Andrea Sears – A Life Overseas |

An Invitation to Help Improve Member Care

by Andrea Sears

For too long, people care and development (member care) for cross-cultural workers has been operating with no shared guidelines to shape our field. But now, the Shared Foundations Initiative at MTI (Mission Training International) aims to gather the voices and wisdom of the Great Commission community to work together toward thriving for cross-cultural workers. We are currently accepting submissions for the Thrive Outcomes Project, and you are invited to participate!

[For more information on the Shared Foundations Initiative, scroll to the bottom of the article below the author bio.]

This project seeks to answer the question: What does it take for a cross-cultural worker to thrive? As cross-cultural workers yourselves, you know what helps you thrive and what hinders your thriving. We want to include your voices in this important research.

We believe the Thrive Outcomes Project has the potential to:

add depth and clarity to what member care is and does,
strengthen organizational conversations,
help practitioners access quality thinking on how to support cross-cultural workers well, and
lay strong foundations for collaboration.

We cannot build this project alone. Would you consider contributing your voice and insights for the strengthening of cross-cultural workers? This is an evolving research endeavor, and we have published preliminary results from initial submissions, which you can check out here.

See what ideas are still missing or need to be strengthened, and submit your ideas here. We’re looking not only for your personal experience, but also for evidence from books, blogs, podcasts, or published academic research (when available) to support your ideas. This helps us to ensure that the results are strong, evidence-based, and credible, which will increase their utility to organizational leadership and care teams.

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Andrea Sears and her husband, Seth, spent thirteen years in Costa Rica, working in the largest immigrant squatter settlement in Central America, and founded the community development ministry giveDIGNITY. She now runs the ministry from the U.S. and recently accepted a faculty position at John Brown University, teaching Intercultural Studies, Humanitarian & Disaster Relief, and Bible courses. She previously oversaw a missionary attrition study, which was summarized in a series here at A Life Overseas.

Additional information about the Shared Foundations Initiative:

The Shared Foundations Initiative (SFI) exists to strengthen the health, resilience, and long-term thriving of cross-cultural workers from Global North cultures by cultivating shared language, fostering alignment, and hosting thoughtful, collaborative conversations related to cross-cultural worker care and development.

Rather than prescribing uniform practices, we seek to offer ideas and examples of practices that could be done, to help organizations and individuals translate shared values into a lived reality within their specific contexts (denomination, organizational culture, organizational size, cultural context, etc).

Our vision is a Great Commission community in which quality care & development for those sent is consistently understood and practiced, contributing to the faithful witness of God’s love both to those sent and to those they are serving.

SFI’s vision is shaped by the following guiding commitments:

Unity without Uniformity
We affirm shared values and principles while honoring the diversity of organizational models, theological traditions, cultures, and contexts.
Field-Informed Wisdom
Guidance emerges from the lived experience, research, and discernment of practitioners and organizations actively engaged in cross-cultural worker care.
Non-Prescriptive Influence
The initiative does not set standards, accredit programs, or enforce compliance. Its influence is catalytic, invitational, and relational.
Holistic Understanding of Thriving
Cross-cultural worker health includes spiritual, emotional, relational, physical, vocational, and communal dimensions across the life cycle of service.
Learning as a Shared Stewardship
Knowledge is held as a commons to be cultivated, shared, and responsibly stewarded for the good of the whole field.

The cornerstone of our approach is applied research into what factors are helping cross-cultural workers to thrive. This research is conducted by researchers and practitioners that have come together to form the John Powell Institute (JPI) at MTI.

Discerning God’s Call (unpacking the spiritual factors that affect the decision to leave the field)

by Andrea Sears

The mission field is a place of tremendous opportunities for spiritual growth. We learn to depend on the Lord so much more when we have our normal comforts and culture stripped away. We see God doing amazing things in the lives of others, even miracles, that strengthen our faith. We see Him working in our own lives to make Himself more real than ever to us.

The mission field can also be a place of tremendous spiritual challenge. Traumatic things happen, leaving us wondering about God’s goodness and presence with us. We often see pain and suffering on a new scale that gives us doubts about God’s sovereign plan. Unusual isolation, stressors, and temptations may present themselves, and a lack of accountability can lead to moral failure. Satan desires to take advantage of our vulnerability to destroy not only our work and our families, but even our faith itself.

