Minister of Education Reports        

The Necessity of Missionary Support and Outreach       

            Sometimes people turn a negative eye upon the church activi-

ties that do not yield direct, visible results beneficial to the church. One of the areas where this is true is the area of missionary support. Then there are others who say that since we support the Cooperative Program through our tithing dollars, we should be satisfied with doing that. They argue that there is no further reason to be giving to missionary efforts. Both viewpoints are biblically wrong.

            It was the character of the early church, as recorded in the Book of Acts. They sent out missionaries in keeping with the Great Com-

mission. It has always been part of the work of the church that they would commission people and send them out to represent the Lord Jesus Christ on foreign shores. The land of Wales, where we now sup-

port the Johnson missionary family, was first touched with the Gospel message by missionaries from North Africa. They brought the story of Christ’s salvation in Old Latin Bibles based in the same Greek texts that underlie our King James Bibles. It was this missionary work that prepared a people who knew the Lord to resist the incursion of Rome and the error of the Catholic church along with its Latin Vulgate Bible.

            Though the value of a cooperative means of working together to support missions is nothing to be denigrated, a church has a need for doing some direct support as well. This is the method employed by the early church and it gives a body of believers people we know and whose work we can relate with in a special way. Not only that, having people who are on the missionary field relating directly to the local church can help to encourage the young people in the church who might be feeling God’s call to missionary service.

            Living in a land as wide and diverse as the United States we also have a need to support missionaries who are active in this country as well. Often they are some of the most neglected missionaries of all. Some of these have been reduced to the most extreme circumstances in the course of trying to bring salvation to American citizens.

            Through the years I have seen that churches most highly blessed and favored of the Lord have often been those churches with a strong interest in missions. Critics of missionary outreach are often the very people who are most ignorant of how the Lord so often works in quiet and subtle ways to reward those who are faithful to His command to go unto all nations, kindreds, and tongues. A church can never go wrong doing what is right when souls are hanging in the balance.