Caring For The Missionary Family

All right. Our session class today, we're going to hand it over to our conscience leader, Pastor Paul Craig. Pastor Paul has done a great job in the last couple of days of just really getting us to think structurally and helping us to see that too often our culture forms our thinking that when the Bible comes into play, we all have to know Why? Are you kidding?

Is that what it says? And it's done after the missions. And if you haven't been here, Paul's done a great job of rattling our pages and shaking up our thinking about what are the true missions and who are missionaries. And so it's just been a really, really good time. So he's going to come in this Sunday School Hour and talk about the missionaries' game.

OK? So Paul, they are all yours. Do what you want. So because I'm standing in the aisle, it's Sunday school, right? Is that how that works? Okay.

We can do that. Let's begin with prayer. Father, we thank you that we can be together now and gather and know that you will be among us and that you will teach us and instruct us and that you will cause us to fellowship together in the truth in a way that defies human understanding. We just thank you, Lord, for all that you'll accomplish, not only in this time, but in this day.

Father, in all of your creation, Lord, you are good. And we just thank you that we can trust you now. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Well, this morning we're going to talk about how to take care of missionary family. So because we're a missionary family, we figured maybe we could have a thing or two to say about what that looks like.

And talk about the relationship that we had with our sending church. and hopefully that can encourage you and help you understand that each and every one of you in the church have a critical role to play a very important part And we're going to go to the scriptures for our foundation in the book of Philippians, Paul's letter to the Philippians. And there were a number of churches that supported Paul and the work that he was doing. the Philippians particularly he was grateful to them and said so as he wrote to them. So in Philippians chapter 1 we find in verse 7 after Paul greets them and then gives his customary thanksgiving for them and what God is doing in and through them and speaks of his prayer for them.

He does that in many of his letters. And then he gets to verse 7 and he says, It's right for me to feel this way about you, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. So there's a lot in this verse about Paul's relationship with the Philippian believers. and I think that in any relationship between one who is sent a missionary who is sent from a church or is connected to a church maybe it's not a homegrown what we call a homegrown missionary from your fellowship but one that you support and one whose ministry you are a part of these things would also come to bear And one of the first things we note is the intimacy of their relationship.

Paul says, it's right for me to feel this way about you because I hold you in my heart. So he has a deep and intimate relationship with him. One that is primarily founded on their mutual relationship in Christ. Because that relationship gives definition to all other earthly relationships. but there was a knowledge too because he had spent time we could go to the book of Acts we're not going to go there this morning but we could go to the book of Acts and we could see how the church was born in Philippi there when Paul was in jail and the Philippian jailer and his family were saved and just a number of things are recorded in Acts about that And that together with any other interaction that maybe we don't have recorded here in the New Testament led to Paul's relationship with that church.

So much so that he spoke to them in terms that he doesn't really speak necessarily to other churches that he writes to. Where he says, I hold you in my heart. And the reason that he does that, aside from the fact that they are together in a relationship with Christ, which is what he means for you are all partakers with me of grace, and that's what he's referring to there.

They're all recipients, the Philippians and himself, of the grace of God and Christ. And there are partakers in that grace with him, but also there's a connection with his imprisonment because he is in prison when he's writing this letter to them. And he is experiencing detrimental things to his life. I mean, we can't imagine, really. Maybe some of you have read what prison is like in those days.

It's nothing like it is nowadays. I went and visited a guy in prison some weeks ago. I actually have been visiting him regularly over the past five years, and I'm amazed because they have TVs, and they have all this stuff in prison. They can get all this kind of food that they want, and it's just really amazing. They even have dogs that come in and visit them, just because the people that run the prison want to make sure that they're adjusting to prison well, so they have these puppies come in.

I kid you not. I don't even know if you can call it prison. I guess because there's razor wire around the outside and they don't get to go to Burger King whenever they want. So I guess in that sense it's prison. That's not the case in Paul's day. It was pretty bad.

You were often sitting in your own excrement and you had very little to eat unless somebody brought you something to eat. And it was just nasty beyond our wildest imagination And they were still with him in the sense that they understood and they were part of that imprisonment with him And we understand that our relationship as believers is that very thing. And we can go to several passages where we see that when one of us is in prison, we're all in prison.

We share the book of Hebrews talks about that as well. When somebody mourns, we mourn. When somebody's happy, we're happy. When somebody's in prison, it's as if we're in prison with them. We share in that. And so they were partakers in that sense of Paul's life and ministry as a whole.

