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Suppose you’re a Major League baseball manager. A guy comes to your office one day and says, “I just love baseball. I’ve read all the baseball books at Barnes and Noble, I watch every game on TV, I love to keep the stats when I watch a game. I’m just a baseball fanatic. Baseball is in my blood.”

You look at the guy. He seems nice enough, so you say, “OK, you’ll be the starting pitcher for the next game.” Even a Little League kid would say, “That’s crazy.”

Now let’s switch to Major League mission agencies. I think you know where I’m going. Suppose this great couple comes to your agency and they are so pumped about missions. They’ve read the books, subscribed to the magazines, gone to the conferences and been involved in the missions committee at their church. They can hardly wait to get on the field and start “pitching.” So you say, “OK, here’s your mission, here’s your ticket. God bless!”

Baseball players get huge fines if they don’t show up for spring training. If it’s that important, what are we doing in missions training? Fortune 500 companies require up to 40 hours per year in employee training and many large corporations designate six to 10 percent of their budgets for training. That should tell us something.

Recently the mission agency I work for has been challenged with the criticism that our “missionary training overhead is a liability.” My colleague, Richard Lewis, responded by asking whether we consider training an important core value. Do we hold training as such a high value, that we, as an organization would willing to subsidize that training?

Some churches have become so concerned with the lack of training that agencies do that they have begun their own intensive training programs. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize that missionaries sent to the field with little or no training will face being unprepared cross-culturally, will be a problem in team-building on the field, could be destroyed by emotional, cultural and physical crises and will be a liability to those around them.

It’s true that a few courageous, self-starters can weather the challenges of cross-cultural ministry, but statistics are not in their favor. The burnout and failure rate for new, untrained missionaries is staggering.

My challenge is that we get serious about sending out professional, well trained missionaries. This is a mandate for agencies and we cannot drop the ball.

May 10, 2002