I did some number crunching recently to try and get a handle on what’s happening with the number of cross-cultural mission partners sent by UK churches.
Having ploughed through five years of stats for nine different agencies, this is what I found. In that relatively short space of time, the number of UK-sent mission workers had gone down by 14%. For one of those agencies, numbers were down by over a third – in just five years. Only two of the nine reported an increase. (We’re grateful that UFM was one of them.)
Of course, there might be all kinds of caveats you’d want to make. God is raising up workers from all around the world for mission today. Yes, praise God! And yes, the traditional western agency model is in need of and is going through significant change. Quite right. And Covid has had an impact. Fine. But the general picture we observe does seem to be backed up by the numbers. UK churches are sending fewer cross-cultural mission workers around the world.
I wonder, what do we make of that? Well, some might say there are so many gospel needs in our own backyard these days, it is right that we focus more effort here. Still others might wince slightly at the idea of sending people around the world given the charges of cultural imperialism, from both within and outside of the church.
And yet in Matthew 9:37, Jesus famously says that the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.
So how might we recover our confidence to send and see the trends reversed?
Crowd control
In these post-pandemic days, the crowds are back and being in the midst of a big group can elicit all kinds of responses in us, can’t it?
I think about my first time living in Indonesia as a single guy in my early 20s. Feeling homesick one night, I went on my own to a huge McDonalds, looking for a taste of home. I was met by a vast sea of people, all queuing up for their food. And yet in that crowd I felt so alone.
As we look at crowds and experience being with groups of people, we’re often thinking of our own reaction: elation or excitement, fear or frustration, loneliness or a sense of life.
Yet when Jesus encountered crowds, it’s striking that his response, his feeling, was primarily about the people, and not himself. In chapters 5-9 of Matthew, Jesus is inundated with crowds. As he went through every town and village, people flocked to see him. His response was always the same. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them.”
Beautiful immovable compassion
Every time he encountered people, Jesus had this strong, deep, emotional response. His heart was moved because they were “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
He was so moved, of course, that he was moved to action, being that great Shepherd long promised, who would lay down his life for the sheep – who would die that people might be saved.
There’s so much for us to learn about our own need to grow in compassion for the lost, by reflecting on the example of Christ. Yet perhaps, first, we need to pause and reflect on the confidence we gain in mission because of the ultimate compassion of Christ.
That is, the success of God’s mission in the world is not ultimately down to our depth of compassion – which blows hot and cold – but the beautiful, immovable compassion of the Lord Jesus for those not yet in his kingdom.
As we see few workers for a plentiful harvest, let’s remember that the number of mission workers is not ultimately in our hands, but in those of the Lord of the harvest, whose love for the nations far outstrips ours.
With a confidence in him, let’s give ourselves again to this prayer: “Father, would you send workers into your harvest field.”
Michael Prest, Director, UFM Worldwide