His Christian life and the ramifications of his proclamation of the gospel which is where he goes next. Both in my and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. So they were understanding what Paul was preaching, what he was proclaiming. They were understanding why he was in prison. And they understood that his calling was to defend and confirm the gospel, which is exactly what he was sent to do by God.

And the Philippians were sharing in that with him. They were praying for him. They were even sharing financially in what he was doing. And so as we think about missionaries and their being wherever they are in the field, in other cultures, some of these things are important for us to communicate to them. And that is that we are with them in the defense of the gospel, in the confirmation of the gospel.

By confirmation, he just means that he is proclaiming the gospel as he was sent to do, and people are being saved. That's what that means. Now, we want to encourage our missionaries to always be about doing that, but we also want to make sure that we are about it here. It's very important for a missionary, when they're way across the sea, to get good news, like it says in Proverbs, right? good news from a far country to get that news that things are going well in the home church.

And in fact, if I had to make a list of ways that this church could care for their missionaries for me, that would be a top of the list, that you would be very serious about the gospel ministry right here in LaRue and right here in your lives and wherever you work and wherever you live, even if it's outside LaRue. That would be encouraging news for me. Now I'm an elder, so I was sent as an elder, and we've talked about that, and so my desires for not only the work there, but the work here are going to be from an elder's perspective.

And so I'm going to be wanting to hear that God is doing amazing things in your midst and that you're walking in obedience. It was very important to John along those lines. If you turn to 1 John, actually 2 John and 3 John, he actually says it several times in these letters, but like in 2 John, he says in verse 4, I rejoice greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father.

So that caused great joy for John to hear that these believers, which is who he's referring to when he says children, walking in the truth. And again, that's just a great encouragement to us. Now, we saw the flip side of that at one point in our ministry, early in our ministry. Our sending church underwent some changes in their missions philosophy while we were out on the field.

And they began to communicate some of those changes to us. And we began to see that we were going to be having a struggle because some of those changes that they were making, we felt as we went back to the Word of God and we were looking at what they were saying and what the Word of God was saying and it wasn't matching up. And so we knew this was going to have an effect on our ministry and it was having an effect in the church as well with other individuals in the church.

They had got into a kind of teaching that had several ramifications but some of it was just plain bad hermeneutics And one of the things that was a struggle for us is that they began to quote the book of Acts to us about things that we should and shouldn be doing as if Acts was normative. In other words, as if Acts was on the same interpretive scale as the letters of Paul or the doctrinal portions of Scripture. As if the narrative that we read in Acts were actually commands.

That's a huge interpretive mistake because Acts is a narrative. And the only commands that we can walk away with are the commands that we find in other portions of Scripture that are explained to us or given to us an example in the book of Acts. And that's how we understand narrative text as a whole, not just the book of Acts. but the Gospels themselves often are narratives.

Jesus does give commands in them, which makes it a little different than Acts. But our church was really buying into this, like, whole scale. In fact, they did so to the point where they wrote us a letter and they said, you're going to be coming home soon and we want you to pack all of your stuff up as if you're not going back to Kenya. they made that decision without even talking to us it was all based on this kind of thinking that they were getting involved in well that kind of pulled the rug out from under us a bit and they started sending some really amazing faxes we used faxes back then right?

We didn't have email or Twitter or whatever and stuff we had to send a fax And so when they started talking like that, it really shook us because we didn't know what to expect at that point. And then when we went back, long story short, we ended up separating from them because the road that they were going down was one that we couldn't go down ourselves. But it was very disheartening for us to hear about what was going on in our church. and so if I was going to admonish you about how to care for your missionaries it would be to take care of the ministry here and continue to hold the word of God in high regard and to divide it rightly and just continue carrying out the ministry here because just hearing that is an encouragement to missionaries overseas That is if it's a missionary who is in a relationship with you really.

Not all missionaries are like that though. Not all missionaries can speak like Paul did where he says, I hold you in my heart. If you have that level of relationship, then these things are going to come to bear on the relationship with your missionary. And it's up to you to pursue that too, as well as the missionary to pursue that with you. That's why we like to spend time with missionaries.

If they're not homegrown, we like to spend time with them just to get to know them and to find out how they are getting on and what their walk is like. and if it's a family, how their family functions and just how they're doing. And in that opportunity is the opportunity for the relationship to deepen. And that's a very helpful thing. So that would be at the top of my list.

