Missions on Point

After 5-1/2 years of weekly Friday podcasts, we are bringing the Missions on Point podcast to the next stage. Lord willing, it has been and will continue to be a source of challenge, encouragement, and information for church leaders, their missionaries, and mission-sending organizations. We may add more to the Missions on Point podcasts, but it won't be every Friday; episodes may be longer and more focused on issues in local-church-centered missions sending. I'll be launching another issue-focused media outlet titled "A Drop of Meade" on my channel at DavidCMeade.substack.com. Find me there.

Thank you all, dear listeners, for your loyalty and encouragement.

David Meade

[email protected]

 This introduction to the biblical principle of the centrality of the Church and missions was actually published as Missions on Point. You can get it through Amazon.com. This is the fire in the engine and the main thrust of all of our teaching and ministry over the last 30 years. Please go back to the Missions on Point episodes and find the entire list, which this episode is just the beginning of. Please also let your friends and fellow Church leaders know that this biblical principle can change your church missions for the better in the long term. In fact, for eternity.

A good Missions Handbook resolves many debates and provides context for the direction and strategic development of missions in your church by grounding decisions in Scripture. Start with the simplest nuts and bolts, ensuring each policy and procedure aligns with biblical principles and clear scriptural definitions. This biblical foundation provides the framework for your missions team's decision-making process. Go to Propempo.com or listen to the entire series on Missions on Point podcast. SendForward.org has a reference book for Church Missions Policy that could save you a lot of time and effort.

I love this topic. I've not found anyone else who talks about it. We've all met missions junkies. You probably have at least one in your church. They are people who love to talk about missions, love it when people pay for them to go "do" missions (but only short-term). They don't have the focus and intensity to become a long-term missionary. It's about THEIR experience, THEIR selfies, THEIR "calling" to be an encourager of missions and missionaries, but never a long-term do-er of missions. What can we do with missions junkies? Let's turn their direction into something really useful for the church.

Visiting your missionary on the field is one of the sweetest blessings as a church leader. You get to see them in context, feel, hear, smell, taste, and touch their world. Yet it is also an earnest endeavor to shepherd them well, even to delve into the hard things in their life. Plan well. Let them know that your visit is not as a tourist, not as a dignitary or featured guest, but simply as a shepherd wanting to care for them. This episode will help you sort of the issues.

Business As Missions (BAM) has been the darling and the bane of attempts to reach "closed" countries with the Gospel. As Greg Livingstone has said, "You are either a job taker, a job maker, or a job faker." Most BAM out in the wild is job faking. While there is good work to be done by sincere Christians creating God-honoring businesses, they are rarely aimed at the end goal of establishing and strengthening indigenous local churches.  However, we all need to understand BAM to interact with it. We've got more in Missions on Point and Propempo.com on BAM.

Church-based missionary training is a huge, paradigm-shifting undertaking. But, if you don't want your sent-ones to be cannon fodder, you'd better wake up and take note. Sound church-based, guided missionary training will make the difference between burnout and longevity, between frustration and effectiveness, between being crushed and thriving. Listen and learn.

Imagine you had to train someone from your church to become your associate pastor. Then add layers of training in church planting, cross-cultural exposure, leadership training, and becoming an elder. There you have it, in a simple form; that's how you train a church member to become a missionary. This episode will guide your thinking. Look for lots more on Propempo.com, SendForward.org, and the Missions on Point episodes' history.

We actually address the issue of candidate identification in other series of the Missions on Point podcast. This one is the first of four in an overview of sending, equipping, and shepherding missionaries.  I maintain that having a constant stream of equipping and leadership training in your church is absent in most churches. That's why it's so important to begin to address it. The answers to finding and equipping missionaries from your Church are parallel to those for leaders in your Church, whether elders, pastors, or deacons. We need a thoughtful, well-known process for identifying and training, and putting in place, those leaders.  Missions on Point will help you do that.

This episode, featuring The Best of Missions on Point, looks at episode 79. The "Missiology You Need to Know" series continues with The Missionary Must Reproduce Himself. This seems as obvious as the nose on your face. However, missionaries tend to copy the forms of the churches in which they grew up and don't learn because of the absence of emphasizing this in ministry training schools.  This principle is essential for achieving the desired result of indigenous local churches. BTW, a church plant is not indigenous if the missionary is the lead pastor. The fact that this principle is so little or poorly practiced is damning to our Western missiology.