Do missionaries get paid?

The world of missions is wild and wonderful and full of diversity. In the last post we touched on what missionaries can do, in this one we'll look into the question of how they sustain themselves. Like normal human beings they also eat, have bills and the occasional need for new clothes :-)

The modern mission era started in the late 18th century as believers were awoken to the fact that the world is big and in need and God means for his church to go out in it. They founded missions societies, basically groups of interested people that gathered money, prayed and sent out missionaries. Several denominations in Sweden started as these kind of societies. These organisations grew and matured, sometimes became denominations with a missions department (like the Southern Baptist Overseas Mission Board) or they became interdenominational mission agencies. Or in some cases became semi-independent missions societies within older churches, like within the Anglican church.

An important development came in 1865 when Hudson Taylor founded the first "Faith Mission , "The China Inland Mission" which emphasised that God would supply the needs of the missionary through prayer. Naturally through other people but in a much less organised way than the other models, and in this one the missionary was responsible for their own support. Today organisations like Youth With a Mission (YWAM) build on the same principles.

The differences in how missionaries get paid seems to me to depend on where on this development scale their supporters are. Some examples:

• The couple we met in Encarnacion mentioned in the earlier post are supported from a few churches in an independent style. They get paid when and if the churches send money. This would be a faith mission style even though they're not associated with any organisation.
• A missionary family associated with the Methodist church are part of a missionary organisation, or society, but are themselves responsible for raising their support. Not totally independent, but with a lot of freedom their pay depends on maintaining relationships with their sponsoring churches.
• Our own denomination, Interact, has with over 100 years of experience developed another model. Missionaries together with Interact raise support in the churches and when the pre-set quota of support is reached, the missionary is sent out. During the contract period the organisation is responsible to pay a set wage and other costs and benefits. The missionary is responsible to maintain contact with the churches that are supporting him/her. In our case we have about 15 supporting churches which we have contact with each month.
• Our teacher friends mentioned in the earlier post were paid by their mission society but are now paid by the school, like the other national teachers. This we have also met with Brazilian missionaries working in Paraguay.
• A version of the above is the missionary that supports herself through a "normal" job, what is sometimes called "tent-making" because the apostle Paul worked at times like that. 

As we see there are different ways of sustaining oneself as a missionary, from the very organised to the very improvised. Sometimes the less security you have, the more freedom you have in your work, but that is not always true either.

So what model is the best one? Hard to say really, they all have pros and cons and depend a lot on how well the sending organisations work. As is most cases, we probably need all kinds!

Is "missionary" actually a job?

Welcome back to this blog after a break caused by holidays, it's summer down here, and general lack of time. I thought we would start again with an important question: Is "missionary" actually a job? Well, maybe we have to rephrase that, because I obviously get paid for something! Maybe better: Is "missionary" a job description? Does it describe what a person actually does, like doctor, engineer or teacher?

I meet this quite a lot. There seems to be a kind of generic "missionary", a type of person that people automatic associate with the word. Perhaps the most common is the "pioneer-evangelist". Evoking a picture of a gentleman dressed in khaki hacking his way through the jungle to preach the gospel to some tribe for the first time. Or the modern equivalent. Today we would attach "church-planter" to this person as well. While a lot of missionaries do work with this it's worth remembering that the days are mostly over when you step off the boat as the first Christian person in the land. These days the missionary steps out of the air-plane and meets the local pastor.

Let me mention a few different lots of missionaries I've met the last few months:

•  Mags and Gwen are missionaries with SAMS, an Anglican missions agency based in Ireland. They've been in Paraguay for over 20 years dedicating themselves to the St Andrews school. Gwen is the principal for the school and Mags is vice-principal for the older students. 

• Ken and Christie spent their first few years in the south of the country starting youth clubs. The were very clear that they didn't want to start a church. In fact, when they came to the country their idea was to help out at a local camp site. They just moved to the city of Encarnacion where they want to start, you guessed right, another youth club.

•  Emivaldo and Ewa our new pastor colleagues in another CIBB church in the nearby town of San Lorenzo. They came from Brazil about 20 years ago and has worked mainly as pastors, but also other jobs in that time. Missionaries? They would definitely fall in that category.

Our own denomination, Interact, sends out doctors, nurses, economists, journalists, engineers and even pastors! Actually it's quite rare these days to send out pastors for a local church as its considered better if nationals do that job.

So it doesn't seem like a missionary is such a clear category after all. Maybe "missionary" really is something else, like a form of employment or a background motivation or perhaps as simple as the old definition, "someone who goes through salt waters for the gospel" (Sweden is surrounded by sea, so to get abroad you really have to cross a sea, hence the salt) I don't have a killer definition just yet, but I do have an advice:

Next time you meet someone who is introduced as a missionary, ask them what they do!