In a 2017 survey on missionary attrition, we measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be spiritual factors. The table summarizes the results for each question by providing:

The percentage of respondents who said that they experienced this factor on the mission field.
The percentage of respondents who experienced the factor that said that this factor did (to some degree) affect their return decision, be it a slight, moderate, or strong effect.
The “strength index” of each factor, weighted for the size of the effect on their return decision.

The spiritual factors that reached significant levels of strength of influence were issues of call: (1) feeling called back home, (2) feeling unsure about the continued call, (3) feeling no longer called to that location, and (4) working oneself out of a job (another way of feeling that the call has ended).

These are all healthy reasons for transition. There are seasons in life, and God often makes it clear to His cross-cultural workers when it is time to move on to the next thing. This can be because of a new sense of call to something back home or other factors (such as family, health, or team struggles).

God sometimes uses these very circumstances to convince us that it is time to go. We must all pay attention to the seasons of our cross-cultural work and where we can be most strategically effective at different times.

It is also noteworthy that nearly one-half of missionaries felt at some time:

a disconnection in their relationship with the Lord (47%),
unable to connect with a local church (47%),
that spiritual leaders and sending churches back home had forgotten about them (46%), and/or
overwhelmed by spiritual oppression (41%).

These results should disabuse us of the notion of the super-spiritual Christian missionary who never has hard moments in their spiritual life because of their dedicated service to the Lord. Even (and especially) those who have sacrificed much to carry out the Great Commission can have dry periods or dark nights of the soul, often indeed brought on by the situations they face overseas.

Yet there is often a church and missions culture that discourages missionaries from sharing these experiences with others. It makes people uncomfortable if missionaries come down off the pedestal and share their struggles. This dynamic layers isolation onto the spiritual struggles themselves, exacerbating the vulnerability even further.

Missionaries are often confronted with harsh circumstances, spiritual attack, ambiguity in discerning their call, and doubts about their own competency and/or God’s plans in the place where they serve. Some will even reach the point of questioning their own faith.

To a degree, the spiritual health of a missionary is their responsibility. They are accountable for their devotional and prayer life, congregating habits, and practice of spiritual disciplines. However, these things are not simple formulas that automatically produce intimacy with God and spiritual invulnerability.

There are also things beyond the missionary’s control, including the inscrutable ways of God Himself, invisible powers and principalities that seek to destroy our soul, and interactions between circumstances and body/mind that affect our spiritual condition. We cannot dismiss spiritual distress with a simple “Well, he/she is obviously just not walking closely enough with the Lord.”

Finally, more than 1 in 3 missionaries (38%) no longer felt sure that their methods of sharing the gospel were effective. For those who experienced this, it was a factor in their departure about half (52%) of the time. Eighty-eight survey participants shared why they questioned the effectiveness of the methods, and most concerns fell into three categories: (1) the style of evangelization used (often mass evangelization without follow-up for discipleship), (2) the lack of cultural contextualization in the message and tools used to present the Gospel, and (3) the proper role of foreign missionaries in balance with local leadership.

There were also secondary concerns regarding Christian witness being undermined by poor testimony and methods being driven by the desires of foreign donors rather than what was actually needed locally.

In light of these results, here are some questions to consider:

Would your sending churches be shocked to see these statistics?

If so, what can we do to help sending churches de-lionize their missionaries and understand them as sinners vulnerable to spiritual discouragement and questions just like everyone else?

What can we do to modernize our missions methods and contextualize the Gospel better for the cultures we serve?

How do the roles of foreign missionaries need to change as the Gospel takes root in a culture or community?

How can we better guide our donors to understand the best use of funds, instead of letting their desires drive our methods?

These are not easy questions with simple answers, but they are important ones that global workers will continue to face as we try to stay relevant in our execution of the Great Commission.

