jot a comment below!

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