Money Matters: Does Your Church’s Mission Budget Reflect Its Priorities?

Historically, American churches used their mission budgets to fund foreign missionaries and projects overseas. But a quick scan of today’s mission budgets reveals how what we mean when we talk about mission(s) has evolved over the years. Some churches have funded a wide variety of ministries under the missions heading, things like these:

• A local Christian standup comedy club
• An LED sign on church property to share Bible verses with passing motorists
• The denomination’s church planting and student ministry initiatives in the U.S.
• Scholarships for Christian students to attend Christian colleges
• Sunday morning coffee and donuts 

Any or all of these things may be well worth doing. However, as the late church mission mobilizer David Mays concluded, almost any ministry qualifies for mission budget funds when we divorce our definition of missions from the ultimate result of the last commands of Jesus: making disciples of all nations.

Is such a clear definition all that important? What happens or is at stake when we lack clarity about what we call “missions”? How does it affect how we use our resources, the caliber of those we send or where we send them?

The trend of identifying many good outreach ideas and activities as missions has led to a world in which just 1% of the funds given in our churches and 3% of our ministry workers go to the 40% of the world that has the least access to the gospel, Scripture, Christians or churches.

In their book Well Sent: Reimagining the Church’s Missionary Sending Process, Steve Beirn and George Murray suggest one way to differentiate between missions and evangelism: “Evangelism is reaching people who don’t believe in Jesus. Missions is reaching people who don’t know there is a Jesus to believe in.”  

When we arrive at clarity about what we mean when we talk about missions, churches can benefit in several ways:

• Churches have more certainty about what exactly they are funding.
• More resources can be directed to the world’s places of greatest gospel need.
• Our standards for missionary preparedness and training may rise. 
• We’ll be more proactive in completing our commission to make disciples of all nations. 

Every local church’s values, priorities and definitions will differ to some degree. However, every church should spend time developing a clear definition of missions based on biblical principles and then analyzing its current use of resources. Do our budgets reflect our true priorities, or is something else driving them? How many ministries we fund and missionaries we send are directly connected to making disciples among the nations, especially the least reached? Is that something we want to change?

Our Church Partnerships Team can help your church as you wrestle with and seek clarity on this issue. We’d gladly set up a call or come to your church, ask helpful questions and discuss the results with your missions team.