Missionaries retire, just like everyone else. And, over the past few years, many Mission to the World missionaries have concluded their decades of faithful service and entered new seasons that don’t involve overseas ministry. But the number of new recruits has not kept pace with this rate of retirement. 

The disparity is troubling. Could the denomination be experiencing foreign missions mission drift?

Mark Bates, senior director of U.S. operations for MTW, says he wonders if the PCA, in recent years, has emphasized two of its founding pillars—”faithful to Scriptures” and “true to the Reformed faith—over and above its third pillar,“obedient to the Great Commission.”

“If you go back and think about why the PCA was founded, one of the big things was that we could work together on mission. One of the first agencies started was Mission to the World,” Bates explains. “In recent years the passion for [the Great Commission] is not what it has been.”

Bates worries that the denomination has become caught up in theological and procedural debates and, at times, some of “the basics” have been lost. A healthier denomination would be a perfect balance of the three pillars, not an emphasis of the first two at the expense of the third.

“For us to be effective in mission, we have to be orthodox. We have to be concerned about theology and about our practice, otherwise the gospel will be lost and our mission will be lost. But I think we can do mission and focus on that too,” he says. 

The 1% Challenge

In 2017, when MTW first noticed this shift in missionary numbers, agency leadership began asking churches to pray that 1% of all adult congregation members would be sent into long-term global missionary service, something they dubbed the “1% Challenge.”

The question was then put to missionaries in the field: How would such new missionaries be deployed?

“Field laborers [were] so busy with their own work that they [hadn’t] had time to think about where new efforts could be started,” explains Lloyd Kim, coordinator for MTW. 

Over the next several months, field members were asked to intentionally pray about potential new mission fields: cities, regions, people groups. The result turned into MTW’s field goals for 2020 to 2030—engaging the following with the gospel of Jesus Christ:

• 63 new countries
• 192 new cities
• 486 new churches
• 29 new campus ministries
• 38 new unreached people groups
• 212 new church planting support ministries (ESL programs, mercy efforts, schools, etc.)
• 714 new long-term missionaries
• 271 new initial-term missionaries (sometimes called “short-term missionaries”)
• 855 new interns

Over the past seven years 136 churches have pledged to commit 1% of adult members to long-term foreign missions. Since 2020, these goals have slowly begun to take shape in the form of: 

• 7 new countries (Portugal, Poland, Norway, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Chad, Sri Lanka)
• 25 new cities
• 49 new church plants
• 4 new campus ministries
• 1 new unreached people group
• 25 new church planting support ministries
• 51 new long-term missionaries
• 63 new initial-term missionaries
• 156 new interns

“We give thanks for what God has done,” Kim says.

A Rally Cry

Still, there is a way to go to meet these goals by 2030. 

With the Lord’s help, the dream is that the PCA’s upcoming Global Missions Conference “Multiply” (November 1-3, Atlanta) would not only revive a passion for global missions—and prayer for missions—among PCA churches but also lead to the recruitment of new missionaries to help fulfill these goals. 

Traditionally, the PCA had hosted this conference every four years, but with COVID, the most recent conference was virtual. This will be the first in-person gathering since 2017. 

Keynoting will be Rico Tice, founder of Christianity Explored; Jonathan I., international director for MTW’s Asia-Pacific region; Russ Whitfield, pastor of Grace Mosaic, D.C.; and Lloyd Kim. 

Sixty break-out sessions include topics such as rekindling a missions-driven church, trends in missions, discerning God’s call, preparing people in the church to be sent, welcoming one’s neighbor, and understanding responsible missions. 

“Rightly or wrongly, the past several years have been years where we (as our society in general) have been polarized, have experienced conflicts, fractures, divisions, tribalism; and our hope—my hope—is that this conference could be an opportunity to bring everyone together for our shared mission,” says Kim. “If there’s anything that could bring the PCA together, it’s not only our theology, it’s not only our commitment to the World of God, but it’s our commitment to being obedient to the Great Commission … the conference can be a rallying cry for that.”

To learn more or to register for the conference, visit https://mtw.org/global-missions-conference. Early bird rates apply until May 31.