How We Care for Our Missionaries, Part Four
At Christian Missionary Fellowship, we often refer to ourselves simply as The Fellowship and after 75 years of international ministry, our Fellowship is quite large! Juli Duvall-Jones, our Director of Missionary Care and Development, shares how they use our fellowship of experienced mentors to pour into our missionaries.
One aspect of our care and development program that I think is yielding great results is our mentoring program. This program has been in development for several years but adding Tim Ross as our Director of Pastoral Care to the process has helped us quite a bit in matching missionaries with just the right mentor. It’s like the man knows someone who is just right for everyone. What a gift!
As part of each CMF missionary’s preparation for service, they are required to secure a mentor. This can be someone they already have a relationship with and whom they trust, or they can request we match them with a current or former CMF missionary or someone else we believe would be a good support person for their specific needs.
Once a mentor is identified, both the mentor and missionary are given access to our mentoring materials. These provide topical resources and a framework for a conversation around skills and qualities we believe are necessary for each of our missionary’s development. They include topics like building resilience, conflict competence, cultural adaptation, emotional intelligence, flexibility, team dynamics, and time management, with more topics being added every year.
Missionaries and their mentors are given a book called The Sojourner’s Workbook by Connie Befus to complete together during their first year in their country of service. It was written specifically for missionaries as they adjust to their new setting and provides space for reflection and discussion as they grieve, transition, and adjust…and adjust…and adjust. We know support during the first year is crucial for healthy integration into a missionary’s new culture and ministry.
In their book Trauma and Resilience, Drs. Charles and Frauke Schaefer say that to aid in the development of resilience, missionaries need two safe relationships outside their team and family to provide a neutral space for processing. When missionaries are able to unpack their experiences and gain perspective, they find they are more capable than they thought they were of navigating hardship and making the changes necessary to adapt to the new team, new environment, new culture, and often a new version of themselves.
Of course, this should be no surprise to any of us, because we serve a God who created us for community, and our Scripture teaches us that we are to bear one another’s burdens, let iron sharpen iron, and that those with many advisors shall succeed (Prov. 15:22).
I look forward to seeing this program continue to grow and expand to offer even more support and development for our missionaries. I am truly encouraged by the fruit we have already experienced through this program.
If you have read all four parts of this missionary care and development series, I want you know that we don’t always get it right. Our team is also still learning and growing, and while we have realized that there isn’t any one formula that works for all people in all circumstances in every context, I do believe we are finding some methods that with some adaptation for the individual, tend to work in preparing our missionaries for the good work they are doing around the world.
This is why we do what we do, by the grace of God, with the help of community and for the people we serve and partner with around the world. As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, the world deserves the very best, healthiest people we can send.
I’m committed to seeing that happen and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it all, every single day. Even the hard stuff.