7. The Challenges of Serving the Globally Mobile (MICN Missiology Series by Andrew Lupton)
Untapped Potential
International churches face many challenges as we serve the globally mobile. As I converse with other international church pastors, there’s an overwhelming sense that their church is not reaching its strategic potential. Perhaps you feel this, too. At the end of each week, so much ministry is left undone due to a lack of time and human resources. Many international churches appear to be under-resourced and understaffed, and per capita statistics of churches relative to population size bear this out.
According to population data from 2012, the United States had a church for every 815 people.1 Current estimates are that there are 1,500 international churches worldwide serving a population of more than 65.2 million expats. That amounts to one international church per 43,466 expats. When the total number of global migrants is factored in, there is one international church per 181,333 global migrants. Add to that the many nationals who attend these churches and the disparity is staggering. The world needs more healthy international churches.
Under-resourced and Understaffed
Many leaders of international churches are not employed fully by their church.2 Among the international church pastors I personally know, almost all raise at least some financial support outside their church through a missions agency or a U.S. 501C-3. International church is inherently financially unstable because its congregants turn over constantly and are subject to sudden repatriation due to geopolitical shifts and market fluctuations.
For example, since I have served at UCB, the price of oil has unexpectedly plummeted twice. Seemingly overnight, nearly all of our families connected to that industry were repatriated. I prefer not to see which families donate what, but I assume those families were regular and generous financial contributors to our church. Making long-term financial plans with stable staffing implications is a rare luxury for an international church.
This creates a predicament because I would argue that the staffing needs are higher for international churches relative to monocultural churches because of the instability caused by a high turnover among its congregants. Whereas volunteers fill many leadership roles and ministry teams in a monocultural church, the long-term volunteer or ministry leader is rare within international church. Each summer our church loses 20% of our congregation to relocation. Last year we said goodbye to 70-80 people in June. Among those leaving were elders, deacons, ministry leaders, and loyal ministry volunteers. At the end of a typical summer we welcome a new 25% to our congregation. The Sunday school teacher who serves loyally for 10 years often doesn’t exist in international church. Aside from me, the longest standing elder of our church has served for four years.
In addition to normal church activities, the UCB staff, volunteers, and I are constantly welcoming, assimilating, assessing, recruiting, training, deploying, resourcing, and replacing to keep our ministries running. Given the percentage of congregants who leave each year, if we take our foot off of the gas pedal for two or three years, our church will be half its size. Indeed, the church when we arrived eight years ago was around 60 mostly local people. It’s also fair to say that our church was largely failing to reach its target market, the globally mobile. And it’s easy to understand why. Maintaining a flourishing international church demands an exhausting pace from its leaders. More staffing is the best way to protect those leaders from burnout while capitalizing on ministry potential.
This is where we need human and financial resources from outside our local churches, at least for an interim period of time. Raising my own support through Mission to the World allowed our church some healthy financial margin to invest in strategic areas that would move us closer to self-sustainability and capitalize on our potential of reaching the nations and the next generation. It’s no surprise that as our team grew with the help of our missions organization, our church grew proportionally. People were reached and discipled in our target market, marriages were saved, children and youth found community, our host culture was blessed, and our little church began to flourish. None of that would have been possible without investment from the outside, which we will expound upon in future articles.
Tune in next week as we unpack the challenge of attachment that nearly all international churches face.
Andrew Lupton
2 Wald, Jack, Pastoring a Parade: A Guide to International Church Ministry, p. 88.
