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“Ever since I was a teenager I felt the Lord was leading me to work with Muslim women,” the young woman told me. She was a few months into what was supposed to be a two-year term working in a missions office in a European country. But she was dissatisfied with a job that she said didn’t “feel” like missionary work and was casting about for something different to do.

She was a native of Detroit, which boasts one of the largest populations of Muslims in the United States. But, no, it had never occurred to her when she was living there to look for opportunities to serve with ministries reaching out to Muslim women in her community. She was interested in missions and missions is something you do overseas.

Unfortunately, that attitude is not unusual. As cultural anthropologist Joshua Massey noted in an article in Evangelical Missions Quarterly (April 2002), the erroneous idea that missions can only happen overseas causes many missionary candidates to miss out on the valuable pre-field preparation available in many ethnic communities in the United States.

Massey relates a conversation with an elder in his church in which he described his vision to reach Muslims. “Tell me about your ministry to Muslims here,” the elder responded.

Replying to Massey’s excuses for why he had little contact with local Muslims, the elder asked, “What kind of ministry do you think will better prepare you for church planting among Muslims of South Asia: leading small group Bible studies [one of Massey’s current activities] or friendship evangelism among Muslims?”

The light went on. Within days Massey began to see Muslims everywhere, and he began making friends with South Asian Muslims in his own hometown. “I could never imagine how [God] would use those relationships to prepare me for fruitful ministry abroad,” Massey said. “Not only did I begin learning the language from my newfound Muslim friends, but also proper cultural etiquette…stories, anecdotes and Islamic proverbs.”

Additionally, his relationships with the Muslims he met in the US opened the door to the homes of their relatives in Asia when the time came to depart for the mission field.

I experienced first-hand the benefits of pre-field preparation when I took my first short-term missions trip to Hong Kong in 1983. I’d like to say that I consciously cultivated contacts with Chinese people living in the US in a strategic pre-field plan. However, the truth is that I “happened” to develop strong friendships with several Chinese students when I was in the graduate program at Wheaton College. Through those friendships over the course of a year I learned proper table etiquette, greeting customs, taboos and perhaps most important, how to read communication signals.

This experience helped me to fit into the culture of the Chinese publishing company with which I went to work. My pre-field time with my Chinese friends eased my entry into the culture and enabled me to develop stronger relationships more quickly than would otherwise have been possible.

Practical, on-the-ground pre-field preparation in the home country goes beyond developing cross-cultural relationships. There is also the matter of putting into practice at home what the missionary is planning to do overseas. I’ve talked with graduates fresh out of school, who have never worked in their chosen field, but who feel they are qualified to teach others in a foreign country. They believe that somehow getting on an airplane will make them an expert. Or, that going overseas will qualify them to do things they’ve never done in their own home country.

A Japanese Christian leader once complained to me that American churches tended to send inexperienced church planters to Japan. “They come here to make all their mistakes,” he said. He felt that American churches should be willing to send their experienced pastors: those who have already made the mistakes typical of an inexperienced beginner and who are ready to be productive.

Starting a church cross-culturally is difficult enough. When the person attempting to do so has never tested his ability or gifts in the task of church planting, the potential for failure is enormous. “And who has to clean up the mess?” the leader asked. “The Japanese church.”

Mission agencies are not the only organizations that may send ill-prepared workers. The Russian government recently expelled dozens of Peace Corp workers and refused to renew the visas of nearly half of those who were seeking documents for a second year of service. The reason given? American volunteers were poorly-prepared for their assignments.

Pavel Sadalev, a specialist at the Russian Education Ministry who helps coordinate the Peace Corp program, said that untrained, inexperienced volunteers were coming to teach English or business development, the primary aims of the Peace Corps in Russia.

Although not everyone who works with Peace Corp volunteers in Russia agrees with his assessment, some of the volunteers themselves concur.

“I was in a business education program,” says one former Peace Corp volunteer. “What was I doing in that program? I don’t know anything about business.” She claims that the Peace Corps had ill-served its volunteers by sending them unprepared and not addressing the Russian concerns.

If the Peace Corp plans to continue to work in Russia it will probably be necessary to raise the bar in selecting qualified candidates. That is a decision they will have to make. What about mission agencies? Are we willing to raise the bar as well? Many well-prepared, experienced and highly-qualified candidates are going out to the mission field. But many others-especially short-term workers-are being sent out on a wing and a prayer to do tasks with which they are not familiar in cultures with which they are even less familiar.

Maybe we in missions need the kind of reality check Russia is giving the Peace Corps. Or maybe we just need to look carefully at the qualifications needed for the jobs we send people to do. And insist that candidates take advantage of opportunities to gain experience at home before going overseas to do the job they believe God is calling them to do.

Sharon Mumper directs the Magazine Training Institute (MTI) from Austria. MTI equips Christian magazine publishers in East-Central Europe and Asia.