What Causes Missions Agencies to Go Sideways and Lose Vision?

What causes missions agencies to go sideways and lose vision?

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Greg: Why do agencies go sideways? That's a very challenging question to ask. How do they lose their vision? How do they shift from the original vision of where they were?

I would say oftentimes we've seen that the hard thing, for example in a closed country, the task that's out there is very challenging, to get to the final aspect of seeing a a church planted in a minority people group. That long process is very tiring and very challenging. People think it's hard to get families to be able to walk down that journey. So what people try to do is they'll try to find shortcuts to that. And those shortcuts are pretty easy to look for.

One of the first ones is rather than actually engaging in that language is actually taking a step back into the capital cities and just doing church planting there, saying instead of actually holding on to the vision that we had was seeing direct engagement of church planting and unreached unengaged people groups. Instead of that let's take a step back and say let's do this here in this area, we're walking through those things. And instead of actually encouraging accountability to say seeing people get out there in those minority areas to do this work,  they'll actually settle for that secondary step of being in those capital cities in those places.

Another reason where mission agents can find themselves taken off track is by the pressure of results. It's really hard in a long-term effort for churches and sending agencies to continue to say it'll be 10 to 15 years before we see an active church taking place in that people group. 10 to 15 years is an awful long time for agencies to continue to talk to churches about, saying this is a task that's worth that effort when they're hearing other organizations doing it at what they heard at a far faster rate. So the tendency then is for them to say, you know what, let's just have a couple wins early on, let's just let's just see some people getting out there and do this thing faster by doing some things that aren't exactly within our system, but we'll see churches established there. So they'll continue to to shortcut the process and eventually those agencies begin to shift to a either being double-minded or even not at all holding on to the original values that they once held.

Julia: Just one thing I would also add to that is just not being innovative to change when you need to and to be able to reinvent yourself to stay in. And there are many times we lost visas or people lose visas. It doesn't mean you have to leave, you can reinvent yourself, find a different way to stay in. The door might not always be closed like you think it is. I think being able to change with changing governments and changing times is really important and key to being able to have a long-term ministry.