How to support Missions

I see the church-sent church-supported missionary as an unquestionably scriptural method of doing mission work. With mission boards and missionary societies there is an added element that is not clearly patterned in the New Testament.

As far as mere expedience goes, the larger a missionary body gets the more economical the idea is. For example, back in the 1990s, I did a cost analysis of a body that was supporting 9 or 10 missionaries (I forget which). They employed a full-time secretary of missions, and the secretary of missions had a clerical employee. The short story of that was in their case it was taking about 20% of the mission funds to get the salaries to the missionaries. Apparently they thought it was worth it; imo, that was a high percentage. Now if you had the same two employees and 20 missionaries, you might cut the rate down to about 10%. That is what I mean by it being more expedient the larger the group is. Of course, when it gets larger, at some point you have to add more employees to keep up. Put another way, as far as economics, if you have a custodian who could clean 10,000 sq. ft. per day, it wouldn't be economical to just have him or her cleaning 2,000 sq. ft. per day. Hope that makes sense.

 

It depends on what you can afford.