Home Outreach Leaders Articles for Outreach & Missions Do We Place More Trust in Missionaries Than We Should?

Do We Place More Trust in Missionaries Than We Should?

Even an Unwatched Fool Can Appear Wise for a Day

I don’t mean to accuse missionaries of being fools. My point is that you can survive a lot of mistakes if no one is watching. Missionaries have the great blessing of making most of their mistakes incognito. That doesn’t keep them from consequences, but consequences are not as likely to make it back home. Whereas local ministers commit all their blunders in full view of their elders. Regaining trust takes at least twice as long as building trust in the first place.

In many churches, ministers are not given permission to fail, so they cannot attempt anything creative which could produce dramatically different results. Missionaries can try all kinds of new things and, therefore, can find passages through the mountains or deserts. Then they can report their successes without having to mention all the mistakes they made along the way. They end up looking brilliant. Domestic ministers rarely have this kind of freedom.

Authority Keeps a Record of Wrongs

Mark Twain once observed, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don’t like stoves.”

Elders have a history of cleaning up the messes of young ministers in their churches over the years. It doesn’t take too many bad experiences to create a short leash mentality. When young ministers crash at home, they leave and the elders clean it up. When missionaries crash on the field, no one cleans up, or it is left to people in that country. The elders back home rarely have the stink of the mess on their hands for years to come. To be fair, missionaries can unfairly carry the transferred mistrust caused by former missionaries, but it doesn’t seem to happen as often because the pain recall is lower.

Where Your Criticism is, There Your Heart is Also

No one tells elders this when they agree to serve, but most elderships have tacitly agreed to become the complaints department of the church. Anyone who doesn’t like what the ministers are doing can go over their heads and pressure the elders to fix it. And they do. In an age of declining numbers and a consumer mentality of church shoppers, elderships are filled with anxious problems solvers. They struggle against the temptation to be jerked around by criticism.

It takes great maturity to take the criticism that comes when you are an elder without making your chief priority whatever keeps the phone from ringing. Missionary problems don’t make the phone ring. Stemming the tide of opposition to what the missionaries are doing just never gets close to the heart of most elders because there is no tide of angry calls.

Responsibility Breeds Control

Most elders are told they are the leaders and they are responsible for how the church performs. Since they feel responsible, they want to ensure success any way they can. Trusting ministers to produce is hard for anxious elders, so they meddle in order to calm their fear of failure. They are just practicing risk management. It doesn’t feel like micromanagement or distrust to them; it feels like exercising responsibility and providing valued counsel. With international ministry, the supporting church back home feels some degree of responsibility to pay for it, but they rarely feel responsibility for the outcome. That is on the missionaries. Therefore, they exercise less control. 

I realize there is a great deal of redundancy in this list, but each item is looking at the problem from a different angle. There is always a trade off involved. If domestic workers want greater trust and freedom, they must take on greater responsibility. If international workers want more engagement and support, they must be willing to submit to more scrutiny and critique. You can’t have it both ways.