Growing Your Church’s Capacity for Meaningful Member Care

EMQ » April–June 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 2

By Ivan Liew

Local churches are often uncertain about how to care for their missionaries beyond financial and prayer support. Pastors want their churches to be involved but wonder if they make a meaningful difference. Research conducted in Singapore shows that certain member care functions are better provided from the church family than from specialist organizations. Also, the totality of member care is best provided in a church-agency partnership. These findings assist pastors to lead their churches toward meaningful member care.

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A mission agency director I had only just met shook my hand enthusiastically and said, “Thank you for your church’s partnership and care for the missionary you send through us!” I had been a missions pastor for only two weeks, and I didn’t know what exactly that director was thanking me for. I had only a vague idea of what a church should do to care for its missionaries.

As I met more people in missions, I realized that my local church, Woodlands Evangelical Free Church in Singapore,[1] had a reputation of providing great member care to our missionaries in partnership with missions agencies. I began learning why this was so and developed this further in my church over the next 15 years. This resulted in doctoral research that spanned multiple churches, agencies, and the book, Churches and Missions Agencies Together.

Learning from Pain and Failure

My church was not always great in member care. A painful failure a decade before I took up missions leadership reverberated in organizational memory. Leaders re-told the story with a posture of self-reflection and humble admission that the church could have done better. To learn from our failure and to move the church forward, leaders had to demonstrate a mindset of caring more about future missionaries than saving face. I watched this modelled, listened to the undercurrents beneath the stories, and built on the foundations that had been laid before me.

Building a church’s ability to provide member care to future and existing missionaries involves charting both organizational culture and policy. First, a leader takes stock of what has come before, then assesses what strengths should be harnessed and what needs changing. As pastors, we preach and model these values, we propose changes to boards and committees, and we form ministry teams to execute these plans.

Your Church Culture of Missionary Sending

Singapore is a unique mix of Asian and Western values. We are highly structured and follow rules that place family and the community before individual freedoms. However, our education, business, and media are more engaged with the West. As thoughtful practitioners, we must all be mindful of both society and organizational culture as we lead our churches.

Some churches have little missions expertise but a great heart to support members. Others aren’t aware of missionary needs beyond an annual missions pledge because they don’t know the issues and can’t personally relate to them. Every leader must know their church’s strengths and resources and decide which areas of member care should be addressed first.

As a new missions pastor, I soon realized that the church board deeply valued our missionaries, so we built on this strength. My member care proposals were almost always approved if they were backed up with solid reasoning and good planning. Over the years, we provided retirement savings, study plans, sabbaticals with family, and unlimited Kindle books. Small things added up and the culture of member care solidified in our church.

Church Engagement is Church Care

I often encourage missions pastors to preach on their own missions Sundays rather than invite speakers the majority of the time. A mission pastor can use this opportunity to tell the church about their missionaries and the church’s plans to work with the missionaries. Preaching from the pulpit and providing organizational leadership are powerfully synergistic in leading our churches toward God’s desired future.

As a missions pastor, I preached, cast vision, and wrote proposals for projects and policies. I stood in the gap for my missionaries and bridged their ministries and needs to the congregation and the board. As a result, the church was never reluctant to care more for our missionaries.

I connected Scripture to how we care for missionaries and how we engage on the mission field. The church loved feeling more engaged, knowing more about what our church did on the field, and engaging directly with missionaries on mission trips. When we couldn’t physically travel, we tried digital mission trips together with missionaries on the field. When a church is engaged in the work of their missionaries, its missionaries feel connected and cared for.

Scaffolding through Culture and Policy

In our desire to effect a behavioral change, many Singaporean churches lean first toward implementing a policy or rule. However, even the best strategies or policies in member care will not result in deep and lasting change without addressing organizational culture and values. This requires the slow and ongoing work of vision-casting, biblical teaching, modelling, and constant communication.

Then we can implement policies and strategies for missionary sending and member care that reflect the values and culture we have been building. Doing so results in a congregation that appreciates and internalizes these values as opposed to a group that merely fulfils member care tasks.

