Why we REALLY left missions (Dec. 26)
In person, people may ask us the “real reason” we left missions. I don’t know how much we may share, but this is the truth, for us…
The truth is that we felt God leading us to leave. But God leads through events, and through factors. Two years ago, we were anchored in our mission field like a crustacean wedged deeply into a crevice in the rocks. But God used some events to begin to pry us free:
1. Support
It has become increasingly clear that our support base is “aging.” Our strongest support comes from our “home” community: people who knew us and loved us before missions. But every year away from this base means that these connections grow “older.” We have so much gratitude for those who have carried us for so many years. Every year, there is one or two more that has to redirect giving, for various reasons. As we seek to find support from new churches, we arrive as a stranger and a missionary, seeking support. The simple fact is that more and more support-raising energy is needed to provide the same amount of funds. The summer of 2017 really drove this reality home to me. I spent almost the entire summer on the road, and support raising. In August, I had not been able to gain enough new support to offset our lost supporters.
Another factor is that our missions finance department is, honestly, a complicated system to navigate. To be truthful, they could do better: and I have had discussions, and they are taking some steps to improve their system. But to this day, I can access my profile, and believe that I have sufficient funds, then the next day, or a few weeks later access them and see that actually, no: there is not enough to pay salary for the next month. There have been three specific times when this has happened: I have opened up my account to find that we were basically “broke,” and some desperate measures were required.
These desperate measures included public newsletters, and private phone calls that were very difficult for myself. Also, each of these “low funds” times were extremely difficult, emotional times. They all came when my wife was in a vulnerable place: four weeks pregnant, six weeks after giving birth, just bought a new house, etc.
These factors began to work on us. Although deeply rooted in our place, we began to shift.
[timeline of support]
I have never liked support raising. I enjoy writing newsletters, and keeping people informed. However, that alone never seems to be enough. From the beginning, I have had to make clear, specific, and direct “asks” for funds. Otherwise, people do not give. I have always hated this part, and i have hated how it twinges my relationships with people.
In spring of 2017, my wife and I spoke very honestly about our journey with mental health/burnout. This was very well received, and, unexpectedly, came with a large wellspring of financial support. We continued to raise support over the summer of 2017, and by the fall, we had a modest buffer (around $6,000), and were at reasonably high levels of support — somewhere around 85%. After working hard on support for some time, I thought I would be fine leaving it for a bit: we had a very intense, but very profitable spring. Probably our best yet.
Around Christmas, I logged on to our account, to see if we could still do a ministry trip, and charge it to our account. What I saw traumatized us for years, and may have been the beginning of the end of our missions journey. We had no funds: absolutely none. How had this happened? I did a quick search, and it seems that while I had been working, our support had languished. A $6,000 buffer disappeared quickly as a few donors stopped, and our 85% support had really been more like 75%.
We had just celebrated our fifth pregnancy (we were about a month pregnant) and we were working on renovating our “dream house.” But at the moment, the house was a disaster: it was nowhere near ready to sell. We would lose money if we needed to relocate. But it seemed that the funds were not there to stay. What could we do?
I began by speaking with our mission. I was angry, honestly, quite angry. Why could I never get straight answers about our funds? Depending who I called, I would be told that my funds were “just fine,” or “in desperate need of help.” I never knew what to believe. And here we had gone from healthy to almost dead in the water in three months: where was the administrative help to glance at our finances from time to time and say, “Looks like you should raise more support.” I spoke with them, and was told they were short staffed and could not do this. But I pay them nearly $1,000/month in admin fees. What do I get for this? All they do is administrate my funds: they don’t do anything else for me. And so why can’t they at least do a good job of that? But I was repeatedly told that it was simply and solely my responsibility to keep track of my own funds: they couldn’t help me there. Fine, but they wouldn't even give me good tools to do so! (I did help them by developing better tools. No idea if they shared these tools with other missionaries...)
I had several discussions with them, and over the course of the year was able to create a user-guide for their online finances. This was something, at least: and in the process, I was able to become an expert in reading their complex spreadsheets, and understanding the complex world of support. But the damage had been done.
