How to support Missions

[Salty]

Some baptists support missions by individal missionary -
and this is done by at least two different ways
1)
A. The church decides to support a missionary with a certian amount thu its church budget
B. The church decides to "approve" missionaries and then individual members will choose.
which missionaries they want to support via faith promise - often above their regualr offerings.

2) Groups such as the SBC have the coperative program - where the mission boards (IMB & NAMB) provide
for the missionaries finacial needs without the need to go on deputation

So - is one plan better than the other? do they both have strenghs and weakness?

Open for discussion

 

[rlvaughn]

I see the church-sent church-supported missionary as an unquestionably scriptural method of doing mission work. With mission boards and missionary societies there is an added element that is not clearly patterned in the New Testament.

As far as mere expedience goes, the larger a missionary body gets the more economical the idea is. For example, back in the 1990s, I did a cost analysis of a body that was supporting 9 or 10 missionaries (I forget which). They employed a full-time secretary of missions, and the secretary of missions had a clerical employee. The short story of that was in their case it was taking about 20% of the mission funds to get the salaries to the missionaries. Apparently they thought it was worth it; imo, that was a high percentage. Now if you had the same two employees and 20 missionaries, you might cut the rate down to about 10%. That is what I mean by it being more expedient the larger the group is. Of course, when it gets larger, at some point you have to add more employees to keep up. Put another way, as far as economics, if you have a custodian who could clean 10,000 sq. ft. per day, it wouldn't be economical to just have him or her cleaning 2,000 sq. ft. per day. Hope that makes sense.

 

[Reynolds]

Some baptists support missions by individal missionary -
and this is done by at least two different ways
1)
A. The church decides to support a missionary with a certian amount thu its church budget
B. The church decides to "approve" missionaries and then individual members will choose.
which missionaries they want to support via faith promise - often above their regualr offerings.

2) Groups such as the SBC have the coperative program - where the mission boards (IMB & NAMB) provide
for the missionaries finacial needs without the need to go on deputation

So - is one plan better than the other? do they both have strenghs and weakness?

Open for discussion

It depends on what you can afford.