Continuing on with some of my comments on missions and fund-raising, I recently posted the note below on another blog. After I posted it, I thought that it might be worth reposting here. Since I am no longer an overseas missionaries, it may be that my memories of how it really was will be helful to both churches and organizations involved in missionary support. I have done a couple of minor edits to make the post more understandable since you do not have the discussion that led to this post.
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iMonk, my experience is from the viewpoint of the overseas missionary who had to go and raise the money in contrast with the SBC missionaries I met who did not have to raise the money and got to simply visit a reasonable number of churches to share with them what they did, why they did it, and how they did it.
I was overseas with precisely the type of mission that requires the missionary to raise his/her own support, despite the fact that it was a “denominational” mission. My experience was of months of furlough spent on the road, of times of separation from the family so that our children could have a stable school during our furlough while I raised the money, and of an inability to either really relax or to do the type of studying that a missionary needs to do during a furlough in order to be ready for his/her next term.
My other experience is of times spent watching our budget overseas as churches and individuals dropped out because they had had a “budget shortfall” or because they had not counted the cost of three to four years of support. And, the hidden secret, of watching churches and individuals drop out during our first term because we were not doing enough exciting things. Mind you, the first term of a long-term missionary is often a learning term, when they go to language school, then are seconded to a senior missionary in order to learn their paces. But, there is little understanding of that or patience with that in local churches. However, there is an understanding of that and patience with that in a more national program, such as the SBC foreign mission program.
By our third term, I was field director for southern Peru in our mission. [Note: we used different terminology than that, but the most people will understand if I say “field director.”] During that time, I was riding a mule into indigenous areas of Peru. A school was started as well as an orphanage. Churches were planted in new untouched areas. (I was directly responsible for that.) And the money poured in. But, I never forgot the first two terms, when our life was hardscrabble and at the mercy of inconsistent local churches and donors. No, I would have loved to have been supported by a national program.
As a result, I have few good things to say about that type of mission support. I am very much in favor of programs such as the SBC Cooperative program in foreign missions precisely because it interposes a layer between the missionary and the local church and keeps the missionary from the “tender mercies” of a local church that has little understanding of what it really takes to be and what is really needed by a foreign missionary.
So, do I have a harsh view of local churches “bypassing the middle man?” Yes. That middle man of a national program-among the SBC missionaries I met-was the buffer that prevented missionary mistreatment.
The issue is not hierarchical in the least, nor was I trying to speak from a hierarchical viewpoint. Rather, I was speaking from the viewpoint of the missionary who was at the mercy of the local church, a mercy which was not too merciful.
Fr. Ernesto,
I agree with your thoughts on an SBC-style arrangment rather than missionaries raising their own support. I am a former SBC missionary, and I know from experience that it is much easier to focus on the task at hand when you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll have the resources to do your work (or even to eat) next month. And, furloughs can actually be times of rest and retooling, not constantly traveling and speaking.
Simply put, the SBC’s system is the most efficient system of doing missions that exists in the U.S. This is why they have 3500 or so missionaries around the world, or approximately 1 for every 4571 members that they claim (they claim about 16 million members). Contrast this with the OCMC, which has roughly 10 (the number changes all the time) full-time long term missionaries to about 1 milliion faithful in the U. S., or 1 to 100,000 members.
I wonder if SCOBA and the OCMC would consider going to a similar system? If each parish would send a certain percent of their annual budget to the OCMC, then the OCMC could “hire” missionaries and pay them a salary, like the IMB of the SBC does. They would still speak on their furloughs, but they wouldn’t be burdened with the responsibility of raising their own support. Or would this somehow be “not very Orthodox?”
Not only overseas missions, but also domestic missions would greatly benefit from an SBC style program inside the Orthodox. The reality is that the Orthodox still mostly rely on either ethnic people in an area getting together and requesting a priest, or entire Protestant congregations coming into the Church, or a dedicated individual priest who gets something started. We would actually expand faster if we had an SBC style domestic and foreign mission program. We expect too much of our “mission” priests without providing them other than token support and the desire that they be “warmed and filled.”