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Andrea Sears and her husband, Seth, spent 13 years working in the largest immigrant squatter settlement in Central America (in Costa Rica) and founded the Christian community development ministry giveDIGNITY. She holds a master’s degree in intercultural studies from Johnson University. She currently lives in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, directs the ministry’s local team from afar, and enjoys living near family and being a new grandmother.

How Do Financial Factors Impact Missionary Attrition?

by Andrea Sears

Life on the mission field includes unique financial stressors. Many cross-cultural workers raise their own salary and expenses. Inviting others to join in the work of the Great Commission through financial contributions is a blessing, and helps to grow us in humility and trust in God’s provision. But it can also be uncomfortable and stressful when we don’t know when or if our next paycheck will arrive.

In addition to the pressures of fundraising, life overseas is subject to other financial wild cards such as fluctuating exchange rates, inflation, immigration fees, unexpected expenses, and even increased risk of financial loss due to robberies. Workers may find that what they raised is suddenly not sufficient for a variety of unpredictable reasons.

No one becomes a missionary thinking that they will get materially rich. In fact, many of us leave more lucrative positions in our home country to become missionaries despite the cut in pay. The missionary life is definitely not about making money, nor should it be.

But even with the right motivations for mission work, ongoing stress about finances can take its toll. In our survey, we measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be financial factors:

I felt uncomfortable raising money.
My financial support was low.
I struggled to adjust to my missions salary.
I struggled with financial discipline and budgeting.
The cost of living (or inflation) in my host country was higher than expected.
I was unable to pay immigration fees and costs for residency in my host country.
Local currency exchange rates made my support level insufficient.
I was unable to meet debt obligations.
I was unable to save money.
I was unable to pay for children’s schooling.
I was unable to plan for retirement.

Quantitative Results

The following table summarizes the results for each question by providing:

The percentage of respondents who said that they experienced this factor on the mission field,
The percentage of respondents who experienced the factor that said that this factor did (to some degree) affect their return decision, be it a slight, moderate, or strong effect, and
The “strength index” of each factor, weighted for the size of the effect on their return decision.

Discussion of Quantitative Results

The majority of returning missionaries felt some degree of discomfort with raising money (67%) and experienced low financial support (53%). Both affected their return decision to some degree at least half of the time. The strength factors (0.93 and 0.95, respectively) were the largest for this section, but they were moderate when compared to other factors in the survey.

The next tier of financial concerns included cost-of-living or inflation surprises (strength factor 0.73) and being unable to save money (0.75) or plan for retirement (0.80). While many missionaries are able to raise support for their normal monthly expenses, it is less common to raise enough for future financial planning through savings and investment. While this may not be a problem for short-term assignments, long-term missionaries may find themselves financially vulnerable later in life because they have sacrificed their highest earning years in the work force to missions.

38% of missionaries struggled to adjust to their missions salary, but it affected the return decision of only 1/3 of those and not to a large degree (0.53). It seems that most missionaries are prepared to buckle down and manage their budget very carefully. As a result, the remaining items surveyed were either experienced by few or were of low concern to those experiencing them.

Funding Status at Departure to Mission Field

In addition to the quantitative scaled data, we asked each participant if they went to the mission field fully funded. If they did not, we asked them to supply a percent of support raised relative to their goal.

75% of participants in this study went fully funded to the field. The remaining 25% went with varying degrees of funds raised relative to their goal, as indicated in the chart above. Individuals who went to the field before reaching full funding went at an average of 63% of their goal and a median of 70%.

When we divide the sample into subgroups of fully-funded and not-fully-funded, we see that the not-fully-funded experienced significantly higher levels of financial distress on all factors. First, we can see that the percent that experienced each stressor was higher for all measured statements.

Next, we can see that in nearly all cases, the percent of not-fully-funded respondents who felt that the factor affected their return decision was also higher.

Finally, when comparing strength factors, we can see that nearly all of the financial factors were more heavily weighted in the return decision for the not-fully-funded group.

This analysis shows that there is a demonstrable correlation between going to the field without full funding and experiencing higher levels of financial distress.

