I have been grading the mid-term assignment for my Foundations of Missions course. Students identify a local church and then search for evidence for the importance of global missions.

Here are the instructions from the syllabus:

Missions Involvement in the Local Church: Discover & Report. Find out how your local church participates in activities, promotions, services, trips, and ways to be involved in missions education, missions financing and missions prayer support. Look for evidence on bulletin boards, pre-service slides, newsletters, and web sites. Talk to three lay leaders  involved with promoting missions and your pastor. If you really want to earn a good grade, talk to your district missions president (or his or her equivalent in your denomination) about his or her expectations for missions support among churches on the district. The outline of the paper should be: Why This Church Thinks Global Missions Is Important, How This Local Church Promotes Global Missions, Surprising Things I Learned. 

As a result of grading these assignments, I have been reminded about the proliferation of various Baptist groups in Appalachia splintering throughout the American South during the late-19th century. One of the distinctions between some of these groups included the means by which a local church supported global mission efforts, particularly between missionary Baptists and anti-missionary Baptists.

Missionary Baptists supported a foreign missions board that selected, trained, and sent missionaries. The local churches partnered with these agencies, and outsourced foreign mission strategy to organizations within the denomination that were directly and more closely linked with these foreign locations. Strategy was left to the experts.

Anti-missionary Baptists sounds harsh, but it really isn't. "Anti-missionary" as a modifier means not relying on a mission agency or mission board to make decisions or develop strategies for foreign missions. The local church, from this perspective, sent and supported individual missionaries directly rather than send monies through a mission agency. Part of this trend arose due to the mistrust of how these agencies were governed, sometimes with little outside accountability.

This direct support without intervening agency is an implication of congregationalism, represented generally by Baptists, in which the local church is the deciding authority.

The alternative is connectionalism, represented generally by Methodists, in which the local church acts in unison within a network of local churches and mission agencies. These definitions are grand simplifications but they get to the gist of the issue.

So, the questions rattling around my mind once again:

• In what ways has the development of local church to foreign field partnerships just created another expression of congregationalism?
• How have the difficulties in funding the missionary efforts through denominational structures become signs of an "anti-missionary (agency)" mindset?  
• Are local congregations capable of strategizing, selecting, and sending individuals on foreign mission assignments?
• Are local congregations capable of supporting indigenous, localized leadership without sufficient cultural understanding?
• What could go wrong with any of these scenarios?

On the first Sunday of October, The Shepherd's House met for the second time in our regular place of worship at Bad Apple Pub in Howard, Ohio. 

While preaching and presiding over the Eucharist, I noticed one of the workers pop into the service. This is not uncommon to see a few workers here and there since there are several prepping the restaurant and bar for a noontime opening. This worker came out and watched for bit, then went back into the kitchen area. And, she did so several times.

After the service, I saw Sonya talking to her. After a bit, Sonya filled me in. What a story! Her name is Melissa and she caught up to me before we finished packing up. She told me and a few others standing outside on the veranda, about how she once died. 

It was a major car accident not far from where we were standing a few years prior. The EMTs reported she lost consciousness, and a pulse. They were able to get her heart started, and she regained consciousness. She wanted to get her life right with God. 

She worked all the time, like every day, and could not get time away from work to attend church.

A couple of weeks ago, Nikki, the co-owner of Bad Apple Pub, told Melissa, "Guess what? The church is coming to you." 

​And, we did.