The systems we build, including policies surrounding member, become the scaffold upon which others empowered to be involved in member care. Some member care initiatives in my church are spontaneous because of our culture and permission-giving policies. Church members visit the elderly parents of missionaries, send birthday greetings and gifts, ask about children, and sponsor university studies. I would often find out about these only later. I loved the fact that I didn’t know half of the loving deeds done!

Other member care initiatives are carried out through programs and policies. It’s not uncommon for Singaporean churches to fund 50% of a missionary’s budget. My church takes this one step further: the missions pastor helps missionaries raise the remaining 50% from our congregation. The missions pastor speaks for their needs and the work they do in our church services. As a result, we have always fully met their needs from within our congregation.[2]

Meaningful Care from the Church Family

The research I conducted focused on optimizing missionary care in the partnership between local Singaporean churches and mission agencies. Missionaries were asked what the most valuable types of member care they received were. As they talked, certain areas were consistently mentioned as more valued from the mission agency and others were more valued from the local church.[3]

This distinction was evident even when both church and agency provided the same type of care. Certain areas of member care were more effective when given by the local church, while others were better from the mission agency. Multiple focus groups of missionaries, church, and agency leaders summarized this truth – the church is like a person’s family at home, and the agency is like a family of colleagues in the workplace.[4] Member care is most valued when it’s given both from church and mission agency as shown in table 4.1.

Table 4.1 – Types of Member Care Most Valued by Missionaries 

Church	Mission Agency
fundraising structures	conflict resolution
mobilizing the church	crisis evacuation
parents/family care	field-entry
pastoral care	healthcare
prayer	ministry feedback
re-entry to home	ministry strategy

Church leaders would find it helpful to keep these areas in mind when addressing missions culture and policy. Do we have a giving, generous, and appreciative culture towards our missionaries? Is our church engaged in missions with our missionaries? Do we exhibit prayerfulness for our missionaries? What financial policies, prayer strategies and other plans can scaffold improvement in these areas after we address organizational culture?

In the past, my church had gathered all our missionaries newsletters and prayer points in a booklet which we printed monthly and distributed to the congregation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, worship patterns changed so we moved to a monthly Zoom platform, where people could hear from the missionaries themselves and pray for them in small groups. This proved more effective than previous newsletters and in-person prayer meetings. It was a great source of encouragement to the missionaries.

Certainly, there are times when a church or agency provides in an area in the other’s column. This may be needed, but not as effective. For example, when one of our missionaries experienced a serious team conflict on the field, the agency’s home-side simultaneously had a leadership crisis. With no agency person to provide care, I had to step in as the missions pastor, even though conflict resolution and ministry strategy matters on the field would have been best handled by the agency. Years later, when that same missionary talked about the care she most valued, she gushed about many things the church provided but never once mentioned the months we had spent on that conflict. Instead, she commented that she wished she had more support from the agency in that crisis.

Concluding Remarks

Local churches can provide member care that is highly meaningful for long-term missionaries on the field. Certain types of care are more effective originating from the church family, but still in partnership with a missions agency. In growing a church’s capacity for member care, church leaders may focus on these highly valued areas first and do so by addressing both organizational culture and policy.

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[1] Woodlands EFC has more than 1,000 worshippers in Singapore with both English and Chinese congregations. It sends multiple missionary units through several mission agencies. https://www.wefc.org.sg.

[2] This method of missions pledges creates a strong relationship not only with the missionary, but also with the mission agency because the church gathers the funds, then sends 100% to the agency. Smaller churches have replicated our model and reported similar success at raising funds for their missionaries.

[3] Liew Ivan, Churches and Missions Agencies Together: A Relational Model of Church-Agency Partnerships (Condeo Press, 2017). The full findings, described in this book, includes the aspects of effective member care provided by churches and missions agencies.

[4] We may spend eight hours in the office, and only see our spouse and children for two hours in the evening but home relationships are the foundation for ourselves and our missionaries. Similarly, the church may know less about details of front-line missionary than the agency, but the care it provides is like home and essential. Similarly, the agency is not just office work as it also provides personal care but in the context of field ministry.

EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 2. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.