Abstract: Robert Cline helps pastors see the vital role they play in the preparation of missionaries sent out by their church. Though most pastors can’t speak from experience about learning a new language and culture, they can provide instruction and mentoring when it comes to the basics of everyday ministry. And these basics are critical for the long-term faithfulness of missionaries.
Pastor, you can’t know fully what it’s like to be a missionary until you’re standing in a cold, moldy apartment in a city where you can’t read the street signs, where the handful of local believers who gather barely understand your stumbling attempts at their language, and where the nearest qualified elder is a flight away. Unless you’ve been a pioneer church planter who started from nothing—no congregation, little support, and no local elders—you don’t really know what those challenges feel like.
But you do know something that prospective missionaries desperately need to learn, namely, ordinary, faithful pastoral ministry.
The Basics Travel
If you watch your life and doctrine carefully, feed on God’s Word, and serve as an under-shepherd to the Chief Shepherd, and if you teach not only from a pulpit but also at meals and in homes, and if you care well for your family and your closest relationships, then you’re already practicing the basics of cross-cultural gospel work. And the basics travel. They’ll need translation, of course, but they remain central because they’re rooted in Scripture, not in a particular culture.
Christian character. Competent teaching. Caring for the flock. These essentials, drawn from Titus and 1 Timothy, are vital whether you’re shepherding a congregation in Dallas or discipling a small cluster of first-generation believers in a Middle Eastern city with no previous gospel witness. Disciple that prospective missionary to fear God, watch his life and doctrine closely (1 Tim. 4:16), and prove faithful in ordinary ministry. Then he’ll be better prepared for ministry anywhere on earth.
The essential preparation for cross-cultural ministry is not primarily cross-cultural studies. It’s biblical and theological understanding, competency in basic pastoral skills, love for God and neighbor, and regular habits of grace. The man who knows his Bible, shares the gospel regularly, loves the local church, prays faithfully, walks with suffering members through crisis and joy, and receives counsel and rebuke from trusted friends is more than halfway prepared for cross-cultural gospel work, even before he contacts a sending agency.
Pastor, you have a key role in discipling and preparing cross-cultural workers. Your normal, week-in and week-out ministry is the training ground for tomorrow’s missionaries. So get to know these prospective missionaries and model for them faithful ministry. Disciple them!
The Not-So-Secret Ingredient
In addition to the basics, there’s a not-so-secret ingredient to ministry success—love. Love matters more than ministry skill. Seasoned cross-cultural workers will tell you that no amount of cultural insight, language ability, or missiological strategy can replace Christian love (1 Cor. 13). Wherever we go, enduring love for God and others travels well. Without it, all the ministry skill and cross-cultural competence in the world is just noise.
So, pastor, disciple prospective missionaries to cultivate and guard their core relationships—and model that kind of love for them. Invite them into your life to see what this looks like.
• Seek daily communion with God through unhurried prayer and time in the Word—for your own soul, not just for sermon prep.
• Love your spouse and children in concrete, visible ways; they feel the strain of ministry too.
• Emphasize the importance of member-to-member relationships that are marked by mutual care, confession, and encouragement.
• Love the lost enough to make evangelism a joyful routine outside of the pulpit.
• Manage interpersonal conflict with Christlike wisdom and love.
• Cultivate a small circle of trusted friends who will counsel, encourage, and lovingly rebuke you.
Remember, these loving relationships aren’t luxuries for the cross-cultural worker—they’re essentials. And those whom you send will follow your example.
What You Don’t Know
To be clear, there is some really difficult work in overseas ministry that goes beyond the basics of Christian ministry. It usually involves the stressors of learning a new language and a new culture.
Learning a new language challenges a person’s sense of identity and usefulness at the deepest level. It’s demanding, humbling, and emotionally draining. A missionary may arrive with suitcases full of pastoral experience and theological knowledge, but those bags won’t be fully unpacked for a while. First comes language and culture, and often loneliness.
Yet this is even more reason to send people who have learned the ministry basics, because language and culture acquisition will consume their early years overseas. The temptation to cut corners, retreat into English-speaking spaces, and avoid the lonely road of learning is real. Thus, the man who arrives without proven character, without competency in teaching Scripture, and without experience walking alongside struggling believers will be overwhelmed. He’ll have language school in the mornings, cultural confusion in the afternoons, and no bandwidth left to figure out what ministry looks like in a new context. And he’ll be lonely. As his sending pastor, you can’t remove all his burdens, but you can prepare him for some of them. And you can commit to walking with him through these difficulties with prayer, with honest communication, and with patient, realistic expectations.
More Than You Might Realize
Because of the unique challenges of language learning, cultural acquisition, and spiritual isolation, sending organizations and missionary training schools can helpfully supplement what local churches provide, but they can never replace the discipleship that comes from their pastors and local churches.
Like most pastors, you probably aren’t a missiologist. But you know more about missions than you might realize. Your instruction, your example, and your life-on-life discipleship of prospective missionaries are essential to their future ministry.