Furlough

Ann, may I suggest caution. With all due respect unless you have been on a particular field then you have to speak carefully.

I know missionaries who have served for many years before getting someone to replace them. In some fields it is extremally difficult.

To say a mission would be a failure is just wrong. I know many of them that you have lumped as potential failures are nothing of the sort. They have strived for years to see the first soul saved. What of William Carey, he served for a number of years before he saw the first convert?

Now, if it takes them several years to get into the culture and see the first soul saved, then they need several years to train that individual, then it takes more time for that missionary to get the church self-supporting, then you see it takes a while.

Any time away during this period removes the only Christian witness in an area and it sets everything back.

I have met some in the States who have made very simplistic, and may I say ignorant statements, about the way things should work in the UK. Some have come here afterwards to serve and actually apologised for their error.

While I have a great desire to see things happen quicker, in the UK and Ireland, right now, it just does not seem to be that way. I am aiming for things to happen quicker and working to that end, but frankly, better men than I have served and not seen such results.

I am praying daily for some missionaries to come over and prove this trend wrong. This is one area I would love to be wrong!

 

C4K, I understand what you are saying.

I can't imagine leaving the church I pastor for a yr.. not out of pride, but simply because we have so many baby Christians that have only been saved for a few yrs....

And out of the ones that have been saved for many yrs.. (Which is probably less than 8!) only a couple have matured in their faith to lead.

There was problems in the church a few yrs back, and the more mature Christians... (immature in most ways.) But anyway, the leadership of the church got mad an left... this left the church to struggle with baby Christians...

I basically have a 125 yr old church plant!!!

Most in the offices, except for one deacon has only been saved less than 5 yrs....

Now If I left for a yr... I can't imagine what would happen...
I am training them the way annsni said... But that takes time.

And for a missionary to do this in an anti-Christian culture is unreal to me.

I know you all are independent missionaries.. (I think)....
And this is the reason our denomination doesn't require the missionaries to come home to raise their support... we are developing a MPTs (Missionary, Partner Teams) where people here in the states form a team with the missionary, and represent the missionary to the churches by being their PR team to raise support...That way, the team keeps the churches informed, and promotes the missionary, and raises support for them...while the missionary stays put, and does what God has called him to do...

The team also plans mission trips to take the church to the missionary.
They connect churches, and encourage the churches to "adopt" missionaries and make them a family member... via email, IMing, chatrooms, etc...

The internet can substitute furloughs to some degree.

So C4K, you could form a MPT to do your work here, and stay in contact with your team via the internet...
That is just one idea.

You would still be in control of the team, but you are just delegating your responsibility to people that God wants to use to support you...

Or else you could clone yourself!!! lol

 

That is one of our few IBF 'traditions' (I speak TIC here) that needs to fall by the wayside. Along with paper copies of prayer letters, IMHO.

The 'missionary world' of this generation is so much different from the missionary world of 20 years ago (or even 10 years ago, for that matter) it is unbelieveable. Much of it has to do with technology. I remember when my boss at the time got his first 'portable' phone. The thing was as big as a concrete block and weighed almost as much. Then there is the internet, hard to imagine what life was like before Al invented it smilewinkgrin.

AISI, if the Lord tarries missions as we know it will be transformed. And I personally do not see that as a negative at all.

Sorry, C4K! I just got to ramblin' and hope I didn't drag this too far off your OP.

 

I am not C4K, but....

God forbid! ONE of me is enough! :laugh:

 

Well, and in all this, you love your church! I wouldn't want to leave mine for six months or a year and come back to try to pick up my ministry were I left off. My oh my! Just the thought! and my ministry (or the place that God has placed me for this time) is only the media center. So I leave and come back. Someone carries on. How do they feel when I come back? Even if they understand I'm coming back and will pick up. They've grown in the meantime in ways that I don't know. We've got to get to know each other again. There are serious adjustments. Maybe I just need to find a new place of ministry. There is just so much to consider when you are gone for a long time.

