You Are What Your Website Says You Are

All the core values, mission statements, letters from the director, and pre-packaged messaged a missions agency can create don't hold a candle to the message communicated through their website. Here's why. In order to communicate well with all the different audiences a missions agency interacts with – churches, donors, applicants, home office staff, retirees, and missionaries – most agencies use their website. Websites provide a central repository for information that most audiences can find easily, so they are the logical choice.

Websites also force transparency. This means they have to reflect what's really going on, right now. Reading a mission statement will tell you what the agency is heading toward, or what things inform their decisions. Their website tells you where they are at today.

A missions agency I had contact with in the past is a good example. Their missions statement and core values are inspiring, encouraging, and biblical. They are focused on church planting, and value the church. However, if you check to see what opportunities they have available for people who want to get involved in missions, there are 163 opportunities for people who want to be involved in church planting and 227 for people who want to be involved in MK education.

So in spite of their values, this agency has a present-day focus on MK education.

In a seminar I attended this past week, I heard a lecture about being a change agent within your church or ministry. At the seminar, the speaker emphasized that to learn about what a person values, look at their lifestyle, not the things they say they value. This holds true for missions agencies as well.

From having done some web development, I can assure you that the fastest way to understand a company is to ask them what they want to have on their web page. The information they want to present, how they want to present it, and what things they choose to leave off indicates a great deal about the present state of the company or organization. It is interesting to be a part of this process as someone outside of the company. You get to read their missions statement, and then construct a site that sometimes paints a very different picture of the organization.

What you are actually doing is the indicator of what you believe, not what your core values say you believe, though they may be things you are pursuing.

They're Ours, No They're Yours, No We're Partnering

One of the buzzwords in missions these days is “partnering with the local church”. Mostly, this means letting the church take more responsibility for the people that are on the field that came from that church. It used to be that the agencies told the churches to just give them their best people and a bunch of money, and they'd take care of evangelizing the world. This isn't true anymore. This is a good thing. As I read through the accounts of Paul heading out to reach the Gentiles with the gospel, I don't get the impression that a missions agency played much of a role in the process.

Actually, it seems like Paul had a much easier time getting underway, but found things much rougher on the field than they are for most people today.

This post on partnering is related to the missions and marketing post I made earlier. Since the idea of partnering with the local church is the new black in missions, agencies are doing all they can to figure it out and let people know that they get it. However, there are a few challenges with this idea of partnership that need to be thought through. They are:

• Who decides what the missionary should be doing and where they ought to locate?
• To whom is the missionary accountable?
• How will finances be handled?
• Who's responsible for setting and keeping the vision for the field?
  

The question that comes to mind when conversations about partnering with local churches comes up is what's left for the missions agency to do when these partnerships are in place? If the church determines their particular focus for missions, screens and sends their own people, and takes responsibility for what they are doing on the field, what is left for the agency to do?

Some people will say that the agencies are where the expertise in how to do missions lies. However, as the churches take more responsibility for missions, this will surely change. So what is an agency to do? It can point out areas of the world that are yet unreached, provide suggestions about how to get people into these places, trains churches in how to set up missions programs, run the finances for the people going to the field, and serve as a travel service for the churches.

This is bad news for agencies that are dependent on the process of sending out missionaries in order to raise the money they need to keep their office running. Here's a suggestion. What if a missions agency were to become a missions consulting agency that provided a number of services to the churches sending missionaries for a fee?

By assigning a dollar value to the different services offered – training, travel arrangements, some sort of application and screening process, etc. – missions agencies could do more than partner with the church, they could help push the church to actually do missions itself, but could still supply services in which they have expertise.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if this took place. I think several things would occur. First, I think that churches would begin to take more ownership of the missionaries they sent out. Second, I think the missions agencies would be able to focus more on improving the services they provide to the churches and missionaries on the field, without wasting time on recruiting for missions. This would now be the church's job. Third, I think there would be some consolidation and specialization among agencies as different groups with similar focus would choose to work together, and those with particular expertise would begin to work themselves into a niche.

There would also be some exceptions. Agencies which already maintain their home office without taking a percentage of a missionary's support would be relatively untouched by these changes. Perhaps, they are already functioning in the way I have described. Denominational missions would also be affected, but the changes there would be different than in “standalone” missions agencies.

Proposing this model isn't to say it's the best or only way to do missions. However, if I were starting a missions (consulting) agency today, it's certainly the way I'd set it up.

Missions and Marketing

I'm going to have to start by coming clean. I've been involved in missions by working in or for the communications department of a missions agency for the past 5 years. I still don't get it. For a good part of the time I was involved with the agency, there was an ongoing effort to focus on “rebranding” the agency. To me, that meant trying to figure out what our particular strengths were and trying to emphasize it in order to gain some sort of advantage. But it was strange. There weren't any large differences between us and other missions agencies that were selected as our peer group, and the idea that they were “the competition” felt a lot like being interested in the same girl as your best friend.

At the time, the agency I was working for was losing missionaries due to attrition, and a slowdown in applications following 9/11, and having trouble knowing what to do about it. They emphasized their long and storied history, revamped their website a couple of times, bought a new ERP, beefed up their major donor and foundation support-raising, and started lots of new initiatives.

In the middle of it all, I found myself asking a lot of questions about missions and what happens when most of it gets done outside of the local church. I was managing projects, working on websites, and writing articles, but at the same time, I was thinking about questions like, “What's a missionary, anyway?” And, “What's all this talk about 'partnering with the local church' really mean?” And, “How come all the talk about missions I hear sounds more like business than missions when it comes to how we interact with churches and people in the US? Does missions only get talked about among the actual missionaries?"

So what does a missions agency market? Here's a short list of things that I think do actually differentiate agencies:

• Missionary services provided (training, health care, MK education, technology, on-field support)

• An intangible “quality” on the part of the missionaries already on the field

• Knowledgeable home office staff

• How finances are handled

There are also a lot of things that agencies think make them special, but are really just the latest buzzwords. They're like the Purpose-Driven Life campaign, or sermons on the Da Vinci Code. Somebody important said or did something about it, and suddenly everyone thought they should do it too, in order to be successful:

• Church planting

• Partnering with the local church

• Holistic ministry

• Cutting-edge

• Team based

• Intentional

I have to admit that some of these are real differentiators, but I'd also say that if people have been thinking through missions carefully, these are mostly things that you would expect of any mission agency. I'll write more about this later.

At the risk of just being an armchair missionary, I should probably try to provide some pro-active suggestions. The problem is that when I've tried to do this, I keep coming back to questions about why the missions agency is like this in the first place, which I'll get to in another post as well.