by Jim Reapsome
It is a hopeful sign that mission board administrators are beginning to talk about evaluating performance on the field. Admittedly, they are bucking strong pietistic trends to the contrary.
It is a hopeful sign that mission board administrators are beginning to talk about evaluating performance on the field. Admittedly, they are bucking strong pietistic trends to the contrary.
One question is why it has taken so long for mission boards to do this, or for any Christian organization or church to do it. In the past, the people who support pastors and missionaries have been content to say that so and so is a "good" pastor or missionary, and sometimes they have had to say that so and so is a bad one.
The "good" evaluation may mean the person is only acceptable or even mediocre, certainly not superlative, and "good" may actually hide a lot of incompetence and laziness. One need not go so far as Ralph Winter did when he said it is the "desperate inefficiency" of missionaries that is holding back missionary advancement around the world. But mission executives privately confess to more sub-par performances among their personnel than they talk about publicly. Thankfully, not too many of them profess to be total strangers to inefficiency overseas.
But what is the answer to improved performance? Or, if that sounds too worldly, what is the answer to rooting out those who, for one reason or another, are not capable servants in the Lord’s vineyard? Virgil Olson suggests several ways to go in his article in this issue.
Obviously, the place to begin is to admit the problem. Beyond that, however, it seems that a cardinal need is to know how to evaluate a missionary’s work. When is he doing an acceptable job, and when is he coasting, or even worse, being a hindrance?
In baseball, you look at the batting averages; in sales, you look at the dollar volume. But what do you look at when you size up a missionary? The number of converts? The number of TEE students? The number of shots given in a clinic? The number of hours he has spent in the control room of a radio transmitter? The number of hours he flies or repairs airplanes?
It is at this point where, for the most part, evaluation of one’s work becomes dangerously subjective. What distinguishes a good missionary from a bad one? How would Ralph Winter decide which ones are "desperately inefficient"? By the number of hours they don’t pray? By the number of prayer letters they don’t write home?
An ex-missionary sat in my office, desperately wanting to know why his board was dissatisfied with his performance. What exactly had he done wrong? What should he have done differently on the field? Either he hadn’t been told the answers to those questions, or if he had, he couldn’t understand them.
In his case, he was the victim of the absence of what Virgil Olson says is necessary: evaluation counseling. But before that can take place, both the missionary and his supervisors must know what they are looking for in job performance. This is what Olson calls "a profile evaluation which could help missionaries understand their stewardship in missionary service."
How many missionaries have a simple, understandable document that informs them of what the are supposed to do, of the standards by which they are to be judged? I seems apparent that more missionaries would be happier with supervisory evaluation if they knew what their supervisors expected of them.
There is a tiny cloud of suspicion on the horizon among supporting churches that mission board executives are also- afraid of evaluation. Churches are asking for performance charts. They have a right to know what the many people "out of sight" overseas are really doing with the increasing amount of support they are receiving.
No one is demanding so many souls per dollar, but certainly it is not unreasonable to have some kind of evaluation of deeds done. If we can accept the fact that one day the Lord Jesus Christ will hold us accountable; and if we can explain the apostle Paul’s missionary zeal partly on the basis that Jesus was going to judge him; then we can surely confess to one another that with sensitivity and compassion we can allow our earthly masters in Christian work to evaluate what we are doing.
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