What Are Some Common Mistakes Missionaries Make and How Can They Be Avoided?

What are some common mistakes missionaries make and how can they be avoided?

Some of the common mistakes I see missionaries make and how they can be avoided:

The first mistake I see them make is in this notion of calling. They tend to think that because they went to a conference, heard the Great Commission preached, and their hearts were warmed, that they ought to go. "Now I'm called because I have sort of a burning in my bosom." That mistake needs to be corrected by going to your elders, going to the godly older people in your church, and saying, "Do you see me as someone that you would want to support and send to the mission field?"

Secondly, I see a mistake that I don't always want to pin on the missionaries. Often, I want to pin it on the local church. They get very little training and feedback as to their qualifications from the local church. Sometimes that's because they don't seek it, but sometimes it's because the local church just doesn't have any interest in giving it. They don't want to put in the time necessary to really vet these people, to train them, to make sure they're qualified. They really don't want to have hard conversations.That can go both ways: you can have a missionary who doesn't want to hear the hard things so they can develop, and you can have churches that don't want to say the hard things so they can help others develop. That's another mistake.

Next, I see the mistake that they don’t get thorough training in language and culture. So they go out unequipped. They haven’t been taught a biblical doctrine of suffering and endurance, so they can survive long term, and they go out unequipped. That’s one of the reasons we started Radius International—so that we can vet people and train them in language, culture, cross-cultural church planting, and suffering—so that they’re ready to go to the field equipped to do this task.

Another mistake: they go out to the field and get on social media or their computers and lose hours and hours of time communicating with people at home, looking at what’s going on at home, rather than being out there doing the hard work daily of learning language, getting into the community, and building friendships.

Another error I often see is that when it gets hard, they start to think that the hardness is unusual—that somehow suffering is something that ought not to be happening. So they seek therapy, and then they realize, “Oh, because my family is having a hard time, because this is difficult, our default is just to go home where it won’t be hard.” I think that is a huge mistake—to believe that suffering is somehow foreign to the experience. Really, it’s an essential part of it. Paul is joyous to fill up the afflictions in his own body that are lacking in Christ. And his point isn’t that Christ hasn’t paid a sufficient penalty on the cross. His point is that Christ’s body is going to continue suffering on His behalf as we make the gospel known to the ends of the earth. So seeing suffering as somehow foreign to our experience—rather than as essential to it, or a part of it, or natural to it—is another mistake I often see.