I knew that I needed to make a strong appeal to supporters. I decided that honesty was the best policy: I just told people the truth (dubbed down as far as I could, in order not to shock them). I told people that we were in a precarious place, and really really needed support. This message was extremely hard to write, and at least one family member wrote us instructing us to stop “begging” for money.
Despite the strong appeal, the money did not gush, but trickled in.
I was not concerned, because I saw summer coming, and so I spent hours and days on the phone, lining up a busy summer schedule of visitation to new churches. Between visiting existing supporting churches, and candidating at new ones, then calling back to make asks, I spent the entire summer in full-time support raising mode. It was exhausting, and it took its toll on me.
With the emotions of constantly being in “giving” mode for support-raising, and making the heart-wrenchingly difficult “ask” calls, my body began struggling under the stress. One symptom was that I got a lymphatic infection at the beginning of the summer. A small cut got infected from working in the yard, and the infection began making a red line walk up my forearm. Without antibiotics, I would have died.
And then, oddly, it came back again, even with antibiotics. My immune system was simply not able to kick it out.
Then, two weeks later, while visiting a church, it came back again. This is not supposed to happen, as there was no fresh infection at the site.
My wife was also struggling. Mission finances had become so hard for her that I could not discuss them with her: she would have panic attacks or extremely high anxiety. And so I kept all of the stress to myself, or talked to a few trusted friends. But she still felt the tension. That summer, as my energy became depleted and my stress continued to rise, her anxiety rose as well until she was at the place where going out in public was difficult for her, and she couldn’t handle much as far as company or having people over. I did what I could by shopping and taking things “off of her plate.”
Towards August, things came to a head. I had visited six new churches, spent weeks on the road, and done somewhere near a hundred calls. And what did I have to show for it? I had gained one $20/month donor, and another at $50/month. But also? I had lost several donors, amounting to $100/month. So after all of that, I had moved backwards in our support.
One very emotional day, my wife was gone, and something triggered me. I went into the woods behind my house, and thrashed around, cutting trees, and yelling at God. “God, we are here. God, we are working. God, the worker is worthy of his wages. God, why aren’t you paying me?” I questioned it all: God’s goodness, our call, our whole life. None of it seemed to make any sense.
Afterwards, I called a trusted friend and longtime pastor and mentor. He sympathized with me, and encouraged me to trust God in spite of it all.
But the question I asked kept ringing in my ears: “Don’t you want us here? If you want us here, why aren’t you supporting us?” So maybe, just maybe…God didn’t want us here after all.
Then, we had our fifth child. With the strain of everything that had happened that summer, my wife was not at peak health going into the birth: and the birth was very difficult. Add to that, our child had an undiagnosed lip and tongue tie, which made life extremely difficult for a few weeks. Finally, things began to level out slightly after two months.
It was at that time that I checked our bank accounts and saw — for the first time — that we were in the negative numbers. We “owed” the mission $17.00. The silver lining was that now that we had a child, we could go on paternal leave, and allow funds to build up in our account. We did this, and there were no complications, leading to a $15,000 buffer.
I tried to explain this to my wife — bad news, we are broke, good news, funds are coming — but her body would not listen. It went into a very severe panic attack, with trembling and inability to move and breathe normally. We both vividly remember that night. “Yes,” she told me later, “it is great that we will get paternal leave money — but this is our last child! We can’t just keep banking on that!”
I tried to keep raising support — but now my time was divided with the ministry startup. But money finally began to come in. After an extremely hard year, around Christmas quite a few people increased or started giving. By January — one year after our worst moment — came our best moment. We had a large buffer (from the paternal leave) and were at over 100% support.
But the damage had been done. Damage to my wife's trust in missions finances. Damage to my confidence in the mission (“we’re on our own here…”) and confidence in support as a long-term, stable source of employment. Damage to my relationship to donors. Although I had great love for individual donors, if I saw donors as a whole, and tracked the giving, I did not like the picture I got. “Donors” (considered as a whole) did not seem to show care for us. It responded to us when we met their needs: visited their churches, shared intimate details about our live, and gave them things, such as sermons and handwritten cards. Even with these things in place, there would be no guarantee that they would give. I could drive hundreds of miles to a church, present, have a warm reception, but not even have the travel paid. Finally, I had our support up. But I had also seen what sorts of sacrifices would be required to keep the support up. Was I willing to keep making these sacrifices? I was not. It was time to make a change.