I've also been thinking a lot about my classroom this post. I have to travel some with my husband and have to get a sub for a week (only a week) at a time. The thing is that it's just hard on the kids. Try as I might to explain the routine and the nuances and the things that might happen and the things that do happen and all the jobs that everyone has, it's just impossible. I want to travel with Ron, but I don't want to leave my class because I want to be there for them. In many ways it's a catch 22. Again, there is just so much to consider when you are gone for a long time, and my week is very small compared to a furlough.

 

I don't think that is what annsni is trying to say.
And she does make some good theoretical points. But mnw addressed them well, I think. I think that annsni is not recognizing some hard realities about founding churches. It takes years and years in some places to establish leaders in the church.

I was blessed to live in the UK for two years. Absolutely two of the best years of my life. I was part of a great church with wonderful Christians. (Tiny though by U.S. standards. And one of the very few churches in the area. Many villages have no churches.)
Unlike here in OK, where if you don't like one Baptist church, go to one of the other 50 in the immediate area, and about 1/3 to 1/2 of the people go to church. The UK is a post-Christian place. Even compared to some very secular areas of the U.S.
There are tremendous differences in the time it takes to establish a church, for all kinds of reasons, as Hudson Taylor found out in his mission field.

Annsni, the main part I think you are forgetting is that there is no guarantee that an individual church will survive. Yes, the church collectively has and will survive. But there are lots of individual churches that have ceased to exist. And it seems to me that this is far more likely in a place like the UK, in which, astonishingly to us Americans, a missionary may be the only Christian witness in the town. And new Christians have very little background knowledge of CHristianity.
But even in the U.S., a large number of Southern Baptist church plants fail to ultimately survive.

So maybe mission boards need to think about restructuring how they send people. Maybe UK mission plants, for example, need more of a commitment from mission boards to send a team.

 

Hi Roger and everyone.

I just noticed this great thread, and have read quickly through it. Good comments from everyone, and I hope I can add some wisdom, having been on lessee, five furloughs I think.

My wife just called me for breakfast, though, so I'll catch you guys later.:wavey:

 

Hi, Roger.

I don't think the furlough will be outdated until we have little booths that we step in which will then dissolve our cells and reconstitute them in a similar booth in the homeland.

Paul and Barnabas' furlough in Antioch after their first missionary journey gives us the example (though not the mandate) of going back to the home church and supporting churches on furlough to minister there (Acts 14:26-28). I think this does several things in person that cannot be very well duplicated by the media you mentioned: (1) encourages the home folk to keep supporting missions, and maybe even give us a much needed raise in support; (2) increases their prayer burden; (3) recruits new missionaries.

This last one is the most important, I feel. The military has recruiting offices all over, and they send folk to the schools quite often. That is how they get new recruits. How do we get new recruits for the mission fields of the worlds? We go back on furlough. This is how I was recruited (through the leading of the Holy Spirit, of course): a missionary from Japan preached in the Highland Park Baptist/TTU missionary conference and God burdened me. Another missionary from Japan approached me at my graduation and asked me to pray about working with him.

God bless, Roger. As my uncle used to say, "If it were easy everyone would be doing it!" Keep on keeping on.

John :type:

 

Several have mentioned this, but mnw gave a nice succinct statement that I want to interact with.

In some South American or African countries, a missionary may spend just three years and have enough folk saved and a young pastor trained so that the church can become independent. This is the goal of most church planting missionaries. We call it the goal of the "three selfs": self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing. In such cases the missionary may do little of what we think of pastoring (counseling, marrying and burying, etc.), since he is spending his time in evangelism and training the new believers.

The problem C4K has (and others of us who work in a "gospel-resistant" country) is that it is almost impossible to plant a church in three years. It is more likely to take 10-15 years. In that case, the missionary ends up counseling, performing weddings and funerals, and all the other things a pastor in the homeland does. It ain't easy being where C4K is, folks! He is doing a very difficult work.

Now, in such a case a furlough, contrary to what you might think, may be just the thing to get the church people running their own church instead of depending on the missionary all the time. This is especially true if the missionary cannot get anyone to replace him.