Matthew 6:19-20 exhorts us to pursue that which is eternal, rather than that which is temporal. But the Bible also teaches us to plan ahead (Proverbs 13:16), save diligently (Proverbs 21:20, I Corinthians 16:2), and be prepared for emergencies (Genesis 41:34-36, Ecclesiastes 11:2). Missionaries are not exempt from these teachings – all Christians are responsible to be wise administrators in caring for our families and others.

Given that so many missionaries experience discomfort with raising money, we have some options before us to help manage the financial stress that comes with the missionary life:

comprehensive training and preparation on the theology of fundraising
consulting on strategy and event planning
accountability for meeting planned goals
investigation of other models for missionary support (for example, tentmaking, business as mission, or church/denomination salaries for missionaries)
mission policy balancing “stepping out in faith” with required thresholds for funding before departure
provision of “safety nets” for temporary low support while on the field
flexibility in furlough policy that allows balancing of family and fundraising needs
insurance coverage that helps missionaries avoid high unexpected medical or mental health care costs
required savings and retirement contributions

Does your agency offer these types of support? Are there other innovative ways of helping missionaries with finances that you have seen?

There is sometimes a sense in missions that “people are donating money for the direct impact that I will have on the mission field, not for me to have insurance or savings or be able to plan for my future.” We rightly feel a tremendous burden to be good stewards of the money that we have raised. But that does not mean we must neglect our own needs.

Expecting missionaries to be paupers can actually cause them to stumble and become proud and competitive about how frugal and unworldly they are. This sin of pride in frugality is no less sinful than the blatant idolatry of riches.

Financial safeguards are an important part of giving the missionary a sense of some minimum level of security at a vulnerable time when most of the security they have known is stripped away. The missionary should not put their faith in that security instead of in God, but this does not mean that they should not have it at all.

Providing for missionaries’ financial needs within reason will free them to be the healthy workers that we need to keep on the mission field. Surely we can do this in balance, providing for the emotional and physical well-being of our workers while still being careful stewards of God’s resources (which include not just the money, but the missionaries themselves). It is well worth the investment of donors’ money and should be seen as a necessary part of ensuring a missionary’s health and resilience, thereby extending their longevity.

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Expectations: Future Disappointments, Planned Out in Advance

by Andrea Sears

Our perception of an experience can be greatly colored by our expectations. On the one hand, missionaries tend to understand that we must hold any expectations lightly as we travel to live in another country. We know that with so much change in our lives at once, the nature of some of those changes will surely be unexpected and surprising. We are prepared to be flexible. However, if the dissonance between expectations and reality is large enough, it can cause pervasive dissatisfaction that negatively impacts our assessment of the missionary experience and ultimately causes attrition.

It can also be true that we enter new situations with expectations that we don’t even realize we have. It’s possible that we have not been adequately informed of what to expect at all, so our imaginations have filled in the lack of information. We can even romanticize what life will be like on the mission field, filled with rewarding work for the Lord and saving souls day after day, with our well-adjusted families serving at our sides. For if the Lord is with us and has called us to this life, everything will be great, right?

It is important to examine the role that expectations play in the missionary experience, along with their potential role in causing missionary attrition. We all are going to have some expectations upon going to the mission field about what things will be like – whether we should or not, and whether they are realistic or not. It is important to recognize what our expectations are, and whether they are realistic, so that we can manage them (and the ensuing disappointments when we and others fail to live up to our ideals).

In a 2017 study on missionary attrition, we measured the frequency and strength of influence on the decision to leave the mission field for the following statements. This table summarizes the results by providing:

The percentage of respondents who said that they experienced this factor on the mission field,
The percentage of respondents who experienced the factor who said that this factor did (to some degree) affect their return decision, be it a slight, moderate, or strong effect, and
The “strength index” of each factor, weighted for the size of the effect on their return decision.

The two areas that reached statistical significance on the strength factors were unmet expectations regarding team members and job responsibilities. In addition to the scaled data above, we collected open comments on these and other areas.

In our survey, 38.6% of participants responded to the question, “If applicable, how did your team members not meet your expectations?” One wise commenter gave an excellent overall perspective on this question:

“Tricky question because the only way people fail to live up to expectations is if we forget that they are people who are still trying to die to self and can have bad days and seasons . . . even if they are missionaries! In the end, you have to set your expectations on God, and as leaders build systems with accountability and systems to help protect people from leaning on anything other than God’s strength.”

