Source: www.freeimages.com

We’ve all seen them – fences to stop people falling.  Usually accompanied by large signs saying ‘DANGER’.  Authorities put them up to stop people getting hurt, for people’s own protection.  It makes sense.  We don’t want anybody to get hurt do we?  We should make them alert to the risks, and if possible even put barriers in their way for their own safety.  Yet in some places, such as the spectacular Victoria Falls, there is no protection at all.  Inevitably, in such locations, people use their own discretion and sadly there are accidents.

This resembles the world of mission.  There are too many times when people intrepidly go abroad in mission, unaware of the dangers, underestimating the risks, without sufficient support, and accidents happen.  People struggle with health-damaging stress, become emotionally or spiritually wounded, give up and come home, or maybe even lose their faith.  Many of the people that Syzygy works with have suffered some degree of avoidable injury.  We do our best to help them recover so they can resume their ministry.  We are privileged to be able to be part of this process, but we’d rather not be.

Too often we are like an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, when we’d rather be the fence at the top.

Prevention is better than cure.  That’s why we’ve compiled a series of guides for doing mission well, so that people planning to serve God cross-culturally can be made aware of the issues involved and how they can plan to deal with them.  Because we’d much rather prevent the damage occurring than pick up the pieces afterwards.  Another way in which we help is by providing training and support to churches, so that they can support their mission workers better.  The more the sending church is involved with the mission workers, the more likely they are to thrive.  The church is a critical yet often overlooked partner in providing support.

This year Syzygy’s goal is to be able to talk to more churches to help them support their mission workers.  We can run vision events and training days.  We have partners who can provide ongoing relationships to act as a resource centre to churches.  But we need the first contacts.  Our biggest challenge is that church leaders can be (rightly) suspicious of people coming in from outside telling them how to do their jobs.

This is where you come in.  We need advocates in churches to introduce us and vouch for us, so that we can make those initial contacts.  Please talk to your church leaders and let them know about us.  You can point them to the part of our guides that is written specifically for churches.  And please let us know – we’d love to give them a call!

Then perhaps we can function more like a fence than an ambulance!