Helping missionaries thrive in their calling

Imagine you are a newly ordained seminary graduate who is finally pursuing a lifelong desire to engage in global missions. You have spent the last few years completing seminary while working alongside a church planter in the U.S. Now you, your wife, and two elementary-age children are excited to move to South Asia to plant a church in a part of the world that desperately needs the gospel.

But you get there and everything feels foreign. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know how to navigate the transportation system, or if the tap water is safe for cooking. Suddenly, simple, everyday tasks such as buying kids’ sunscreen are stressful as you figure where to go, how to get there, and which bottle to purchase. It is unclear what you should do for your kindergartener’s schooling. You must be aware of new risks such as unfamiliar illnesses, theft, your wife being sexually harassed, and the possibility of evacuation if certain groups of people find out what you are doing.

Then you begin ministry and quickly feel like none of your church-planting experience in the U.S. is useful in this context. You accidentally but continually offend local people because of cultural missteps. There aren’t many Christians, much less churches, to go to for resources.

For the first time in your marriage, you feel like you and your wife are living on different planets as each of you handles the stress of the transition differently. You are far away from your family and friends and are struggling with isolation, culture shock, and knowing where to find support.

You feel called to church planting in South Asia, but you need help.

As extreme as this scenario may seem, it is reality for many missionaries. In MTW’s experience, most missionaries would say that the sacrifices they make for the sake of the gospel are worth it, but they also wouldn’t deny the difficulties that accompanies life overseas.

Missionaries need intentional care and equipping for their cross-cultural setting. Without it, their health, family, ministry, and ability to remain on the field are at risk. But with the proper resources, they can thrive in their calling. This is why our Member Care Team and Learning and Development Team are essential to our mission. Recently, MTW hired former MTW Japan missionary and licensed counselor Amy Newsome as the director of Member Care, and Regional Director for West Africa Jim Weaver as the director of the Learning and Development Team. With their collective experience and expertise, Amy and Jim are well suited to lead MTW in preparing, supporting, and strengthening missionaries serving around the world.

Amy Newsome and the importance of member care

Member care is defined as the ongoing support, training, and protection given to missionaries and cross-cultural workers so they can stay healthy and effective in their work. As a field, it is a relatively recent development in global missions. During the 1980s and 1990s, missions agencies and cross-cultural workers began addressing preventable challenges that caused missionaries to leave the field prematurely. These efforts gradually evolved into member care as it is understood today.

“The church has often had a myth about missionaries—that they are somehow more spiritual, more sanctified, or more together—and that’s why they serve. This couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Amy. “I think to really understand the call to missions, we have to recognize that missionaries are broken, flawed, sinful, and vulnerable in all the same ways every other member of God’s family is. Because of that, member care is a critical part of kingdom work,” says Amy.

Amy points out that missionaries struggle with all the same issues church members in the U.S. do—loneliness, imposter syndrome, anxiety and depression, battles with besetting sin, church and team division, family trauma, parenting struggles, marital tension, and perhaps unmet desires if they are single. They, therefore, need a circle of care around them just like anyone else. For missionaries, however, the pressures of cross-cultural living can intensify these struggles while also limiting access to the professionals and resources they need to address them.

As a former MTW missionary who served with her husband for 35 years in Nagoya, Japan, Amy is intimately familiar with the joys and challenges of missionary life. She knows what is helpful for missionaries while they are trying to find their footing during an international move, or working to raise healthy missionary kids, or watching their well-thought-out ministry plans fail, or repatriating to the U.S. She is also a licensed counselor who served with MTW member care in the Asia-Pacific region during her time on the field and offers her services to missionaries and missionary families who need them.  

In her role as MTW’s director of member care, Amy longs to see missionaries flourish and the gospel of God’s kingdom advance. She and her team view their work as both preventive—providing resources and tools that build health and resilience on the field—and responsive—intervening when missionaries face crisis or trauma. Their care extends throughout a missionary’s entire tenure with MTW. They participate in preparing missionaries for life on the field, help new missionaries navigate the difficult initial adjustment, provide resources and counseling throughout their time of service, offer opportunities for encouragement and renewal through area retreats and MTW Refresh events, and develop relationships with churches who oversee their spiritual and pastoral care.

