EMQ » July–September 2023 » Volume 59 Issue 3
Summary: When someone becomes a missionary with a raise-your-own-support type of agency, they are taught how to make phone calls and talk to people to create their ministry team. But this process could be accelerated if potential partners could also discover missionaries who matches their interests. What if there was a website/app that could help missionaries and potential partners find one another?
By Kevin Horan
There are two major challenges with our current process of sending out missionaries: (1) it takes a long time for missionaries to raise support. It is a tough job recruiting missionaries in the first place, but then it often takes 1–2 years of raising support before they can get to work, if they make it at all; (2) Too few Christians are giving to support the Great Commission, and thus miss out on the abundant rewards promised in the Bible.
What if one solution could address both challenges? Missionaries and ministry partners finding each other is a classic matching problem. It is similar to matching employees to employers, singles to other singles, drivers to those needing a ride, and so on. In all these cases, both sides make an effort to find their match. An employer must expend effort to find a good employee, and if someone wants to be employed, they must search for a good employer.
But in missions, we do it slightly differently. Only the missionary does the searching! When someone becomes a missionary with a raise-your-own-support type of agency, they are taught how to make phone calls and talk to people to create their ministry team. This is all good of course. But this process could be accelerated if the other side also made a similar effort to find missionaries to partner with. These potential partners have a problem though. If they want to look beyond their friends, family, and church for a missionary who matches their interests, how do they find them?
What if there was a single solution that has the potential to address both challenges? Our solution is essentially an online matching service for missionaries and ministry partners. It provides a missing tool needed to help generous believers find missionaries matching their interests, allowing the matching problem to truly be solved in both directions.