Just before one furlough my heart was completely broken because I could find no one to replace me but I felt we absolutely had to take a furlough. In the States, I bought a movie camera and began taping messages to send back, going through the book of Ephesians. The church did not grow while we were gone, but that's the way it is in Japan. However, in many ways the believers had grown while we were gone, and we did not lose a single one (unlike a previous furlough when we had men coming in to preach every week).

 

Is that the one we hit furlough together? My, how time flies!

Our first term was five years. At the end of that, I had a stress-related disease. I won't say what it was, but it rhymes with "asteroid" and is below the asteroid belt! That furlough was truly needed. However, the longer we are here the less we want to go on furlough. Our last furlough was only 7 months. Shorter furloughs seem to be the trend nowadays.

I certainly share these concerns. Furlough can be very rough in these and other ways. If it weren't for the recruiting angle and the occasional need for more support I might join the furlough naysayers.

When we came to Japan the exchange rate was about 270 yen to the dollar. At one point it was down to 70 yen, and nowadays it hovers at 120 yen. So there was one furlough when we simply had to hit the trail and pray for more support.

Prayer for God's will is the only way I know to sort it out--as you will of course agree!

I sure hope they are, given the way us missionaries are thinking.

 

Well, praise the Lord for that! I'd say God willing, get that furlough in, brother, while you can! We had a co-worker for a few years at one point here in Hokkaido and were able to get in one furlough. But I don't know what we'd do now.

Exactly our situation last furlough. Fortunately our sister BWM church across town had two missionaries in it and one was able to cover for us. The church was fine when we came back, and even had a new couple coming who had been contacted through my tract passed out by our interim missionary. Of course the couple then began going all the way across town to the other BWM church because they liked that other missionary so well. Can't win 'em all!

In the previously mentioned furlough where I sent back videos for the folk, we were in a similar situation. I think that if your furlough time comes, and you are sure it is the Lord's will, you have to just go ahead and take the furlough and let the Holy Spirit take care of your folk. It is so hard to let go though in such a small church, since they are your spiritual children--and they are so rare in a gospel-resistant society that they are even more precious. The greatest emotional pain in my life was when I was driving back from the last possibility for an interim or permanent pastor, and realized there was no shepherd for my sheep. But God took great care of them when I couldn't. raying:

 

I've skimmed this thread with interest as missionaries are near and dear to my heart. In my skimming, I read one mention of SBC mission work (with respect to one of my heroes, Bill Wallace).

For the few of you who don't know, there is a huge difference in funding and administration between SBC and non-SBC mission work. Since all SBC international mission work is paid for via a joint funding mechanism that nearly all SBC churches (~44,000 churches?) support, SBC missionaries do not do deputation. In addition, in many areas, especially those areas that have commonly called "closed", there are teams of missionaries who work together to plant churches and train national pastors.

When SBC international missionaries come "stateside" (the term is becoming more common than "furlough" in our convention), they are usually involved in preaching/teaching in various churches, schools, and seminaries. And unless there is a emergency issue, stateside work is done on a fairly strict schedule to avoid uprooting the growing national ministry.

In the case of missionaries who have served for 10-15 years or longer, the furlough may be of more benefit to keeping the work before the folks in SBC churches than to the missionaries themselves. In my experience, missionaries tend to become a more pure model of NT thinking as they slowly lose the influence of North American culture (and the specfic culture of how church is done 'round here) and become more and more effective in their specific national field. The other side to that coin is that they find (according to what many have told me as I have had the opportunity to spend time with them on the field) that they become less and less fit to serve in North America. The longer they serve overseas, the more guarded many of them must be when they return to the states.

 

I mentioned earlier about a missionary that we had when I was a teen, and how he is now pastoring fulltime in Australia.
When I spoke to him last year, he told me that he went from needing the support here in the US to pastoring a self supporting congregation. His kids grew up in Australia, his kids married in Australia, and are raising Grandkids in Australia... Australia is now his "home".

How often does this happen?
How many do you know have went from missionary, fell in love with the country they went to, and stayed there as a full time pastor?

I am just throwing this out there, but is it possible that some of what you may be feeling about not wanting to come home is God working in your life to stay where you are? Is is possible for that church to support you?

Again, this is just me throwing ideas out there, since I know of a missionary that has done this.