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Everyone, who gives, wants to see their gift used efficiently. Some people refuse to support missionaries that are part of a board with a central US office, because they want their entire gift to go to the field. This concern encourages most boards to operate efficiently. But there looms a much larger drain on mission funds than the potential inefficiencies of US boards. As much as eighty cents of each dollar are consumed without on-field results. This problem prevents most new missionary recruits from reaching the field. This problem is the current direct missionary support system. It does not work. It consumes most of the money it generates. Let’s consider a typical missionary. He has a wife and children. He must provide his own housing and vehicle. He needs to raise support for his family and ministry in a foreign country. Here are his full time fundraising expenses:
He only approaches congregational missions committees or elder boards, which only meet on Sunday. He speaks every Sunday of the year and one congregation in five that hears him decides to support him. The average congregation supports him for 10 years. He spends $25 per year on publicity materials for congregations that support him and he gives them a report, in person, on a Sunday, every third year.
He speaks to five congregations: A, B, C, D, & E. Congregation B decides to support this missionary at $100 per month. Here is the break down of the cash flow of that donation.
Here is a graph portraying this information.
Here are some facts concerning this model. If you spread the expenses out over a ten-year period, it costs an average of $77.24 per month to raise and maintain support from a congregation. More alarmingly, a missionary must have $5637 in hand to raise money from one congregation. If he is trying to raise a budget of $100,000 per year to cover the cost of ministry in the target country, he needs 84 supporting congregations. To reach these congregations, he must have $473,508 in hand to cover his fundraising expenses. You may also notice it is 8 years before he sees any net benefit from the donations. This could be one of the reasons that the vast majority of missionary recruits never make it to the field. This means at $100 per month gifts, 77.24% of the funds are consumed by the fund raising and reporting process. Ten percent would be a much more acceptable amount. To get this system down to 10% fund raising overhead, the average gift given by a congregation would have to increase to $772 per month. That would have to be the average, meaning some would give more. Some congregations have attempted larger gifts, but have fallen into the same trap on a larger scale because they demand an increased amount of the missionary’s time. Often, a committee will require multiple visits over a period of months or years before they trust the missionary with a larger support level. In addition, some of these arrangements require the missionary to periodically spend months at a time working in the supporting congregation. With these factors taken into consideration, you find that most of the benefit of the larger gift is absorbed by the additional conditions and procedures attached. What has caused this? Actually, a number of factors are to blame. First, congregations have not adjusted missionary support to keep up with inflation. This gives the congregation the impression that they are supporting more missionaries. However, what is happening is that missionaries are constantly adding more supporting congregations to offset the impacts of inflation. This process results in an ever-increasing percentage of the support being used to raise and report and less available for use in the field. Second, there is a subtle shift in the definition of missions. Missions used to be understood to mean an "evangelistic outreach to bring people to Jesus Christ who are too far away for this congregation to reach." But slowly other items have crept into mission budgets. Camps, Bible Colleges, Youth and other programs that benefit the supporting congregation, get lumped into this category. These may all be worthy, but they do not qualify as missions. Imagine a congregation that receives $100,000 per year in offerings. They set aside $10,000 of this for missions. However 75% of that goes to benevolence and local projects. This leaves $2,500 for real missions. But again 75% of that is absorbed in the reporting process. This leaves a grand total of $625 out of the original $10,000 that actually makes it to the mission field. The congregational leaders may brag that they give 10% to missions, but they actually only give a little over half of one percent. This is unacceptable. The third factor is a reduction in both Christian giving and the percentage of Christian giving to congregations. In 1900, Christians worldwide, donated 3% of their incomes to God, 87.5% of this was to congregations, and only 12.5% was to Para-church organizations and institutions. This gave congregations access to 2.6% of their members’ income. In 1970, 71% of Christian giving went to congregations and 29% went to Para-church organizations and institutions. Today, in 1999, 46% of Christian giving goes to congregations with 54% going to Para-church organizations and institutions. On top of this, giving in general is down to only 1.7% of total Christian income. This means that for this century, congregational influence has dropped from 2.6% of members’ income to only eight tenths of one percent of members’ income. (For more information see GEM)
Although the total numbers of dollars are up from 1900, the trust level is way down. People generally trust their congregation with less than 1/3 as much of their money as people did 100 years ago. Consequently, it is functionally impossible for missionaries to raise funds using only this congregational support method. Congregational mission funds, as they are currently administrated, have become an inadequate and inefficient source of funds for the completion of the Great Commission.
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