Mission Committees: 10 Ideas to Grow a Missions Culture at Your Church

Missions committees. They are an important part of any small church and yet increasingly, it’s becoming more and more difficult to know if the churches they serve are all that interested. It can be an uphill battle to keep global missions at the forefront of church culture as congregations become busier than ever with frantic schedules and hurried lives. Previous generations saw missions as an important part of the duty of all Christians and so they joyfully gave to the work of global missions, attended missions emphasis events and prayed regularly for those missionaries whose pictures adorned refrigerator doors. Within younger generations, that emphasis is slipping and this can make the work of the missions committee difficult and frustrating.

I was recently reading the story of two small churches in rural Minnesota who, between their founding in the late 1870’s until 1980, had sent out 35 missionaries and 55 pastors. These two churches sent out a new missionary every three years! They did this by creating a strong culture focused on global missions. In 1887 they began celebrating the Fourth of July with a missions festival in addition to the quarterly missions festivals they already had. Ladies' prayer meetings for mission work and the missionaries they supported were held weekly for decades. Older members report that there was a general expectation that their young people would go into missions, the pastorate, the medical field or teaching - anything focused on serving. These churches had in them an ethos for missions.

While we probably won’t be able to talk our church leaders into five mission festivals a year, there are things we can do to grow a missions culture in our churches. In Turkish there is a proverb, “Damlaya, damlaya göl olur” – drop by drop a lake is formed. The focus of these ten ideas is to take small but consistent steps to increase awareness of God’s heart for the nations, working toward slow but steady growth in mission culture at your church.

Note: As our churches and world become increasingly digital, be sure and pay attention to how you talk about your missionaries, from the stage in particular, during Sunday morning services if they are being shared online. This creates a real challenge in telling the story of what God is doing in and through our missionaries, but their security and ability to remain in their country of service is vitally important. Make sure and have a good conversation with them about what is appropriate and not appropriate to share. Every missionary will have different contexts and different thoughts on their security. 


1.  It Starts With You
It’s an old truism that a leader can’t lead where he or she hasn’t been. In order to lead your church toward a more robust mission culture, the mission committee is going to need to lead the way. A few years ago I wrote Ten Ways to Focus on the Great Commission this Year. I’d encourage you to bring this article to your mission committee and discuss a few options to pursue together. Choose just one to get started with - even one is more than none and will be the first step toward greater missions awareness and excitement. Some of these will also show up in the rest of the list below.

2.  Movie Nights
Movie nights are a fun way to bring your congregation together for fellowship while also creating an opportunity to stir their hearts for the nations. You could host quarterly movie nights or one in the fall and another in the spring. Make these fun nights and perhaps open them up to the greater community. Pop popcorn, serve ice cream and after the movie is over, spend some time praying for your missionaries and the countries in which they serve. Make sure and preview the movies so you can let parents know if it would be appropriate for their kids. Here are a few movies that will encourage and challenge your congregation: End of the Spear | Beyond the Gates of Splendor | The Insanity of God | Many Beautiful Things: The Life and Vision of Lilias Trotter | Better Friends than Mountains | More Than Dreams Movies | The Distant Boat

3.  Serve The Kids
Investing early in the kids of your church will ensure that a heart for missions starts at a young age. Fill your church library with missionary biographies written for children and young adults [YWAM Publishing]. Have each Sunday school class “adopt” one of your missionary families. Hang their picture in the classroom along with a flag and a map of the country in which they serve. Make sure the teacher is getting the missionary’s newsletter and sharing updates with the kids. Pray for them every week and make sure the missionaries know there is a class of kids who are praying for them every week. Learn about a simple snack from the country and bring it to class for the kids to share. And, if the missionary family is visiting your church, make sure they spend the Sunday school hour with the kids. Some churches have a missions moment for the kids every day of VBS and take an offering to support their work. There are a lot of creative ideas for getting the kids of your church excited about missions.

4. Prayer Focus
A pastor friend of mine once told me that our hearts and minds follow our prayers and our pocketbooks. And so if we want our hearts to grow in a certain area, we need to focus on beginning to pray more for it and find ways to give towards it. I’ll focus on prayer here. It’s important that our congregations begin praying for our missionaries and the mission endeavors of our church. Here are a few ideas for how to do that:

1. Prayercast Videos - Prayercast creates powerful videos that are usually 3-5 minutes long and focus on particular countries by creating a beautiful video montage with a native of that country praying for their people. These can be helpful to play during a church service, small group or a specific prayer meeting for missions. Here are a few examples: Turkey | Ukraine | Bangladesh They also have religion specific videos that can be very helpful: Islam | Judaism | Ayatollah Khamenei
2. Prayer Guides - There are a lot of different prayer guides being produced for people groups, countries and religious festivals. These are often 30 day guides, sometimes in print and others through email, but all of them will both help your congregations pray and also help them learn more about the work that the missionaries we send are apart of. Here are a few examples: 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World | 15 Days of Prayer for the Hindu World | Voice of the Martyrs Global Prayer Guide | Let All the Peoples Praise You
3. Prayer Events - As you build the culture of prayer in your church it will be important to begin to host regular prayer events for your missionaries and the great commission needs of our world. You want the majority of the time to be spent in prayer but it can be good to start with some worship, utilize a prayercast video or two and have a prayer focus for the night or a list of topics to be praying through. Reach out to your missionaries a week before the event and ask if there are specific ways you can be praying for them.

