How to choose a mission agency

How do I choose a mission agency?

When you partner with an organization, it's essentially a marriage, and it's important to see it that way because they can dictate a lot of things in your life and so, if you just kind of flippantly go through the charts and find one with a cool name or a cool logo — that might be neat for your letterhead, but if it's not lining up with your personality, and your tastes and your interests and where you want to go, it's not going to work and it will be a disaster. And you will spend half your time fighting with the board, fighting with the mission agency, kind of behind the scenes, and it will disrupt your ministry, and you won't be a good fit for them.

So more than anything, pray about it, and do a lot of research. Look into many different organizations — a lot of them only work in one area, like Africa or South America or Asia, things like that — so it'll be easy to do a broad search to find out things.

But then also, ask questions. Ask them what percent of your money that the organization will keep for the home office because some are higher than others, and that may be important to you. Or ask them if they'll let you fly home every summer, or if you have to stay on the field for four years in a row and then go off for a year. All these questions are important to ask before you go and before you get too involved in the mission and you really don't have much leeway once you're on the field.

In choosing a mission organization to go with, definitely the top four list was an organization that had already been established in that part of the world for years. The organization that we went with had been in Africa for over a hundred years. And that's something that's incredibly valuable. I mean, there have already been a lot of people that have gone with them who have made a lot of mistakes and have told them, and they've learned through experience, don't do this, don't do that. And so they have a set of rules for you to live by, a set of guidelines. And so that's helpful. That's something that we definitely found that was valuable.

There are a lot of great organizations out there, but one organization that's great in this part of Africa may not be the best one for this other area. They have different areas of emphasis and different areas of specialization. So definitely look into that as you're trying to consider a group to go with.

Every organization is going to have some type of orientation process, whether it's here, in the States — even for short-term stuff — or on the field when you get there, and you've got to, definitely take that into consideration before you're too far into the process, because every organization has their way of doing that.

Basically, organizations have a lot of hoops that you need to jump through, but it's good because you don't want to be two weeks on the field and have a nervous breakdown because you can't handle something. So everything thing that an organization has you go through — all the interviews, all the tests, reading all these books, writing out what you believe, what you think, what you feel, why you want to be a part of it — there's a purpose in all of it, and the road is very long to get there, but it's so worthwhile in the end.

Credits:
Produced by Mission Data International
Video Editor: Paul Nielsen
Cameraman: Paul Nielsen

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2008 Mission Data International
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