We see that kind of relationship in the New Testament often with the Apostle Paul. I think it's safe to assume even with the other apostles that it was that way as well. and the other missionaries that were sent had that relationship. As I think about Timothy and the opportunities that he had to spend time in different churches in Corinth and Ephesus, that he established those kinds of relationships with them.

And then when Paul said, well, I want you to go somewhere else, they had those relationships, those strong relationships, to be an encouragement to them. Now there was also the monetary support, the material or physical support, which is a helpful thing. We used to get suitcases full of stuff that was sent to us by our church. And some things we asked for, some things we didn't ask for, we just got.

And it was all good because, again, we knew it was coming from the hearts of people that loved us. And they wanted to care for us. And so that was an expression, that was a material expression of that care. so and you know there were some things that were there were good in there some things we wondered I wonder why they sent this but but it was all good and because of the the heart that was behind it now you you you support missionaries here right I assuming I haven looked into who you supporting or anything like that Have you had opportunities to encourage them?

And if so, what has it looked like? Because I don't want to assume that you're not doing anything. What does encouraging the missionaries that you support look like right now? We're working on communicating closer. We're taking a new list of families. I have a connection with one missionary that we're supporting.

We're communicating directly and then he'll give me what's going on in his life. We've just known him the past two years I think. Okay. So you have these different groups for different missionaries? Yeah. Or one group for the whole?

No. No, what? So what? Okay, so each missionary has their own little group. Okay, that's cool. And the one, like I'm connected to this one guy pretty close because he was a veterinarian.

And we had some chemistry there. Okay. So we're just trying to initiate communicating closer, you know. Okay. Instead of waiting on letters. Right, right.

I'll tell you how missionaries operate for the most part. And that is, if you don't communicate back to them, you're going to get form letters. You're going to get letters that are typed out, and maybe they have a signature on the bottom. But missionaries, especially if they have a lot of support, like it used to be back in the day that a missionary would have a lot of supporters, but just a little bit of support from a lot of supporters.

And they might have seven or eight churches, you know, and who knows how many actual individual supporters, right? So as you think about that and the amount of communication that it takes to keep those relationships going, you can't be writing personal, you know, letters necessarily to every single. Now, some of the old school missionaries that taught us said, you've got to do that anyway.

And they were handwriting letters to everybody, regardless of how they wrote back. But you shouldn't be surprised you just continually get a form letter if you're not pursuing the relationship with them. So that's good. That's good to hear that you're doing that. Now, of those groups that are reaching out to those missionaries, what do the specifics...

I heard you say that you're trying to foster communication. You're trying to engage them on a more personal level, right? To find out what's... More items of prayer. Okay. More people in... finding out how you can pray for them.

All right, that's huge. That information does come out in prayer letters, but when you make personal contact with a missionary, you get prayer requests that don't go in those form letters. What's that? FaceTiming? Wow. Okay.

Yeah. That's amazing technology. Yeah. That's good. Right. Right.

Now, that connection, the connection that technology has afforded us in these days, I think is both a good thing and a challenging thing as well. And I'll tell you why. back in the day we had email was like just starting when we were out in Kenya and we only had a satellite phone which was like $2.50 a minute to run this thing but we had it we had it for emergencies and sometimes we had conversations with people if they were worth it and No, we didn't think like that. But our email went out on that sat phone.

So we would type up all of our emails and put them in the outbox, like a virtual outbox, but they sat in the outbox until I could connect successfully on the sat phone. Now, what that did is it limited our communication. I mean, we could communicate, but it was a limited communication. So we couldn stay connected like you can when you doing FaceTime When you doing FaceTime that a whole different level of communication One of the byproducts and it could be we could even call it an unintended consequence of the FaceTime type connection or the enhanced technology and communication that it affords us, is that the missionary will stay more connected to life and culture back here, making their assimilation and connection into the culture where they are more challenging.

Does that make sense? Think about it. Think about yourselves. Some of you have traveled, right? When you're here, you're here and you're connected. And this is where you're from, this is where you're comfortable.

Your family's here, whatever. This is your place, right? You go somewhere else, it's not that way. You're feeling disconnected. So you stay connected back here through communication and everything. You don't necessarily, if you're just going to go somewhere for a short amount of time, you're not necessarily trying to assimilate there.

For missionaries, it can't be like that. If they're going to be out there, and we've talked about this this weekend, if they're going to be in a place, they need to be in that place. They need to acquire the culture. They need to acquire the language. They need to find familiarity in that place. It's very hard to do that staying attached to two places and now take the missionary who's got several sending churches and tries to maintain close relationships in several places and yet also assimilate into the culture that you're in.

