Media Missionary Focus

The Story That’s The Story (Kidnappings, Hurricanes and Missions)

Being in America for the last few weeks has given me more access to news than I know what to do with.

Over the last few years, things in Cambodia have changed radically, and we actually have a couple cable news channels, like CNN, at our home, and I regularly check a couple of news web-sites. But here, there’s not only numerous TV news channels, there’s newspapers of every kind in every gas station and restaurant, high speed wireless access to the internet in every coffee shop, as well as talk radio of every stripe.

But the most striking thing is that with all those news outlets, they all seem to be covering the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t all saying the same thing exactly, but they all do seem to cover the same stories.

A week ago, it was the girl missing in Aruba. Then there was the London bombings. Now it’s the hurricane. There always seems to be a “piling on” in the media. This tends to bother me a bit at times. How many times can you hear the same thing over and over again? They tend to not only repeat themselves from network to network, but even on the same channel they cycle through the news every 30 minutes or so and keep repeating the same information again.

This is exactly the same problem I was talking to a pastor about last week. People in churches, especially those who have been recently saved and haven’t grown up in churches, aren’t used to making long term regular financial commitments to missions. A big part of that is because they are used to this instant news. They are used to seeing the latest instant news updates everywhere they turn. Traditional missions in the Assemblies of God is a bit different. Missionaries visit a church once every four years or so, there might be a newsletter stuck on the bulletin board a couple times a year, but it’s all old news. And it’s very “filtered”. They spin and condense three or four months into a one page newsletter, or four years into a 45 minute sermon, so the view the average person gets isn’t exactly “eye-witness”.

So the current trend in churches and in missions is to get that hands-on, eye-witness feel by concentrating the missions efforts of the church more and more in short term teams sent out by the church for a few weeks, or in one time projects that the church raises money for and then moves on to the next thing. These things aren’t bad, but if churches shift their support away from monthly support of long term, full time, field based missionaries to increase the short term projects and teams, it could become a bad thing.

I believe both of these efforts have their place. The challenge is, how do we in the church keep from making the story, “the story”? How do we keep from allowing the immediate feedback of short-term work to undermine the importance of the long term work? The answer is relationships.

Churches and pastors and church boards usually pick up a missionary for support because they came to the church and established a relationship with the church. That relationship is based initially on that first service and usually on the mutual association with the Assemblies of God. But like all relationships, if this one is not worked on regularly, it is going to have problems. The sad thing is that like much of life, the negative news gets the attention, and the problem relationships between missionaries and churches are the ones that get the attention.

It is my hope that this blog is one step to maintaining good relationships with churches who support us here in the States.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 8:40 AM