How We Care for Our Missionaries, Part One
Juli Duvall-Jones served as a missionary with us for over a decade in Ivory Coast, so when she later became our Director of Missionary Care and Development, she understood the unique challenges of life and ministry on the mission field. Here, she shares how she and her team help better equip our missionaries for the ministries in which they serve.
In my role at CMF, I often find myself longing for one, tried and true, sure method of managing, caring for, and developing people. I am starting to believe it doesn’t exist. We humans are just so darn complex.
Until we find that one-size-fits-all formula, our goal at CMF is to build up our systems and processes so that we can be consistent and effective in the care and development of our missionaries. To do that, we started by defining what we are doing and why.
That resulted in our Care Team Mission Statement:
We exist to holistically and proactively prepare and develop missionaries for service by supporting them, their families and their teams as they navigate tension and transition so that they may be fruitful, engaged and effective cross-cultural ministers of the Gospel of Christ.
“So that.” These are the two words that our mission statement hinges upon. While caring for and developing people is a worthy cause and one of my passions, it would be much easier to do this if we were running a yoga retreat center up in the mountains. Everyone is Zen. Everyone is happy. The vibes are always good.
Instead, we are developing and supporting people who are headed off to do hard things, sometimes in hard places, and we are moving them towards health for a reason: to create Christ-centered communities around the world. We can never lose sight of this.
How We Do What We Do
To put our mission statement into action, we identified four foundational methods that help us define how we do what we do.
Clarify Expectations. Unmet expectations feed frustrations, and through transition, anxiety can be lessened if people know what to expect, even if, or especially if, things are going to be hard.
Cultivate Trust. Clarifying expectations builds trust, but so do consistency and clarity. We want our missionaries to trust that we are dependable and honest – even in hard truths. We want them to know we are for them and the work we are doing together and that they can trust us to be working for both their good and the good of the organization at the same time.
Contextualize Development. We do everything we can to know our missionaries and treat them as individuals. Knowing their unique life experiences, levels of health, personality types, growth areas, and the places they will be working, help us to develop them as individuals – each according to their specific needs.
Continued Support. Especially during times of transition.
What An Ideal Missionary Looks Like
So, what sort of qualities are we wanting to develop in our missionaries through these processes? What does our ideal missionary look like? So glad you asked!
Resilient, emotionally intelligent, relationally intelligent, spiritually mature, self-managed and more. These are some the character qualities and life skills we want to instill, nurture, and develop in our missionaries and our teams. We keep these qualities in mind when we create our resources, and we weave them into conversations as we journey together. Our overall goal is to have missionaries who are self-aware, able to self-regulate in sometimes stressful environments, who serve from a place of holistic health, maximizing their gifts and minimizing the thoughts and behaviors that don’t serve them, or others well.
I believe if missionaries have at least a certain level of competency in each of these areas, they will be better missionaries and better teammates. This will make our teams more effective, because healthy and well-balanced teams are made up of healthy and well-balanced individuals.
If you would like to be part of an organization dedicated to caring for its missionaries well, contact us about service opportunities at mobilization@cmfi.org!