November 7, 2005 Gladstone, Oregon, United States …. [Hans Olson/ANN Staff]
Raising Seventh-day Adventist church members’ awareness of mission activity was a challenge presented to 150 church communicators from North America during a recent seminar here. Members of the Society of Adventist Communicators were given the challenge during their annual convention.
Such awareness is more critical in societies where financial resources can be found, since mission giving has been flat in recent years, church experts say. According to a report presented in July at the 2005 world church meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, worldwide giving to tithe and other local offerings has increased over the past 50 years, while giving to mission offerings has remained static.
Adventists today are giving the same dollar amount to missions that they gave 50 years ago, which means mission offerings today have one-fifth the “buying power” of 1950, despite the church having grown from 1 million to more than 14.3 million members.
“Mission is central to our life and purpose [as Adventists] — we exist for mission,” said Patricia Gustin, who recently retired as director of the Institute of World Mission, the church’s training center for cross-cultural missionaries.
Gustin was one of five panelists at the discussion challenging communicators to promote the church’s emphasis on worldwide mission. Many Adventist members today think the Church no longer sends or needs cross-cultural missionaries, according to Rick Kajiura, Office of Adventist Mission communication director.
Yet, according to Gustin, 30 to 40 percent of the world does not have access to anyone who represents the Adventist Church, including cross-cultural missionaries. The church currently has more than 800 cross-cultural missionary families and each year another 120 to 130 new families are trained. “In the last two years 60 percent of new missionaries have gone to very challenging places,” reported Gustin.
The perception that the Adventist Church no longer sends out cross-cultural missionaries has apparently affected financial support of the church’s international mission programs. For years many churches featured a specific offering each week, and undesignated offerings went to that project. Today many churches no longer promote international mission and undesignated offerings are used for local church expenses.
There has also been a move toward project giving. “It’s not either/or — it needs to be both,” adds Kajiura. “Asking for a specific project is great, but we need to remember missionaries are working because of the money given to the mission offering.”
Mission offerings support much of the church’s work around the world. Some 70 percent of the mission offerings go to support the international work of the church. The remainder supports various services and institutions that serve the world church, including the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA,) the church’s international humanitarian agency, and Adventist World Radio (AWR,) the church’s worldwide radio ministry.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Adventist News Network.
