Daniel Morrell served as the Associate Professor of Christian Ministries, teaching missions classes amongst other responsibilities at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Owatonna, MN. He has written article two in our look at “Thoughts on Deputation, from a Missions Prof.”

Thoughts on Deputation

As a pastor in the early 1990s, I led my church to increase the minimum support to all of our missionaries to $200 per month.  If we were the “sending church,” the minimum support was $500 per month.  A fellow pastor in our area at that time informed me that his church voted to take on each missionary for at least $400 per month.

If that could be done in the 1990s, surely our churches in 2009 could be educated to significantly increase the support levels of our missionaries. Church associations and fellowships (e.g. GARBC) who have promoted this emphasis have fared better than the wider independent church movement.

We need a full court press to educate our churches that supporting a missionary for only $50-$100 a month is not good stewardship. Offering small increments of support adds to the delay in getting missionaries to the field and increases the expense of travel when missionaries return on furlough to report.

The discipline of deputation, coupled with a true desire to minister to others, has provided a built-in system of checks and balances to determine the level of perseverance among our missionary force. Though the time needed to get to the field must be reduced, the value of ministry that missionaries provide to the churches during that time of deputation is worth keeping. Likewise, the value to the missionaries is multi-faceted as they increase their faith and dependence on the Lord.

Creativity in the process of pre-field ministries is indeed welcomed. One missionary appointee set a goal to spend an entire week with each church he visited to serve in whatever way the pastor deemed helpful. Some churches are requiring their future missionaries to be on staff for a year before they leave for the field. Other churches have determined to commit a large percent (i.e.: 25% or 50%) of a missionary’s support if that missionary is sent out by that church. I especially appreciate the decision by churches that have received large monetary gifts from wills and estates etc. to earmark the on-going interest earnings toward their missions outreach, especially for missionary appointees.

Thinking “outside the box” may yield some workable solutions, but before we move any fences, let us review the reasons they were put up in the first place. We should resist the knee-jerk reaction of discarding our present system for an untested system. If the present system is broken, let’s fix it without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

I believe that the remedy to fix the broken deputation system is not found in deputation itself, but in the broader context of global missions. The present trend toward short-term missionaries is tapping a significant amount of available missions funds, as do legitimate outreach programs such as prison ministries and pregnancy centers. Some of the paradigmatic shifts in Missions are very healthy for global evangelization, but the typical local church pastor and people are struggling to keep up with these vast changes.

Perhaps the time is right to increase the monthly support levels, to narrow the parameters of our local church missions budget, and to establish a vehicle whereby future generations don’t find themselves in a similar quagmire.

After 25 years in the pastorate, Mr. Morrell moved his family to Israel where together they studied the Hebrew Scriptures and Israeli culture while serving the Lord there for one year. As International Coordinator for Shalom Ministries, Mr. Morrell frequently speaks at home and abroad about the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel and prophecy, the Jewishness of Scripture, and Jewish evangelism. He has visited more than a dozen foreign mission fields and more recently has taught South American seminarians and pastors from mainland China. With his wife he leads tours to Israel every other year. As a member of Grace Baptist Church of Owatonna, Mr. Morrell plays in the church orchestra and teaches ESL to Latino immigrants.

Mr. Morrell was the Associate Professor of Christian Ministries at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College. Mr. Morrell received his B.R.E. from Baptist Bible College, M.R.E. at Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, M.A. from Baptist for Israel Institute, and is pursuing a D.S.Min from Northland Baptist Bible College.