Of the many comments we received, the most common ways that team relationships disappointed were in the level of interpersonal dysfunction or emotional unhealthiness of team members; the level of cohesiveness/community on their team; differences in personality, politics, life stage, etc.; the quality of leadership; and the level of disengagement on the team.

32% of survey participants responded to the question, “If applicable, how did your job responsibilities not meet your expectations?” The most common concerns were that the role was not as advertised, it was a poor fit with their skills, the workload was too low or too high (more often too high), it was a poorly defined role (which can easily cause conflict on the team when toes get stepped on), they felt “put in a box” (not free to use their unique skills and ideas), and that leadership on what they were supposed to be doing was inadequate.

Mission agencies, sending churches, missionaries, and family and friends of missionaries can benefit from this examination of expectations that missionaries have when going to the field and the many ways that real life can fail to live up to them. It can help to understand the common feelings and experiences missionaries share and to be aware of how to support them more effectively through it.

This is an extremely brief summary of a 37-page report on expectations factors related to missionary attrition, with lots of sample comments to delve into. For the full report on expectations factors related to missionary attrition, click here.

*Thanks to Elizabeth George for the insightful definition of expectations found in the article title.

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How Does Physical Health Impact a Missionary’s Decision to Leave the Field?

by Andrea Sears

There are many things about living on the mission field that can influence the physical health of missionaries and their families. When the body does not cooperate, even the most simple of tasks can become difficult. Sickness can necessitate trips to the home country for treatment, or even permanent relocation to an area where full recovery is possible.

We measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be host-country-related factors:

I experienced significant health problems.
My spouse experienced significant health problems.
My child/children experienced significant health problems.
There was inadequate health care in my host country.
I had a lack of health insurance.
I felt that stress affected my health.
I felt that stress affected the health of others in my family.
I had limited access to clean water.
I felt that the climate/geography affected my health negatively.
I felt that pollution affected my health negatively.

When it comes to health matters, neither missionaries nor their sending churches and agencies are necessarily in control of how their bodies will respond to physical conditions, challenges, and illness. Country factors impacting health, such as climate and pollution, can hardly be changed. However, it is hoped that this data will be helpful for its descriptive value, as well as for the limited conclusions we can draw about preventable factors of attrition related to health. It may also suggest areas for deeper etiological research into the health of missionaries.

Results
The table below summarizes the results for each question by providing:

The percentage of respondents who said that they experienced this factor on the mission field,
The percentage of respondents who experienced the factor that said that this factor did (to some degree) affect their return decision, be it a slight, moderate, or strong effect, and
The “strength index” of each factor, weighted for the size of the effect on their return decision.

Discussion of Quantitative Results
It is noteworthy that more than half of missionaries reported having serious health problems. More than one-third reported serious health problems for their spouse. And one-third reported serious health problems for at least one child. These are very high rates of sickness for the periods of time being reported (the average tenure was approximately 8 1/2 years). In all three cases, over half of the respondents reported that this issue affected their decision to return to their home country, and to an overall moderate degree. It is hard to know how much overlap there is between the three categories, but clearly many families have multiple people experiencing significant health problems, which can compound the stress of dealing with them.

The most significant finding of this section (and indeed, one of the most significant in the survey) is the degree to which participants felt that stress affected both their health and the health of their families. More than two-thirds felt that stress affected their health, while half felt that stress affected the health of other family members. In both scenarios, this affected the return decision in 68-70% of cases, and to a relatively strong degree. These findings seem to indicate that the whole family experiences the stress of living on the mission field and is affected by it. Spouses and children are not immune. In addition, when stress is affecting the health of the whole family, the likelihood of attrition increases.

Qualitative Data
To survey the most frequent types of health problems experienced by missionaries, in addition to the quantitative scaled data, we collected open comments on the following question:

If applicable, please describe any serious health problems that you, your spouse, and/or your child/children experienced.

The collective suffering reported truly shows the sobering costs of the missions call, and the astonishing bravery and stamina of missionaries in facing them.