5.  Missionary Focus
It’s important to keep your missionaries and the missions efforts of your church and denomination continually in front of your congregation. If the only time they hear about a missionary family you support is when they come and visit every 3-4 years, there’s not going to be a lot of relationship built. Without relationship, prayers will be meager and support lacking. So one thing a mission committee can work toward is ensuring that the congregation gets to know the missionaries supported by the church. And while the missionaries themselves have a role to play in this, the mission committee is most equipped to actually make it happen. A few ideas have already been discussed in the previous topics. And like the prayer focus above, I’ll offer a number of bullet points with ideas for how to do this better.

1. Share Their Stories - When you get a newsletter from a missionary, find ways to share highlights with the congregation. This could be as an announcement on a Sunday morning, an insert in the bulletin, an email in the church email chain or a text to members of the church.Video Updates. Invite your missionaries to create 2-4 minute video updates to share with the church several times a year. This is something they can create with their phone and will allow your congregation to see and hear from them more regularly.
2. Monthly Focus - Consider using a month to focus on a missionary. One week you could share a video update. The next week you could use a Prayercast video about the country in which they serve. Another week could be just a story or testimony about a person they’ve impacted. You can be creative but make sure and pray for them each week as well as a congregation. If you have six missionaries your church supports you could do this every other month and cover them all in the course of the year.
3. Serve Them - It is important to get your congregation involved in serving them as well. Send cards at Christmas and allow some in your congregation to write a short note of blessing. Invite the congregation to contribute to send gifts to the kids of the missionaries. You’ll want to communicate with mom and dad first to see what would be best. Bless your missionaries with a gift card to Amazon or Starbucks (you’d be surprised how easy it is to find a Starbucks around the world these days). Find ways to bless these families as they serve in the field.
4. Utilize their Time - When missionaries are on home assignment and are going to be coming and visiting your church work in advance to plan their time with you. Have them visit the kids’ Sunday school class who have been praying for them. Give them time to share from the stage during the service. Provide a table for them in the entryway where people can learn more and talk with them after the service. Help them get people signed up for their newsletter. Do you have small groups? See if you can have them visit small groups to share in a smaller setting. This will allow more people to hear from them but it will also communicate your interest in and desire to partner well with the missionary. When they come all the way to your church just to share a five minute update after which few people talk with them, it can be hard for missionaries to feel like the congregation is even interested in them or their work.

6.  Short Term Missions
Many of the missionaries I know point back to short term ministry or mission trips as instrumental in beginning to shape their hearts toward making Christ known among the nations. Creating opportunities for youth and adults from your church to engage in short term missions then is a fantastic opportunity to disciple hearts and cast vision for missions. Talk to the missionaries you have sent out and see if there are opportunities to come and serve with them or if their sending organization has short term mission trips. You can find other opportunities at: Global Gates Sifting Week | Adventures in Missions | Ethnos 360 | Praying Pelican | Crescent Project

7.  The Perspectives Course
Perspectives in the World Christian Movement is a powerful 15 week course that will give participants a new “perspective” on God’s heart for the nations. The Perspectives course is another launch point for many of the missionaries I talk with who claim it was this course that sent them on a trajectory toward the mission field. Classes are available in person or online.  Perspectives in the World Christian Movement 

There are also other curriculums similar to Perspectives that can be used for Sunday school classes or small groups. These kinds of classes can be a simple way to help your congregation to be more informed about God’s missionary heart and what He is doing to bring the nations to himself. A few of these include: Storyline | The Bridges Study | God’s Heart For The Nations

8.  Vision Trips
Vision trips are different from short term mission trips. They are for a small group of people from your congregations who are A) considering long term missions and want to learn more, B) Leaders in your church who you as the missions committee want to gain a deeper understanding and heart for God’s work among the nations, C) People who can specifically serve the missionary family you are going to visit, D) Prayer warriors, and E) Members of the missions committee. It doesn’t need to be all of these but as you can see, the focus of the trip is not on the personal discipleship of those who are going like it may be on a short term mission trip. The group isn’t going so much to serve as to listen and learn.

