MISSIOLOGY
LECTURE 46
MISSIONARY ATTRITION
The bold faced comments are by Bro. Rex Cobb: associated with BBTI, an Independent Baptist ministry, sponsored by East Side Baptist Church of Bowie,Texas. The italics are comments by Pastor Warner.
Dr. Jeff Williams, veteran missionary to New Zealand, gave the BBTI graduating class of 2006 a sad example of the attrition in our Baptist missionary force. He was one of 450 missionaries supported by a church on the East Coast. Unfortunately, the church lost a number of members and could not continue supporting that many missionaries. They vowed not to drop any missionaries, but not to take on any new ones. At the end of four years, the number of their missionaries still on the field had decreased to two hundred eighty! One hundred and seventy missionary families, or almost 38% of their missionary force, left the field in only four years! Perhaps a few died or retired, but the vast majority left for other reasons. Does God not want them there afterall? Does God change the calling in that short period of time? If a stressor comes along, is that reason to permanently leave the field? What is the mission God has sent you on? Have you completed the mission? A Missionary who has successfully completed God’s specific mission, can then reasonably leave that ‘field’ and move on to the next mission field; this ‘attrition’ is good. Oh so few ever really specifically know what God’s call is for them on this ‘field’ and, if they happened to know it, don’t ever really fulfill it. The call for Paul and Barnabas involved a evangelism and church planting expo thru a variety of cities in a specific region and then to return to the sending church. The call should be more than ‘being a Missionary’; that is a more ‘general’ calling; there needs to be ‘specific’, short term, calls, goals, missions. How many Missionaries do you know that explain what their specific calling is for this particular mission field, field trip?
At a time when world population is increasing rapidly, making the need for missionaries even greater, the number of missionaries going to meet that challenge is decreasing. Furthermore, many missionaries drop out after only a year or two. Some stay for four years, take a furlough, and then do not return for a second term. Veteran missionary to Japan, Kenneth Mansell, says that in many countries the number of missionaries returning for a second term is as low as 10%! How many of those missionary families planned to stay only one term or less? On deputation, did they tell the churches that they would need support for only 24 or 36 months? No, they planned to spend a lifetime on the field! Therefore, we conclude that something went wrong! These Missionaries are psyched up about their supposed ‘calling’ in life and their ‘field’ that they plan to win for the Lord. It is perfectly reasonable to be all excited about this; but, sometimes your eyes are bigger than your stomachs…. sometimes you have the initial excitement and dedication, but once things don’t go as planned, once the honeymoon is over, enthusiasm is curbed, and doubts start setting in. Prior to going, you were prepared to spend the next 40 years there; 3 years after living there in Kenya, you feel the Lord ‘calling you elsewhere’! Maybe official ‘contracts’ should be written up for these men with their sending churches on how long they will indeed stay there before ‘quitting’ and moving on to greener pastors.
Could it have been prevented? Was it God’s plan for them to spend three or four years visiting churches to raise their support, spend thousands of dollars on passage to the field, then thousands more to set up housekeeping, buy a vehicle, and go to a language school, etc. only to return home in such a short time? Close to $75,000 and 4 or 5 years later, what was the point, if you quit shortly after finally getting started?! This is insane! It’s like going to medical school for 8 years with the dream of being a doctor, graduation, becoming a doctor for 3 years, and then quitting and going back to your hometown to work at Walmart! I can’t see it as God’s plan to have one do all this preparing and then to change it all shortly afterwards.
What does this do to church members who pray and make financial sacrifices to help send these missionaries? It must be heartbreaking for the missionaries themselves who must live with the fact that they left their field before they planned to. I know that when a Missionary we have fallen in love with and have been giving thousands of dollars to over a few years, ‘leaves their field’, it really causes me to not trust them and to consider not supporting them any longer at ‘the next field’; and, it carries over to other Missionaries who come our way asking for support…can we trust these guys? Will they quit like that other guy?! And, the Missionary and his family must feel somewhat humiliated after essentially ‘quitting’ from what God called them to; failing at it; no matter how they try and rationalize it all, they still come away with this mindset, and so do most of the churches that supported them. It could have been bad health, failing finances, governmental redtape, extremist violence, lack of fruit, whatever, but it all boils down to a premature ending to what God had called them to.
The important question, however, is where does it leave the heathen that never hear the Gospel of Christ because a missionary never went to them or did not stay long enough to learn their language and culture and preach Christ? Forget about your personal self esteem issues, how the supporting churches feel, how your sending church feels, all the money ‘wasted’, all the time wasted; hey, what about all those souls that needed to have you there to present the truth of Jesus Christ to them, that you never will do! Will anyone else come to do this?! How many will burn in Hell specifically because you weren’t there…?! If the Missionaries could only keep this dreadful thought in the forefront of their minds when they start ‘considering’ ‘another calling’.
The field is a difficult place. If the devil attacks any Christian, you know it is the one who invades his territory, the mission field! The Devil wants the Missionary, or one of his family members, to ‘call it quits’ there; he will try and find a way to get this to happen. He keeps whispering, “quit, quit, quit, try a greener pasture, go back home to mommy, quit, quit”.
There are many diseases on the field that might cause a family to leave. (But why don’t they return when they are well again, or find another field where medical services are available?) Is it ‘reasonable’ to leave the mission field you were called to because of chronic health problems that are secondary to the ‘field’ you are living in? For example, the Missionary who develops chronic diarrhea from the ‘odd’ diet there in Costa Rica; the Missionary’s wife who begins having chronic migraines upon living in Swaziland; or the Missionary’s child who gets severe eczema once arriving to the field of Iceland? Some ideas are: send the family home for 3 or 6 months to hopefully ‘get well’; grin and bear it, just like the apostle Paul did; have more frequent, but shorter furloughs for rest and recuperation. I believe that the most significant health issue that ultimately causes a Missionary to leave is a psychological one…anxiety, depression, personality disorders.