Can you see the challenge? It is very challenging to do that. Yes? Right, right. That's right. Yeah, I think what you're saying is that we want to exercise some sensitivity toward that missionary.

We want to stay connected to them We definitely want to find out how we can pray for them and whatnot But to try and maintain something similar to what you have when they physically here that's really challenging. And it does put an additional burden on the missionary to do that. And it's a struggle for them because they want that. They want to stay connected.

And they're going to be doing whatever they feel they need to be doing to stay connected. And that's where making sure that we're being discerning and we're actually hearing what they're telling us and that we have enough knowledge. And then together with that, and this is where I want to talk about field visits. Field visits are indispensable. Field visits are the flip side of home assignments.

So when the missionary comes here, they're with us. But a lot of times if you're not the sending church, they're going all over the kingdom. And they may only have a certain amount of time that they can be here. And again, it's like you don't want to overdo it on their time or put unnecessary constraints or pressure on them. You want to spend as much time with them as you can so that you can have that intimate relationship with them.

Field visits do that as well, but in a different way. The field visit is helpful because the individuals go out and they actually spend time with the missionary in their culture on the field. And you get to see them. And I'm talking about for an amount of time more than like three or four days or even a week. We actually encourage, if it's possible, to go out for like a month or more, like one to three months.

If the field can take it, you know, the field where they are, the area that they're working in areas around the world are different so you really have to look at the situation we last year were able to go and spend three weeks in Brazil with the Zimmer family and it was wonderful for us it was just like the optimum amount of time like for us and for them they were happy to have us around but when three weeks are up they had to kind of get back to normal life we were a disruption to their normal life and practice now they never let on to that but we just know as missionaries that that was the case. But three weeks was really good in that case. But we also when we were in Kenya we had our missions elder and his wife from our second sending church come and visit us and they stayed three months with us in the village where we were And they got to go, they got to see how things were, they worked on the language a little bit, they got to make trips down country for supplies and back up with us and all that, all that kind of stuff.

They got to see a lot that they wouldn't have seen in a shorter amount of time. And it worked out well for us. It wasn't like three months was a long time. It actually was a really good time. And that was a tremendous encouragement for us, and it was a tremendous encouragement for them, and then it was a tremendous encouragement for the church as well because they went back all fired up about what God was doing out where we were, and it was a win-win-win for the whole situation.

So field visits are another way that you can do that. Now, we at Grace have those in our budget. Do you have field visits in your budget? Okay. Not yet. Okay.

You need to put field visits in your budget, all right, so that it's a part of your whole program. The whole... What's that? What's that? So, yeah. Yeah.

You said the communication aspect. Right. I think one of these is try to focus on the fact that put yourself in a position in a sense that we don't want them to feel like they're out there by themselves on their own without any support. Right. And then I think you've already hit on the other part of it. But I think that was something we really felt like.

Paul talked about this, you've reconnected with me in Philippians and talked about that, right? I think that's kind of where we are a little bit trying to make reconnections Right, and you'll know the Lord will direct you as far as the extent of that involvement and how you can best do it for those missions not all the missionaries are the same either I think it's great that you're doing separate teams for each one I think I'm going to go back and talk to our missions people about something like that I think we have it to a degree. Most of our missionaries, more than half, are retired.

Can you talk to us about a relationship in that situation? They're back here in the States retired. They're back here in the States retired. Okay. Well, hey, if you're going to go visit them in Florida, woo-hoo. Right?

What's wrong with that? Yeah. So, well, that's interesting. That's an interesting dynamic. And I think it's a different dynamic from a missionary who's serving actively on the field. And I think that, you know, every church is going to make a decision.

We don't have any direct revelation in Scripture about how to handle retired missionaries. That said, all of the relational stuff takes place still, I mean is in place. If we've made commitments, then we need to make good on those commitments, whatever those are. And if that means continued support while they're retired, then you have to continue to support them if they don't have any other means to do that.

Sometimes there are other options, and you can diminish your support over time, and you can even withdraw your support in some cases if that's a good thing to do. I would say if you can do that, that would be the optimum. If you are in commitments and you have to keep supporting them, then, you know, but their sending church, too, ought to be taking responsibility for them at that point.

So I think we talked about this yesterday or the day before yesterday. It would be good to contact their sending church and find out what their status is, really, and what their options are. Sometimes missionaries, especially retired missionaries, don't maybe understand completely what their options are, or nobody's really kind of looked into it. And they're sending churches just assume that things are a certain way.