These trips are about deepening relationships and helping you as a sending church move toward deeper levels of engagement and understanding. They could also be about exploring new opportunities for partnership in new locations.

9.  Host a Conference
It can be a lot of work, but is an opportunity to put together a great weekend program to help encourage your church to catch a vision for missions and the work God is doing in drawing the nations to himself. It can also be a great opportunity to partner with other local churches in order to share the workload and costs of a conference and to get out of our respective silos to do kingdom work together. Some organizations are looking for churches to partner with and will bring in the content and speakers. Crescent Project’s Bridges One Day is an example of this. There are also a lot of great conferences going on across the world that will be an encouragement to those who go.  Here are a few:  Sinai Summit (online and free) | Moody Bible Mission Conference | Cross Conference | You can find a complete list of conferences, trainings and other missions events at Missions Catalyst

10.  Missionary Hosting
Several times a year one or more of the missionaries you support will come and visit your church. They are most likely on what used to be called their furlough though that term was never accurate. That word conveys the idea that their work has been suspended for a season, that they are on vacation or a break. And this is categorically not what three months back in one’s home country feels like. One agency I’ve worked with now calls these times away from their country of service as their Ministry in North America (MINA) which is much more accurate. It is ministry and it is work.

Some missionaries will put thousands of miles on a vehicle over the course of two to three months in the summer. Nearly every weekend finds them in a new church, engaging with new people, working to meet unsaid expectations and for some, all of this with kids in tow. When they come and visit your church, my challenge to you is to make that time as special and meaningful for them and their family as possible. Missionaries aren’t proud of it, but we all have a mental list in our heads of the churches they can’t wait to go back to and the ones they dread. So how do you become a “can’t wait to get back to” kind of church? Here are a few ideas:

1. Communicate Well - You’ll have to discover what a colleague of mine calls their “communication love language”.  Some people email. Others text. Some just want a phone call. Missionaries may do most of their communicating on Whatsapp. Whatever it is, once you find it, begin communicating early with them once you hear they are coming back to the states. I’ll cover some of the other details of this below but make sure they feel wanted and welcome. Ask lots of questions to learn what their expectations and needs are. Do they need to raise a lot of extra money this year or are they just wanting to tell the story of what God is doing and raise up more prayer support? As you communicate, remember that they may be in the midst of a long road trip and may be setting up meetings all along the way. You may need to be patient if you don’t hear back right away. If it’s been a week, send a gracious reminder. They are probably having the same kinds of conversations with many others and will appreciate the reminder.
2. Lodging - Every family is different so make sure and ask the missionary coming to visit what they would prefer for lodging while they are with you. Some will want to stay with a family - this will be more likely if ample opportunities have been made in the past to build relationships. Others, especially those with kids, might really feel blessed to stay at the local hotel with a mini water park inside. Another missionary family might love the chance to stay at a cozy Airbnb or someone’s guest house.
3. Schedule - While most missionaries I know would love to be invited to share in multiple classrooms, small groups and in the service as I mentioned above, some may be in a season that just doesn’t allow that. If they have small kids, they may not want to drag their toddlers to six different events during the few days they visit. My kids disliked going to new churches every weekend when they were small. Those are the kinds of challenges your missionary family may be struggling with. Letting them know that there is grace for whatever works best for them will go a long way in helping them have a good experience at your church.
4. The Small Things - There are lots of small things you can do to make their stay with your church a good experience. If they have small kids, a gift bag for each with some things inside (things you’ve asked mom and dad to help you pick out) will go a long way toward blessing the whole family. A well stocked Starbucks gift card will allow mom and dad to enjoy coffee as they travel. The offer of a date night for the parents (give them a gift card to a favorite local restaurant) will allow them to have much needed time together - something that is desperately hard to find when traveling from church to church. And because most missionaries are on a pretty tight budget, it can be a real blessing to give them a small cash gift to help with their travel expenses.
5. Make Space for Relationships - The most important thing that any missionary takes away from a visit to your church will be relationships. Relationships only grow with time and so you need to create the time for that to happen. As a mission committee it's a great idea to share a meal with your missionaries after the service on Sunday to just hear more from them. If one of the kids in the church makes a good relationship with one of the missionary’s kids, encourage them to become pen pals, either in the traditional manner or through email or social media. Whatever you can do to help foster relationships and build a real partnership will go a long way to serving the missionaries you support.

​This list of ten ideas is not meant to overwhelm. Celebrate the things you are already doing and pick one or two to try and initiate in the future. If you keep at it with patient endurance you will slowly see your congratulation grow in both their understanding of their role in the great commission and their passion to be a part of it.

If you have other ideas you seen or tried at your church, please share them in the comments below.

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