As I charted out previous giving to track trends, I noticed that there had been a huge spike in giving when we had shared about our mental health crises in 2017. My first thoughts were positive: “people care about us.” But quickly turned negative, “people only show their care if we make enough drama.” How could I get that support again? Did I need to keep up the intensity? Make a fake message, so people would give?
As a deeply honest, intensely sincere person, the idea of “telling a story” (even if it were mostly true) deeply bothered me.
But I had to tell a story. In my great fund-raising drive of 2018, I told people the honest truth: that we were “missionaries” in one of the most secular, difficult places in the world. Yes, it's a first-world country. But the government is hostile to religion, and the population places pressure on outsiders. It is a hard place to be a Christian. Yet we served God in a variety of ways. But it was not well received. Several people explicitly said that they did not “get” why we needed to be there. What we did didn’t look enough like traditional, missionary ministry.
And so in 2019, my story changed. “We are campus pastors.” I told that message simply, clearly, unambiguously. And people “got” it. Funds started coming in.
The problem was, campus pastoring was only about 20% of what we actually did, and not the most important or successful part of our ministry. And so I felt fake when telling the message, and fake when I showed up at the campus ministry. And the “real” ministries that we did — like online ministry, hospitality, teaching, pastoral care — seemed to be “extras” or even “distractions” from our “real ministry.”
A rift was growing between the story I told people, and the life I actually lived. This rift seemed necessary, because “supporters” (considered as a whole) seemed to respond to “the story” more than “to me.” But this double life (while actually being true…I was a campus pastor) bothered me quite a bit.
I just wanted an honest, integrated life were I could do what I wanted to do, because I believed it was right, rather than taking selfies at a ministry where I was barely needed and had no passion, simply to keep up appearances so that I could make enough money to pay the mortgage. Really — who wants to live like that?
2. Life Purpose
Despite the difficulties with support, 2018 was a year of tremendous personal growth. I lost 50 lb, I applied for my dream job (which I did not get), I ran a marathon, and I began a journey of researching mental health, and standing up to my parents...and so this move was just as much about is making a change for ourselves as it was about us being pressured to move by external forces...
The truth is that we felt God leading us to leave. But God leads through events, and through factors. Two years ago, we were anchored in our mission field like a crustacean wedged deeply into a crevice in the rocks. But God used some events to begin to pry us free:
1. Support
It has become increasingly clear that our support base is “aging.” Our strongest support comes from our “home” community: people who knew us and loved us before missions. But every year away from this base means that these connections grow “older.” We have so much gratitude for those who have carried us for so many years. Every year, there is one or two more that has to redirect giving, for various reasons. As we seek to find support from new churches, we arrive as a stranger and a missionary, seeking support. The simple fact is that more and more support-raising energy is needed to provide the same amount of funds. The summer of 2017 really drove this reality home to me. I spent almost the entire summer on the road, and support raising. In August, I had not been able to gain enough new support to offset our lost supporters.
Another factor is that our missions finance department is, honestly, a complicated system to navigate. To be truthful, they could do better: and I have had discussions, and they are taking some steps to improve their system. But to this day, I can access my profile, and believe that I have sufficient funds, then the next day, or a few weeks later access them and see that actually, no: there is not enough to pay salary for the next month. There have been three specific times when this has happened: I have opened up my account to find that we were basically “broke,” and some desperate measures were required.
These desperate measures included public newsletters, and private phone calls that were very difficult for myself. Also, each of these “low funds” times were extremely difficult, emotional times. They all came when my wife was in a vulnerable place: four weeks pregnant, six weeks after giving birth, just bought a new house, etc.
These factors began to work on us. Although deeply rooted in our place, we began to shift.
[timeline of support]
I have never liked support raising. I enjoy writing newsletters, and keeping people informed. However, that alone never seems to be enough. From the beginning, I have had to make clear, specific, and direct “asks” for funds. Otherwise, people do not give. I have always hated this part, and i have hated how it twinges my relationships with people.
