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Mennonite Brethren Missions/Services, the Mennonite Brethren missions agency, has an annual budget of about $5 million. With that money, MBM/S supports work in over 20 countries (including Canada and the US). That is an impressive work for a small denomination. It amounts to about $100 from each of our 50,000 members.
The down side is that the MBM/S budget today is, if anything, somewhat smaller than it was a decade ago. While MBM/S supported over 125 full-time North American missionaries a decade ago, it supports considerably fewer than 100 such missionaries today.
Has something gone wrong? Are we losing our commitment to missions? Do we no longer care about bringing salvation to a lost world?
The reality is far more positive than one might think from looking at these MBM/S statistics. In the first place, the missionary totals reflect some internal changes in how MBM/S operates. While the number of long-term missionaries from North America has decreased, the number of short-term workers and the number of national workers supported by MBM/S have increased. In fact, the large majority of workers supported by MBM/S are national workers--about 450 national workers altogether.
Another factor is that a number of other mission agencies have sprung up in the last decade. Four are most prominent.
Youth Mission International was launched in 1988 by the Canadian MB Conference Board of Evangelism as a one-time summer outreach ministry within Canada. Now sponsored by the Canadian and US MB Conferences and MBM/S, it has an annual budget of about $1 million. This year, it will send out about 850 youth workers, with almost two-thirds of them serving outside Canada and the US.
LOGOS Canada was founded in 1989 as an auxiliary to the Logos Bible Training by Extension organization founded in Germany by Johannes Reimer. The purpose of both organizations was to help train church leaders in the former Soviet Union. Logos Canada currently raises about $400,000 a year. A good portion of this goes to support St. Petersburg Christian University. Logos Canada also supports 60 graduates of the school (at $2500 a year each), who work as pastors, church planters and teachers in other Bible schools. In addition, Logos Canada sends several large containers of clothes and other supplies to the former Soviet Union each year. Logos Canada is run almost entirely by volunteers, and receives donations mainly from Mennonite Brethren and Mennonite people with Russian roots.
Kingdom Ventures Inc. has been instrumental in setting up Christian camps in the former Soviet Union. In 1997, KVI assisted 160 camps, mainly by training national camp staff. KVI had four full-time and 13 part-time missionaries in the former Soviet Union in 1997, but also supported 12 full-time national workers. KVI has an annual budget of $400,000 but also sends about $100,000 in donated food and other materials to the former Soviet Union; many of its staff and about 75% of its donations come from people with Mennonite/Mennonite Brethren roots.
Church Partnership Evangelism is the most recent of the various ventures. It sends teams of North Americans to various parts of the world for two-to-three-week periods, where they do door-to-door evangelism in cooperation with national workers; 325 people went out in 1996-97 at a total cost of about $600,000. Many, but not all of the participants were Mennonite Brethren.
This is not all. Increasingly, local Mennonite Brethren churches support missionaries who go out with other missions (often people who have been members of their congregations). More recently, some of the larger MB churches have sent out missionaries on there own, without ing agreement as an auxiliary arm of MBM/S. MBM/S offers the same services to local church mission efforts. The cooperation does not end there, however. These agencies cooperate with each other and even with other partners from countries such as Germany and the US.
5. The weakness of the new agencies and local church efforts is that they do not always have well-developed support and accountability structures. A local church which sends out a missionary on its own, does not have trained mission staff to visit the field and offer advice. It may not have pension plans and medical disability plans. What if something goes wrong? For this reason, the new agencies and many local churches are quite willing to work in conjunction with MBM/S.
6. The multiplication of agencies makes mission strategizing difficult. MBM/S constantly has to plan where its efforts will do the most good. Should it send a Bible teacher to South America or a tentmaking missionary to a Muslim country? Among the other agencies, there is no central place where priorities are weighed against each other. They never have to face the question of whether it is more important to send a CPE team to Fiji, a YMI team to Congo or a KVI camp leader to the former Soviet Union. They use whatever resources and volunteers they can raise--and that in turn is based on the decisions of individual people in the pews, people who may have little knowledge of the overall missions need. This is not all bad. The global missions strategy should ultimately be determined by God, who has even greater expertise than MBM/S. Nevertheless, the other agencies cannot escape the responsibility to ponder prayerfully where they fit into the overall missions effort.
7. All in all, these new agencies have probably increased Mennonite Brethren interest in and support for missions generally--and that is a good thing.
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