“MTW member care workers are privileged to come alongside and provide some supports so that our people can grow, heal, and be strengthened for the calling that they have. Without member care, I am certain there would be greater attrition, greater failures, and the work God is doing around the world would be impacted in negative ways,” says Amy.

Jim Weaver and the necessity of equipping missionaries for cross-cultural ministry

While Amy and her team oversee the personal wellbeing of missionaries, Jim Weaver and MTW’s Learning and Development Team equip missionaries to do the work of a missionary. They focus on: theological and practical learning that is necessary for ministering cross-culturally; language learning; appropriating the gospel in different contexts; and understanding the church in different places.

According to Jim, missions agencies can’t just assume those who are called to serve globally automatically know these things.

“With missionaries who feel called … God pricks their heart and makes it abundantly clear they’re supposed to go do this. But they don’t have the basic skill set, they don’t have the experience to understand what they don’t know yet. The scriptures tell us that we should prepare ourselves for ministry. And it’s like any other job. There are skills you need to learn, there are things that you need to know,” says Jim.

Calling alone does not prepare someone for the complexities of cross-cultural ministry. A new missionary may arrive on the field with years of theological education and ministry experience and still find that many of the instincts and skills that served them well in the U.S. do not translate into another culture. Without intentional training, missionaries can be left to learn these lessons through trial and error, which can have consequences for their teammates, national partners, families, and longevity on the field.

Jim has firsthand experience with the steep learning curve of cross-cultural ministry. Ten years ago, after pastoring a PCA church in Delaware, Jim and his family moved to West Africa to support a local Presbyterian denomination in its church-planting efforts. He quickly realized that not only were there no church-planting candidates, there also wasn’t a nearby theological education institution to send them to. Jim had to learn how to form healthy partnerships with the existing local leaders in order to identify and recruit pastoral candidates and figure out a way to educate and equip them for the work of church planting—all in a developing, Muslim-majority country where the Church was small and people viewed the world completely differently than he did.

Fortunately, God blessed their work and the team established Timothy House, a two-year intensive training center for four church-planting candidates. These four men and their families live at Timothy House, receive a theological education, and serve with a local Presbyterian church in preparation for ordination and church planting. Jim’s entire missionary experience—from learning to work well with people from another culture to training and teaching future pastors at Timothy House to leading MTW’s West Africa team—has prepared Jim for his new role as the director of MTW’s Learning and Development team.

Like member care, ongoing theological training and professional development needs to be available to missionaries before they leave, and then continue throughout their entire service.

“We’re trying to encourage our missionaries to see that they should be life-long learners,” said Jim. “And at MTW, the same robust theology and strong gospel identity that defines the PCA needs to define us as a missions agency too. We want to make sure that our missionaries properly preach Christ, understand the Church and why the Church exists, and to be good sound members of the local church wherever they are.”

Jim and his team are developing a cohesive training path for MTW missionaries that begins long before they leave. It starts with MTW’s Kingdom Foundations orientation, a 10-month cohort journey, and pre-field training. Once new missionaries arrive where they will serve, Jim helps their team leaders implement initial-term training tailored to their specific context, which occurs during their first two years of service.

In addition, the team provides resources for the ongoing development of all MTW missionaries which includes roadmaps and tools that help them cultivate healthy teams and develop strong and equipped leaders.

This is part of following Jesus

MTW’s mission is the mission of Jesus—to make disciples among all nations. He is both our leader and our model for how to pursue this mission. While He was on earth, He cared for His disciples and prepared them to continue His work after His ascension. And He continues to do so for His kingdom workers today.

Caring for and equipping missionaries is not peripheral to MTW’s mission. It is part of following in Jesus’ footsteps. A lack of it can negatively impact families, teams, partnerships, ministries, and ultimately the Church’s global gospel witness. But our responsibility goes deeper than ministry outcomes. Missionaries are members of the body of Christ, deserving of our love and service for no other reason than they belong to Him. Jesus loves and cares for them, and He calls us to do the same. Amy Newsome and MTW’s Member Care team and Jim Weaver and MTW’s Learning and Development team are working toward that end so that MTW missionaries can thrive in their calling and God can effectively use them to build His church around the world.

Interested in serving with MTW? Get started at mtw.org/serve.

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