The missionary assumes things are a certain way. And nobody asks difficult questions. So I don't have a problem asking difficult questions, right, and finding out exactly what's going on with their finances and whatnot. And if we're in a partnership with them financially, to whatever degree that we are sharing in that partnership, it's an active partnership.

In other words there needs to be a measure of transparency So the missionary should be willing to tell us and talk to us about their situation and what their needs are and what the options are that are open to them. Do they have a retirement? Most of the missionaries that we're dealing, that we have dealt with at least up to this point, I've been there 12 years and we've retired three missionaries and none of them we support anymore because we don't have to.

They had either their own retirement packages or their churches have said that they're going to take care of them or their mission organization has something in place already. We actually require our missionaries, and that's one of the changes to our missions philosophy document. You guys got a copy of that, but one of the changes that we're going to make is we're going to actually articulate the requirement for some kind of retirement because we don't want that to be happening.

We don't want our missionaries, we understand that they're going to get support from other churches. We don't want to get that phone call that I'm telling you to make. So what's going on with your missionary? If they're going to retire, we want them to have thought about that ahead of time and, if possible, to be ready for that. So that's kind of how we would handle that.

There might be some other parts that I'm forgetting. Did you have any other specific questions about that? That's going to happen. It's just going to continually happen. But if you're financial partners, you have the opportunity and even the responsibility, I would say, to look into that and find out how things are going. So, yes.

Yes. Yeah. Is that common or usually is it more Well we hear from everybody but we are active in our communication too It always reciprocal And so, for us, we hear from our missionaries because we tell them we want to hear from them. And our homegrown, the Zimmer family, Joel, our mission's elder, actually Skypes or FaceTimes him once a month. They have an actual pre-planned meeting where they discuss the ministry there.

And we went over and visited them. So there's some ongoing ministry relationships that are unfolding. So they talk about those things and whatnot. And then we still get information from Shelly, the wife, about the kids and all of that. A lot of that comes through Facebook sometimes. but there's also direct communication with them as well. Now, we have the added benefit of having family members of the Zimmers in our church.

And that's really a positive thing for us as well because we get to find out things that nobody else gets to find out because the family members are there. And we usually get to find out about them pretty quick because of that. So, but if they're not, are you talking about missionaries that don't, or the churches don't communicate to the missionaries?

The missionaries are saying, we wish our churches would communicate more with us. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing is that they're not getting much communication from the churches. Well, shame on the churches. So, what is that common?

Should we anticipate that a little bit? You mean anticipate it for the other churches that are supporting missionaries that you support? yeah well just let you know you can't really do you can't you don't have a lot to say about what other churches are going to do or not do unless unless you're in a partnership with them and then your leadership can call them and say hey you guys we're hearing that you're not you know your missionaries don't feel like you're communicating well is there anything we can do to help you know sometimes everybody's happy with that non-communication too right missionaries i've Known missionaries, if they send one letter a year, they're happy. We're good with that.

They just want to be out there doing their own thing. They don want to have accountability They untethered They have a sending church but their sending church just writes a check and that it They really out there doing their own thing And we've talked about the mission organizations and things like that that actually in many cases work against that, work against developing the good strong relationship between the missionary and their sending church. And there's far more communication between the missionary and their organization than there is between the missionary and their church.

And they're way okay with that. That's a sad thing to me. Right? And I don't think it should be that way. There needs to be more communication with their sending church. And if a church is not communicating to their missionaries, then the missionary should be able to say, hey, you know, we'd like to hear from you a little bit more than we are.

So it is reciprocal. And sometimes missionaries like to hide in the shadows. so there's different ways to encourage the churches to step up and sometimes it's just by example you're communicating with that missionary in a certain way you've got your little teams that you have together and you guys are doing whatever you're doing in those teams I'd still like to hear some more specific stuff that you guys are doing but sometimes the missionary then goes to their church and they say, you know what those guys in LaRue do? kind of shame them Yes. Oh, what time is it?

It's 1025 already? God, we just got started. Yeah, that's fine. But I would like to hear more about those specific things. Any quick questions, though, before I pray? Those are really good questions that you were asking.

Anything? No. All right, well, let me pray. Father, we thank you that you guide and direct us in these things. We thank you that we can actually see in the pages of Scripture the dynamics of the very relationships that we're talking about, Lord. And I pray that you would continue to grant wisdom to the folks here at LaRue and the relationships that they have as they seek to deepen those relationships and foster good communication.

Lord, may you bring that about in your way. And for your glory, we pray in Christ's name. Amen.