Many missionaries reported here on mental health issues that they and their families experienced. There is a subsequent section specifically pertaining to mental health, but at this point in the survey, respondents would not have known this, so some provided it here. The analysis of and commentary on mental-health-related data will be set aside until publishing of the relevant section, except for one very important observation: Missionaries reported mental health issues more than any physical health category, and this occurred without them being asked to include such issues specifically.

We must remember that these were self-reported “serious health problems.” We did not ask specifically about each possible health problem, nor define what constituted a serious health problem.

Stress as a Contributing Factor
An important observation is the role that stress can play in many of these physical ailments, either giving disease a foothold or exacerbating a problem that would otherwise be less severe. In fact, 52 commenters specifically mentioned that they believed or were told that their physical health problems were caused by high stress:

Some were diagnosed with cortisol regulation problems and adrenal fatigue, directly related to long-term stress exposure.
Others developed disorders that are known or suspected to have stress as a contributing factor, such as migraines, gastric issues, high blood pressure, autoimmune disorders, insomnia, or mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, or PTSD.
Still others had chronic health conditions that were potentially worsened by stress, such as asthma, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, or cancer. Stressed individuals are also more susceptible to viruses and infections, and take longer to recover from injuries and surgeries.

Environment as a Contributing Factor
Sometimes the physical environment in the host country was not conducive to maintaining the health of the missionaries and/or their family. This included primarily air pollution, but also natural substances that caused allergies or severe reactions.

Mental and Physical “Grit”
Reading the stories of health trials reveals one type of high price paid by some missionaries for their commitment to the call. The mental and physical toughness of these missionaries is also apparent. Far from being “weak” or debilitated by their health struggles, they were more typically strong individuals who stubbornly persisted for some time despite them.

Having a health emergency is frightening enough in one’s home country. Being in a place where you are not sure you can even get the medical care that you or your children need can cause an entirely different level of anxiety and uncertainty. One participant shared, “Frankly, any health issue seemed to be serious in an overseas context.” This is a sense of vulnerability that people in the home country cannot often understand.

It is truly impressive how much missionaries are willing to endure for the privilege of participating in the Great Commission. Sending agencies, churches, and friends back home should be aware of what missionaries may go through physically in order to provide the necessary emotional and practical support when health problems strike.

Lack of Support as a Contributing Factor
Even when faced with severe physical or emotional challenges, some said that they still would have stayed were it not for other barriers that came into play. For some, it was a lack of team support during health trials. Others even felt that team dynamics were actively creating stress in their lives that contributed to the health problems they experienced.

Conclusions
What can we learn from this data to help us better serve our missionaries? How can missionaries best protect themselves from health dangers on the mission field?

Physical health is important to all people everywhere. It enables us to have the energy and ability to follow our dreams and calling. When the body is working well, we don’t think about it. When it malfunctions, restoring it can quickly become the focus of our concern. Poor health can hobble our ministry as quickly as team conflict, family emergencies, or a loss of funding.

We must not idolize physical health, for we know that our bodies are subject to decay and that God works through suffering as much as (or more than!) He does through health. But neither must we ignore it, naïvely missing its importance to our ability to serve. With this model of being good stewards of our missionaries’ health, but also recognizing that we are not in full control of it, we can do the following things to lower attrition:

We can ensure that missionaries have adequate health insurance or a financial plan for the payment of health services.
We can train missionary candidates on physical health issues common to the area to which they are going, how to diagnose and treat them, and how to seek medical care when it is needed.
We can also train missionary candidates on the importance of stress management, and the effect that stress can have on their health.
We can practice good self-care as missionaries, being careful to steward our own health well. This includes pursuing healthy diet, exercise, and sleep habits; maintaining a healthy weight; and remembering to have regular times of rest.
We can check-in about physical health when delivering missionary care.
We can provide mutual care and sensitivity to team members who are experiencing health challenges.
And finally, we can remember that even when all these things are done, there is still a spiritual war taking place in the unseen realm and physical problems may be a sign of spiritual attack. We must remember to avail ourselves of the spiritual armor of God, prayer, time in the Word, the laying on of hands, fellowship with other believers, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

And when sickness does come, we can remember that this too is forming us into Christ’s image. God still loves and cares for us even when He allows us to pass through difficult times, and these same trials can be used to glorify Him.