In spring of 2017, my wife and I spoke very honestly about our journey with mental health/burnout. This was very well received, and, unexpectedly, came with a large wellspring of financial support. We continued to raise support over the summer of 2017, and by the fall, we had a modest buffer (around $6,000), and were at reasonably high levels of support — somewhere around 85%. After working hard on support for some time, I thought I would be fine leaving it for a bit: we had a very intense, but very profitable spring. Probably our best yet.
Around Christmas, I logged on to our account, to see if we could still do a ministry trip, and charge it to our account. What I saw traumatized us for years, and may have been the beginning of the end of our missions journey. We had no funds: absolutely none. How had this happened? I did a quick search, and it seems that while I had been working, our support had languished. A $6,000 buffer disappeared quickly as a few donors stopped, and our 85% support had really been more like 75%.
We had just celebrated our fifth pregnancy (we were about a month pregnant) and we were working on renovating our “dream house.” But at the moment, the house was a disaster: it was nowhere near ready to sell. We would lose money if we needed to relocate. But it seemed that the funds were not there to stay. What could we do?
I began by speaking with our mission. I was angry, honestly, quite angry. Why could I never get straight answers about our funds? Depending who I called, I would be told that my funds were “just fine,” or “in desperate need of help.” I never knew what to believe. And here we had gone from healthy to almost dead in the water in three months: where was the administrative help to glance at our finances from time to time and say, “Looks like you should raise more support.” I spoke with them, and was told they were short staffed and could not do this. But I pay them nearly $1,000/month in admin fees. What do I get for this? All they do is administrate my funds: they don’t do anything else for me. And so why can’t they at least do a good job of that? But I was repeatedly told that it was simply and solely my responsibility to keep track of my own funds: they couldn’t help me there. Fine, but they wouldn't even give me good tools to do so! (I did help them by developing better tools. No idea if they shared these tools with other missionaries...)
I had several discussions with them, and over the course of the year was able to create a user-guide for their online finances. This was something, at least: and in the process, I was able to become an expert in reading their complex spreadsheets, and understanding the complex world of support. But the damage had been done.
I knew that I needed to make a strong appeal to supporters. I decided that honesty was the best policy: I just told people the truth (dubbed down as far as I could, in order not to shock them). I told people that we were in a precarious place, and really really needed support. This message was extremely hard to write, and at least one family member wrote us instructing us to stop “begging” for money.
Despite the strong appeal, the money did not gush, but trickled in.
I was not concerned, because I saw summer coming, and so I spent hours and days on the phone, lining up a busy summer schedule of visitation to new churches. Between visiting existing supporting churches, and candidating at new ones, then calling back to make asks, I spent the entire summer in full-time support raising mode. It was exhausting, and it took its toll on me.
With the emotions of constantly being in “giving” mode for support-raising, and making the heart-wrenchingly difficult “ask” calls, my body began struggling under the stress. One symptom was that I got a lymphatic infection at the beginning of the summer. A small cut got infected from working in the yard, and the infection began making a red line walk up my forearm. Without antibiotics, I would have died.
And then, oddly, it came back again, even with antibiotics. My immune system was simply not able to kick it out.
Then, two weeks later, while visiting a church, it came back again. This is not supposed to happen, as there was no fresh infection at the site.
My wife was also struggling. Mission finances had become so hard for her that I could not discuss them with her: she would have panic attacks or extremely high anxiety. And so I kept all of the stress to myself, or talked to a few trusted friends. But she still felt the tension. That summer, as my energy became depleted and my stress continued to rise, her anxiety rose as well until she was at the place where going out in public was difficult for her, and she couldn’t handle much as far as company or having people over. I did what I could by shopping and taking things “off of her plate.”
Towards August, things came to a head. I had visited six new churches, spent weeks on the road, and done somewhere near a hundred calls. And what did I have to show for it? I had gained one $20/month donor, and another at $50/month. But also? I had lost several donors, amounting to $100/month. So after all of that, I had moved backwards in our support.
One very emotional day, my wife was gone, and something triggered me. I went into the woods behind my house, and thrashed around, cutting trees, and yelling at God. “God, we are here. God, we are working. God, the worker is worthy of his wages. God, why aren’t you paying me?” I questioned it all: God’s goodness, our call, our whole life. None of it seemed to make any sense.
Afterwards, I called a trusted friend and longtime pastor and mentor. He sympathized with me, and encouraged me to trust God in spite of it all.
