.jpeg)
Bryan: Missionaries preparing for the field are training as if for a marathon. Missions, like marathons, is no easy task. It is a high pressure calling and there are many things that might cause the missionary to give up. Part of the preparation for the field includes strengthening yourself against what might cause you to stumble or quit. Brooks Buser, missionary and co-founder of Radius International, answers Dominic's question: what are the main reasons missionaries fail in long term missions?
Brooks: Well, first of all, I would say kudos to Dominic for asking this question. It's a really good question to think about: what is the long term failure rate, and what are the main things that are taking people off the field? Those types of questions mean that somebody's thinking long term. And that's a great thing.
I think if you look in your Bibles and just go through a few passages, the author in Hebrews talks about running with perseverance the race set before us. And then one of the verses that I would just have memorized for everyone is 2 Timothy 4:6-8 and how Paul has fought the good fight, he's finished the race, now there is stored for him the crown of righteousness. And he talks about all of the people who long for Jesus' coming will receive the same crown. And it's just a wonderful point that Paul is making—that this is a marathon, this is a long term race.
And so in missions even more so, this race is for those who are going to go particularly to unreached language groups. This is a long term task. And so I kind of split into two groups the reasons why people drop off the field.
The first group is for people who are untrained. And when I say untrained, anything less than two months is not sufficient. So people who have been trained very lightly or haven't gotten specific training—and again, I'm talking about getting to unreached language groups. I'm going to put that in a whole separate category from trained people, because I think there are two different sets of reasons why they come off the field. The untrained people, it really can boil down to they just weren't trained in the things that they needed to know, or their expectations were off, and so that's why they ended up coming off the field.
And so the three main reasons that untrained people come off the field is, first, teammates. That's the most common, or the second most common. If you look at all the missionary statistics, teammates or conflict within teammates is one of the primary reasons. And we should think through this well, because we shouldn't go, "all Christians should be able to work together with every other Christian"—that's not true. The apostle Paul didn't feel that way. Him and Barnabas ended up separating. If you look in Acts 15, they separated because of a legit disagreement, and later on they would reconcile. We know that from scripture. Paul would reconcile with John Mark. You can see that in Colossians 4 and 2 Timothy 4. You can see how these things came full circle. But even the apostle Paul and Barnabas had disagreements. And so to be trained on what type of person you should look for, how to pick teammates—my wife and I do a class called "How to Choose Teammates" down at Radius because it's such a big deal. And then to have a conflict resolution strategy: how do we keep from being a statistic where we ended up imploding as a team because we couldn't get along? That's your number one reason for untrained people.
Number two is going to be kids. Raising kids that know their role on the team, that know the privilege of what they get to do—almost all of that comes down to mom and dad and how they view bringing their kids over there, that they are clear in how they communicate with them the privilege of not only doing this, but the upsides. And not in this Pollyanna, everything's rose-colored-glasses type of way. You've got to be honest. Kids can smell dishonesty faster than anything else. If they feel like they're getting played, it's going to jade them against the job. But if you're clear on these things—and again, this is where trained people do better—they know the four stages of an MK's upbringing. They know the key times that they have got to press into their child's life. I like to routinely say that 90% of how an MK turns out does not depend on what they went through. It depends on how their parents helped interpret for them what they're going through or what they went through on the field. So that would be reason number two, again, for untrained people.
And then number three is the massive one: the difficulty of language and culture acquisition. Those who do not know will get punched in the face on this issue, because it is so dominant to learn another language and culture. And then if you're going to an unreached language group, likely to learn one that has never been written down before, that you don't have any helps for, that you don't have any language schools for—untrained people massively struggle at this task. I mean, if you look at the biographies or the autobiography of John G. Paton or Adoniram Judson or Hudson Taylor. Hudson Taylor later on would put such a premium on this for China Inland Mission, to get fluent and to do nothing else. This is straight 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. This is all you're doing, learning another language and culture and pressing it in. There is no shortcut to this. Everybody likes to talk about these programs that will cut time off and how much AI will do. AI will do a lot, but for the unreached language groups of the world, it's going to be one of the toughest jobs. Those who are trained in how to do it do significantly better.
Now I switch to trained missionaries and reasons why they come off the field. And I'm just going off of the statistics that we've seen at Radius. Of all of the missionaries that we've trained, only 8% of them have come off the field. But what are some of the determining criteria for that?
Well, one, I would bore down into single missionaries going to the field and not yet having resolved what they want to do with marriage, thinking that they're probably going to meet somebody on the field. That may or may not happen. But two or three years into it, if that hasn't happened and that issue hasn't been resolved, that usually takes single people, particularly single women, off the mission field.
One that is completely out of their control and in the sovereign hands of our God, who brings these things along for His own good purposes, is health—your family back home, your own personal health. Those things have taken more missionaries off of the field than a lot of other things, basically because they're things they just couldn't plan for. And so this is again where a younger missionary tends to have more time. Their health issues don't creep up as fast. Healthier missionaries tend to do better. There's a reason why Radius does early morning workouts and encourages our graduates when they get to the field to keep up that process. And even Paul, man—he's speaking to Timothy, exercise is a good thing, godliness is even better. But man, make sure to exercise your body, make sure to stretch your body. Timothy had the stomach ailments and Paul's encouraging him that there is a benefit to keeping your physical body in good shape, especially when you're going into difficult environments.
And then finally, for trained missionaries, the years start to become very, very long. I remember when we were in our ninth year in Yembiyembi, Nina and I really hit—not a crisis point, the church was going well—but there were just things. We would get letters from back home and we would know what people are doing on a Saturday afternoon. We know the fellowship time after the gathering on Sunday. And honestly, it was silly things in hindsight that the enemy used to pry into our minds. But thinking about having ice—like we didn't have a lot of ice in the Yembiyembi—and just missing that type of thing. We would daydream about if we went to Applebee's, what would we order? What would the forks look like? What would the steak possibly look like coming out? What would the chicken fingers be like? Stuff like that that slowly started to work its way in. Missing air conditioning. Just getting sick and having longer and longer to recover.
And I tell you what, I'm so very thankful for the words of Matthew 28:20, that the King will be with us even to the end of the age. And one of these silly things of food and air conditioning and having medicine directly at your disposal and not just sweating on a plywood floor and trying to break the fever through little packets of rice that had been stuck in a refrigerator, and that was the coldest you could get your forehead, like, there will be an accounting someday of everything that missionaries go through.
But I think that long term, hey, you know what, even through this, we're going to stay. And we would stay four more years from that year number nine, and we would, by God's grace, see that church planted. But those little things, the length of time sometimes missionaries start well, the middle stage of their ministry they do well, but it's those closing days, it's those closing years. We've got to tie this off well. We cannot leave prematurely. That tends to take even trained people off the field sometimes prematurely, before that church is planted.
Bryan: If you're interested in becoming a missionary to an unreached language group, consider applying to Radius International, where you will receive rigorous training and preparation for the field. You can learn more about them at radiusinternational.org. If you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, drop a comment on this episode, get in touch with us on social media, or send us an email through missionary.com and your question may be featured on this show. And don't forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when the next episode airs next week. Thanks for listening.