2nd Opinion: Missions gain 21st-century faces

How do Baptists continue their rich heritage of training and supporting career missionaries abroad in the face of dwindling resources? That’s a question all of us who care about furthering God’s kingdom on earth struggle to answer. We know God’s resources are abundant, so we have to ask ourselves if we are thinking as creatively as we could be. Have we become so entrenched with “the way we’ve always done it” that we are not open to “God-sized” visions?

One of the strategic goals of the Baylor University School of Social Work is a commitment to global social work education. As part of that commitment, our dean, Diana Garland, and her husband, David Garland, dean of Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, obtained a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation four years ago. The result of that grant is enabling a different way of thinking and doing global missions.

The Global Mission Leadership initiative, with Jennifer Smyer as the director, educates Christian global leaders to be agents of change—leaders uniquely appointed by God to be catalysts for transformation in their home countries. For a fraction of the cost of training and maintaining missionaries sent from the United States to other countries, an indigenous leader can receive a graduate social work education at Baylor and return to his or her home country to lead and train others in lifetime ministries. (The cost of supporting a fully funded field personnel couple is about $130,000 a year, and the average length of service for all missionary-sending organizations is about seven years. That results in an investment of nearly $1 million. The cost of supporting one Global Mission Leadership scholar for two years of education/living expenses at Baylor is $100,000.)

Now in its third year, the program has six “homeland missionaries” from Southeast Asia studying at the School of Social Work. The first cohort of three is pursuing dual degrees with Truett Seminary. The second cohort of three arrived in Waco in early August.

They have come at great personal sacrifice, deeply committed to and trusting that God will provide the means for them to live out their callings. They have come to Baylor with hearts for the restoration of human trafficking victims, for the inclusion of people with mental disabilities in local churches, for effective advocacy that can change corrupt governmental systems, to teach future generations of social workers and to transform communities from poverty to wholeness. They come from Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Mongolia.

All six students will do their field internship work for their degree in their home countries, and they will serve as field supervisors for Baylor social work students who intern in these international nonprofit agencies in future years. The ripple effect of even one such God-called, mission-driven leader has exponential potential beyond what our eyes can see or our minds can conceive (1 Corinthians 2:9).

We believe the Global Mission Leadership scholars are an integral part of the missions conversation Marv Knox encouraged Baptists to have in his recent Baptist Standard editorial (“Time to talk about missions methods,” Aug. 2). Recognizing and walking alongside indigenous global leaders to help them live out their calling is another way to honor God’s activity in the hearts and minds of his people. It is another way to be good stewards of kingdom resources, which never are dependent upon economic vagaries.

As a Baptist, a home missionary for 29 years in Philadelphia and a beneficiary of intentional missions education in our Baptist churches, I urge us to consider the impact the Global Mission Leadership scholars can have upon a world desperate for the light of Christ. We believe they can be the new faces of missions for the 21st century.

Gaynor Yancey is associate dean for baccalaureate studies and professor in Baylor University’s School of Social Work.