What mission work are you supporting.

[barnhart]

If possible, could the voting be restricted to Anabaptist churches?
For the purposes of this poll I define "missionaries" as religious workers sent anywhere more than 250 miles. Only include the sent members of your local congregation, except for the first option. Long term please.

[steve-in-kville]

Long term, as in they live there? Or short trips?

[barnhart]

I added that later.

[Neto]

I hesitated a bit, because we currently only have two members who are in long-term service. One for well over 20 years already (perhaps at least 25), the other started more recently, but the appearance is that she will continue to be involved for some time yet. The first, a single man, went through all of the necessary training (Bachelors + a Masters) before starting work. I think his only prior experience was as an MK, while his parents were involved in a Mennonite First Nations ministry in Canada. The other, a single woman, just went on a one week building project "missions trip" to an African country, and then extended her stay, and did some educational preparation after a couple of years working there. But her work was and is also not of the same type as the single man is doing in another part of the world, and nor are the governmental requirements for a visa anywhere near as strict. Her ministry responsibilities have now, however, greatly expanded, especially after learning the local language. (I think she has been involved there for around 10 years now.)

The rest of our ministry workers are typically involved for 2 to 3 years, and several of the current workers are returning home ('permanently') in the next 4 to 6 months.

EDIT: I just saw the addition, regarding 'long term'. I probably have a different definition for what 'long term' mean than others, so I would be interested to hear you'all's thoughts.

[Josh]

All of the churches in our group collectively support the mission work so we don't bear the financial burden alone, other than that our local congregation takes care of the property/house/business of a family who is in the mission field. (Usually this just means their house gets rented out to another young family, and the family members who are still at home run the business. Sometimes an unrelated person will take it over and run it.)

[Ken]

We don't support any specific missions or missionaries that are from our church directly. But we support a variety of larger mission programs and some local overseas projects that are not or no longer lead by foreign missionaries. My wife and I support several mission projects in Latin America on our own, the largest of which is Hogar de Cristo in Chile: https://www.hogardecristo.cl/ or in English https://web.hogardecristousa.org/

[QuietlyListening]

We support our niece and nephew in Northern Africa who are with Wycliffe, a local couple not from our church but our church supports them and we send a monthly support and they are with Wycliffe in PNG he is with mission aviation and she does nursing, and then our church is helping support and we are too a young woman who grew up in our church and teaches at a Christian school in Spain working with both Christian and non christian students- she is short term the others are long term. Used to support another niece and husband in NA but they were with BMA there and supporting the other couple, they are home now.

[Neto]

All of the churches in our group collectively support the mission work so we don't bear the financial burden alone, other than that our local congregation takes care of the property/house/business of a family who is in the mission field. (Usually this just means their house gets rented out to another young family, and the family members who are still at home run the business. Sometimes an unrelated person will take it over and run it.)

This is a huge advantage of belonging to a conference. Our congregation is basically pretty reluctant to support individual couples or singles who are not from our congregation. (There are ministries that are supported, but very few non-member individuals. I don't know about now, but when I was serving on the missions & ministries board, when a member served through another ministry, we also supported that ministry itself as well.)

One of the problems with this approach is that non-member mission workers are also very seldom invited to come speak. So the result is that our people are no exposed to ministries where we do not have members serving, so no one hears about it. (It reminds me of something I heard from a farmer, many years ago, when automated feeding systems were a new thing. He said that the computer could starve a cow to death. The feed given to that cow was tied to its yield. So if it was not well, and it's yield fell, then it got less feed. A vicious cycle started, and if the farmer did not see what was happening, and intervene, then the cow gave less and less milk because it was no longer getting fed well, until it starved to death. So I think that we ought to expose our young members to as wide a realm of possible service opportunities as possible. We had a special Sunday morning service some weeks ago, where members were given opportunity to recite a poem, a Scripture, or sing a song. I'm not a great singer, and maybe it's early Alzheimer's symptoms that I kinda' lost my "social restraints", and I sang two songs as an illustration of the importance of Ethno-Musicology. First I talked a bit about translated songs, and sang Gott Ist de Leiber (spelling probably wrong) in Banawa. (The chief had asked us to sing songs in our language, so we did that one. I had already translated it, and sang it for them, and they tried to sing along, but the music is just too foreign to them.) Then I did one in traditional Banawa style. Then I asked how many people in our gathering that Sunday had written new music. I was really surprised, but not a single person had. And we have some VERY talented musicians. So then I still gave a pitch for Ethno-musicology. I was trying to tell them (especially the young people) that you can use almost any skill at all in ministry. (My oldest brother and a 2nd cousin of ours started a Youth HotRods group, where they teach young people how to build hotrods, customs, and ratrods. In the process they build relationships, and "gain a hearing" for the Gospel. A ministry in a large city not too far from here had an inner-city garden in an abandoned lot. The local kids had a safe place to go during the day, and raised food for their families at the same time. The problem is that there weren't activities that would keep the children in the program after they got up to "gang age".)

[ohio jones]

All of the churches in our group collectively support the mission work so we don't bear the financial burden alone, other than that our local congregation takes care of the property/house/business of a family who is in the mission field. (Usually this just means their house gets rented out to another young family, and the family members who are still at home run the business. Sometimes an unrelated person will take it over and run it.)

This is a huge advantage of belonging to a conference. Our congregation is basically pretty reluctant to support individual couples or singles who are not from our congregation. (There are ministries that are supported, but very few non-member individuals. I don't know about now, but when I was serving on the missions & ministries board, when a member served through another ministry, we also supported that ministry itself as well.)

One of the problems with this approach is that non-member mission workers are also very seldom invited to come speak.

We do not currently have any long-term mission workers sent from our congregation, but we help support several in addition to general funding to our missions agency. Typically, long-term people may only be in the US every 2-3 years, so there's limited opportunity to have them speak to us. If security concerns allow, we often post news from them on a bulletin board, but we should also look at having them join us on a video call sometimes for updates.

[QuietlyListening]

Our church thru budget sends money to the missions for the denomination missions but as a church we support 3-4 couples- none came from our church but have family or friends that attend our church and they came and spoke and we are supporting them including our niece and family with Wycliffe. They all come and speak to our church either in SS or at a an evening gathering. Plus we have updates as safely allowed due to security for the Wycliffe ones and others can update freely all the time