Should a church equally support all church members who desire to do foreign missions?

Churches have limited resources. This means that churches will have to make tough decisions about who to support, and how much. To help think through those tough decisions, here are some factors to consider:

1. Does the congregation own this person’s ministry as their own?
2. Has the person sought pastoral counsel about their desire to do missions work or are they acting more like a lone ranger?
3. Is the work valuable and strategic? Or is it something that, while fine in its own right, is not a particularly high priority for the church’s mission strategy?
4. Is the person going to further work in a region the church already targets, or do his or her plans have little to do with the church’s existing missions strategy?

The point in asking these questions is not to discourage people from doing certain kinds of work or from going to certain regions simply because the church is not focusing on them. Rather, the point is to think about how to maximize the impact a church can make by focusing most of its efforts on a particular region.