When a missionary family is discouraged because of their inability to communicate well with the people, when the culture stress is great, and when the results are few, the Missionary often gets the temptation to search for frutier fields. It may be the husband or the wife that is overcome by language or culture shock. Perhaps they reason, if we cannot reach these people, what use is it for us to be here? Very few missionaries are going to admit that they dropped out because of failure, and we are not going to judge them; but we cannot help but wonder. A pastor should make it his business to find out what went wrong. His question should be, what can be done to drastically reduce this tragic rate of attrition? Oftentimes the Missionary says that “I just can’t seem to learn the language”; has he really tried to learn it? has he gotten a translator to help him learn it? I say that a Missionary who doesn’t try real hard to learn the language is a Missionary who is planning to leave that field soon. Then there is culture shock…or the claim that one is having a psychological breakdown due to the ‘adverse’ living conditions. Adverse is often viewed as 90% humidity and 90 degrees outside for the majority of the year; lizards and snakes everywhere; 6 months out of the year having temperatures below freezing; no paved streets anywhere; no American style restaurants; no homes available that are carpeted and with screens on the windows. And then, added to all this, very little fruit for all your hard work; many times the new mission work has 20 or 30 children, a 5 or 10 ladies, and maybe 2 or 3 men, hit and miss…as far as faithful men are concerned, there are none, even after 4 years of ‘hard’ labor. So, how long do you stay on a field without any measurable fruit? 5 years? 3 years? 1 year?.... It is true that the apostles were told by Jesus Christ to leave a city if there was no significant fruit. So, I don’t necessarily fault a Missionary for leaving after a year or so of no significant fruit.
Political problems, wars, inability to renew visas, and such problems sometimes force missionaries from their chosen field; but why don’t they go to another country? Is the call of God a there or nowhere call? Is a closed door a call to go home? It wasn’t for the Apostle Paul! It is true, a government can deport you back home; be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. A government can create visa rules that make it ‘difficult’ (but not impossible) for a Missionary and frequency of leaving the country. Even if it seems hopeless staying in the country, why not ‘transfer’ to another neighboring country in that area? maybe one that speaks the same language and has a similar culture and spiritual climate? Most go home and ‘renegotiate’ and ‘redeputate’.
Are the people being sent to the field of poor quality and destined to fail? Should mission applicants be better screened so that the potential dropouts will be weeded out? That would reduce the number of missionaries even more; and besides, what reliable test can be used to predict whether or not they will stay on the field? Are those who leave the field prematurely less intelligent than those who stick it out? I doubt it very much. Are the causalities less spiritual than those who succeed? Probably not. It is very important for a Pastor (and church) to investigate a preparing Missionary for at least a year or two prior to their departing on deputation or to the field. He should be somewhat frank with the MIT in his observable and supposed deficiencies and work with him on correcting these. It would be prudent to delay an MIT’s ‘leaving’ if there are still some significant deficiencies that might cause future failure in the ministry.
Hang on ladies and gentlemen! Buckle your seatbelts! I am about to make a radical, unconventional, and shocking suggestion: When an exceptional family is willing to give up the American dream and serve Christ on a foreign field, why not prepare them for what they are going to encounter? Are they not worthy of the very best possible preparation? Don’t tell me that all they need are Bible College and language school; the ones who came home in defeat went to Bible College and language school. Don’t tell me that people are dying without Christ and we cannot afford the time for specialized training. We insist missionaries take all the time needed to raise financial support, don’t we? Besides, the missionary trained in linguistics and language learning will learn the new language more quickly and accurately than the one who rushes to the field without it. Am I wrong in thinking that missionaries should not go to a new and difficult field without proper training in language and culture learning? Most Baptist missionaries are bypassing the one school available to them, and naively saying, “I can’t fail! I am spiritual! I am called of God!” So were the ones who came home. Am I wrong, or is the pastor wrong that would send his precious missionary family to the mission field ill prepared? Good point; preparing the Missionary is paramount. But, I believe (as seen in other lectures) that a Missionary doesn’t need deputation, dedicated language school, and the like. As early as possible, get that future Missionary saving monies, networking with area pastors, and learning the culture and language of the field they are going to. This should be starting at least 2 or 3 years prior to the planned departure date. I believe that a lot of Missionaries that have every imaginable ‘delay’ in going to the field (deputation, language school, etc.) are really not ‘cut out for being a Missionary’; Paul and his friends didn’t ‘delay’; they ‘immediately left their nets’ and said ‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do’…and they did it, without delay…and they didn’t quit 3 years later.
Mission attrition is an undeniable reality. We cannot stop missionaries from leaving the field because of death. We have no right to demand that they not retire, but die on the field. Some are going to leave due to life-threatening illness. However, we must prevent the preventable causes of mission attrition! A missionary couple that can successfully learn the new language and adapt to the culture is naturally going to reach the people for Christ; and they will be much less likely to leave their field prematurely. The nine-month intensive training program of Baptist Bible Translators Institute prepares missionaries to succeed. I don’t have a problem with an intensive training program for future Missionaries, but it should be implemented only by that MIT’s church, and it should not end up acting as a delay to his leaving for the field. Perpetual delays and inevitable attrition are huge problems facing Missionaries, their pastors, and their sending churches. There should (ideallly) be no delays and no attrition….let’s work on this noble goal.