But the question I asked kept ringing in my ears: “Don’t you want us here? If you want us here, why aren’t you supporting us?” So maybe, just maybe…God didn’t want us here after all.
Then, we had our fifth child. With the strain of everything that had happened that summer, my wife was not at peak health going into the birth: and the birth was very difficult. Add to that, our child had an undiagnosed lip and tongue tie, which made life extremely difficult for a few weeks. Finally, things began to level out slightly after two months.
It was at that time that I checked our bank accounts and saw — for the first time — that we were in the negative numbers. We “owed” the mission $17.00. The silver lining was that now that we had a child, we could go on paternal leave, and allow funds to build up in our account. We did this, and there were no complications, leading to a $15,000 buffer.
I tried to explain this to my wife — bad news, we are broke, good news, funds are coming — but her body would not listen. It went into a very severe panic attack, with trembling and inability to move and breathe normally. We both vividly remember that night. “Yes,” she told me later, “it is great that we will get paternal leave money — but this is our last child! We can’t just keep banking on that!”
I tried to keep raising support — but now my time was divided with the ministry startup. But money finally began to come in. After an extremely hard year, around Christmas quite a few people increased or started giving. By January — one year after our worst moment — came our best moment. We had a large buffer (from the paternal leave) and were at over 100% support.
But the damage had been done. Damage to my wife's trust in missions finances. Damage to my confidence in the mission (“we’re on our own here…”) and confidence in support as a long-term, stable source of employment. Damage to my relationship to donors. Although I had great love for individual donors, if I saw donors as a whole, and tracked the giving, I did not like the picture I got. “Donors” (considered as a whole) did not seem to show care for us. It responded to us when we met their needs: visited their churches, shared intimate details about our live, and gave them things, such as sermons and handwritten cards. Even with these things in place, there would be no guarantee that they would give. I could drive hundreds of miles to a church, present, have a warm reception, but not even have the travel paid. Finally, I had our support up. But I had also seen what sorts of sacrifices would be required to keep the support up. Was I willing to keep making these sacrifices? I was not. It was time to make a change.
As I charted out previous giving to track trends, I noticed that there had been a huge spike in giving when we had shared about our mental health crises in 2017. My first thoughts were positive: “people care about us.” But quickly turned negative, “people only show their care if we make enough drama.” How could I get that support again? Did I need to keep up the intensity? Make a fake message, so people would give?
As a deeply honest, intensely sincere person, the idea of “telling a story” (even if it were mostly true) deeply bothered me.
But I had to tell a story. In my great fund-raising drive of 2018, I told people the honest truth: that we were “missionaries” in one of the most secular, difficult places in the world. Yes, it's a first-world country. But the government is hostile to religion, and the population places pressure on outsiders. It is a hard place to be a Christian. Yet we served God in a variety of ways. But it was not well received. Several people explicitly said that they did not “get” why we needed to be there. What we did didn’t look enough like traditional, missionary ministry.
And so in 2019, my story changed. “We are campus pastors.” I told that message simply, clearly, unambiguously. And people “got” it. Funds started coming in.
The problem was, campus pastoring was only about 20% of what we actually did, and not the most important or successful part of our ministry. And so I felt fake when telling the message, and fake when I showed up at the campus ministry. And the “real” ministries that we did — like online ministry, hospitality, teaching, pastoral care — seemed to be “extras” or even “distractions” from our “real ministry.”
A rift was growing between the story I told people, and the life I actually lived. This rift seemed necessary, because “supporters” (considered as a whole) seemed to respond to “the story” more than “to me.” But this double life (while actually being true…I was a campus pastor) bothered me quite a bit.
I just wanted an honest, integrated life were I could do what I wanted to do, because I believed it was right, rather than taking selfies at a ministry where I was barely needed and had no passion, simply to keep up appearances so that I could make enough money to pay the mortgage. Really — who wants to live like that?
2. Life Purpose
Despite the difficulties with support, 2018 was a year of tremendous personal growth. I lost 50 lb, I applied for my dream job (which I did not get), I ran a marathon, and I began a journey of researching mental health, and standing up to my parents...and so this move was just as much about is making a change for ourselves as it was about us being pressured to move by external forces...
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