Source: www.freeimages.com
A crisis has been brewing in member care for nearly a decade, which is still widely unacknowledged and has not yet begun to take effect, but when it does, mission workers across the globe will feel the impact.
Since the financial crash of 2008 mission agencies have experienced a significant drop in income which has required them to rethink their approach to doing mission. This often takes the form of questioning whether structures and processes designed in the 19th century are still relevant today, and if not, how we can reimagine the future of missionary sending.
A major feature of this is the argument (which to be fair, precedes the financial crisis even though declining income has given it more urgency) that sending mission workers should be the responsibility of the local church rather than agencies. This is a valid perspective, but for more than a century agencies have effectively told churches to give them their people and their cash, so that the agency can send them. Now they want churches to engage more, but the churches do not always know how.
What is the impact for member care? Over the last couple of decades member care has made great strides in putting the care of mission workers on the map. Most sending agencies are fully committed to member care, and many have full-time members of staff coordinating it, even if they don’t always do it as well as they’d like to think they do. But pushing the sending responsibility over to churches means that agencies are discreetly, possibly even unintentionally, looking to shuffle off their responsibility for member care too.
Churches, meanwhile, are in a similar situation to the agencies. While many churches already do member care well, others are extremely challenged to care for their mission partners. Falling church incomes mean fewer staff while longer working hours for church members mean fewer volunteers available to serve. Yet the church members demand higher quality services and the public are generally more needy of the practical help churches provide. Add to that, many churches have not been actively involved in providing the member care that will start to come their way. How are they going to develop the vision, capacity and skills to deal with this situation?
Syzygy is uniquely placed to assist with this challenging situation. We are able to:
- help churches develop member care capacity by providing training, mentoring and partnership.
- work with larger agencies to help them continue to provide member care well should they choose to do so
- assist smaller agencies which are unable to do their own member care by partnering with them and providing member care ourselves
Over the coming months we will be actively promoting these services so that we are able to provide support to all parties in this situation, with the ultimate goal that mission workers are more effectively supported than ever. Should your church or agency be interested in finding out more, contact us on info@syzygy.org.uk.
