What is it?
As a local church/congregation/fellowship responds to a call to undertake outreach mission in their own locality, can they use the help of external Christians?
There are specialist mission agencies in UK that stage outreach missions, often for specific localities. Think for example of the
- London City Mission
- Birmingham City Mission
- Manchester City Mission
These mission agencies are often aligned on a semi-permanent basis with local churches that have an evangelical ethos. In partnership with churches they will aim at outreach on an ongoing multi-year basis, aiming to reach deep into local communities.
There are also individual missionaries, often living by faith, who can assist in local outreach mission. In the UK the organization Counties UK helps facilitate local missions. As the intro on the Counties’ website says: “Counties equips your church to make Jesus known through our local church training opportunities, the work of our national network of evangelists, pioneering church planters, community chaplains and innovative schools’ resources”. Counties is linked to numerous local churches across Britain.
Finally there is Through Faith Missions (TFM) which exists to undertake local mission on a genuinely faith basis. Here the opportunity is two-fold. First TFM provides opportunity for volunteer missioners to be part of a mission team (and provides training for volunteers to be fully equipped). Such missions are of short duration, one or two weeks being typical. Second, TFM can be a resource for a local church that feels a distinct call to undertake outreach mission but is inexperienced or otherwise not well resourced to undertake this. TFM can help to make this a reality by ‘facilitating’ the mission to the extent required by the local church(es). TFM does not charge for its help, but local churches will often freely provide resources, bed and board, and prearrange opportunities to meet local people.
Some more information here: https://www.throughfaithmissions.org/Groups/374866/What_We_Do.aspx
Why might a local church do this?
The obvious answer is in response to a distinct call of Holy Spirit to undertake local mission in an intentional and time-limited manner, given that ‘mission’ is the permanent and principal task of the church (see chapter 2).
Some churches are ‘on the front foot’ as regards local mission and some are well resourced and experienced in undertaking this task. Such churches are often marked by the ability to church-plant and so to expand their mission task ‘organically’. To be honest, though, most local churches struggle to a greater of lesser degree, with a lack practical experience – and perhaps a weak faith basis.
A facilitated mission, then, can provide the bridge between a local church’s call/ambition, and actually doing. In this sense the ‘facilitation’ is that an external mission partner helps plan, helps pray, and helps by providing trained volunteer missioners to undertake street work. Often the local church will supplement the volunteer missioners with their own volunteers who undergo the same training. At the end of a facilitated mission, irrespective of other direct blessings, churches will find that confidence in local mission is renewed, and by having stepped-out in faith, see God’s hand at work in a very real way.
Sometimes groups of local churches might band together to stage a local mission. Such churches are likely to be mutually aligned in overall ethos. It is unlikely, then, that a hyper-liberal ‘church’ would align with a Bible-based fellowship/s – their expectations and restrictions would be simply too far apart. Whilst TFM (above) has no formal basis of faith, it generally says that its voluntary missioners would typically feel comfortable with the Evangelical Alliance basis of faith statement (see the EA website for this).
Through Faith Missions – typical approach
Some ‘denominations’ have their own preferred mechanisms to facilitate missions, and have varying definitions of what they mean by ‘mission’. TFM’s typical approach is non-denominational, and the organization has worked successfully with independent and denominational churches, sometimes in healthy combination. In this chapter we do not wish to discuss at length how TFM operates, but three schematics help illustrate their general approach.
The basic ‘mechanism’ leading towards an outreach mission begins with a ‘call’, which in turn means a desire to do a local mission is recognized. How viable and how real is that ‘call’ will – in large part – be determined by the church’s mission posture (see chapter 6). In addition, how much prayer has been invested, and how much preparation has been undertaken? This schematic suggests the key steps towards mounting a local mission:
An external mission partner such as TFM will then attempt as quickly as possible to establish the context of the proposed mission, wherein there are likely three typical ‘avenues’:
If there is a strong sense that this is the Lord’s timing and that He has gone ahead of the mission planners, then the ‘mission’ will typically pass through three phases – Explore (that is, confirm the call), Plan (really understand what it is we seek to achieve by God’s grace), and Execute (move from planning to realization). This schematic again summarizes – again it comes from TFM, but in principle other agencies might well adopt a broadly similar approach:
Benefits of facilitated mission
These seem from practical experience to be the key benefits:
It is biblical – Acts in the New Testament suggests facilitation in the sense that the apostles were frequently involved in external ‘mission’, and the ‘through faith’ model was initiated by the Lord Jesus Himself – think of the sending out of the twelve, and the sending out of the seventy-two.
Training is for life – not just for the mission! Once the local congregation has a sense of all this, and some training backed by practical experience, they are in a much stronger position to carry on the work locally and without external facilitation
Mission is likely to happen more quickly if a dedicated mission partner is co-resourcing
Evangelically minded churches may find it fruitful to work together and gain practical experience. Such collaboration tends to persist after the outreach mission has passed.
Harvest yield – whilst this is never a ‘numbers game’, it is likely there will be a true harvest of people who recognize Jesus for the first time and seek to be His disciples – in other words they become Christians. That has to be good news, for them, for their family, and for the local assembly.
Conclusion
Local churches, assemblies, fellowships should at least prayerfully consider facilitated outreach mission as a potential way of expanding reach into their surrounding community. If we can say this with due reverence, God is not going to not bless!
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