For more detail and specific comments in the qualitative section, visit www.themissionsexperience.weebly.com/blog, or email andrea.d.sears@gmail.com to request the full pdf document of the results.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 11 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

How Do Cultural Factors Influence a Missionary’s Decision to Leave?

by Andrea Sears

In reviewing the cultural factors that are part of a missionary’s decision to return to their passport country, it is relevant to consider where survey participants served. Of the 714 survey participants who answered this question, the following chart represents the proportion that served in each region:

For the purposes of the chart, Mexico was included in Central America with other Latino cultures, though it is technically part of North America. Fifteen percent of participants served on more than one continent, and were given the “various” designation since they could not be assigned to only one continent. All others served in only one country, or in various countries within the same continent. The majority (68.2%) of participants served in one country only, 18.6% served in two countries, 7.6% served in three countries, and 5.6% served in four or more countries during their time on the mission field.

Because survey participants served all over the globe in very disparate cultures, their struggles were at times common and at times very different. We measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be host-country-related factors:

I struggled with the local language of my host country.
I struggled with the local culture of my host country.
I struggled with local relationships in my host country.
I missed the developed world.
I experienced security issues.
I had limited access to electricity and/or technology.
I felt taken advantage of by locals for resources.
I experienced conflict with locals that grew out of cultural differences.
I experienced conflict with locals that was unaffected by cultural differences.
I had to leave the country because of immigration/visa issues.
I was in danger of persecution because of my faith/vocation.
I was in danger of persecution because of my nationality.
Political instability or armed conflict made it too dangerous to stay.
National economic instability made it untenable to stay.
The government restricted missionary activities to the point that I was unable to work in the area of my calling.
The climate was difficult for me to live in.
A natural disaster caused me to be evacuated.

Results
This group of factors has relatively low strength indexes for most of the items. While some cultural factors have very high numbers of people experiencing them, usually these factors did not affect the decision to leave, and if it did, it did so to a small degree.

Two of the strongest factors in this group were: (1) having to leave the country because of immigration/visa issues and (2) having security issues. Interestingly, the issues experienced by the most people are thankfully those that are at least in part within the missionary’s locus of control, such as the first four statements on the list. This is a place to look for preventable attrition and prepare missionaries to better weather cultural stress.

Language Study
We also collected data on how long each participant studied the language of their host culture (in a formal sense), in order to see if there is a correlation between length of study and tenure, or between length of study and reporting a struggle with the language.

Based on this data, the greatest proportion of those who studied formally did so for at least 9 months, though there is a small bump at 3-6 months. Those who spent at least 3 months in formal language study stayed on the field for at least an average of 9 ½ years, while those who did not study or studied for less than 3 months had an average of 6-7 years of tenure.

The majority of participants admitted to difficulty with the language, regardless of whether or how long they studied it. However, those studying more than 6 months tended to have their language struggles factor less into their return decision. Those studying less than 3 months more often reported that language was a moderate to strong factor in their return decision.

Culture Struggles
We also collected open comments on the following question: “What aspects of the local culture did you struggle with?”

Themes that consistently emerged in the comments, ranked by prevalence, were: (1) honor/shame culture and the resulting style of indirect communication, (2) income disparity, (3) gender inequity, (4) corruption/crime, (5) demands of hospitality and having less privacy, and (6) less focus on order/efficiency.

Other themes also frequently mentioned were visibly not fitting in, language difficulties, fatalism, different concepts of time/pace of life, local supernaturalistic beliefs, and different cleanliness/hygiene standards.

Unfortunately, comments about culture often contained tones of negative judgment, with indirect communication being categorized as “dishonesty” or fatalism being called “laziness.” One thing we can learn from these responses is that our own worldview permeates deep in our psyche and defines for us what we think is the “right” way to do things, leading us to evaluate others unfavorably when they don’t share our values. Part of being a successful missionary is intentionally rooting out our own ethnocentrism in expecting others to be like us (or to work on becoming like us).

Local Relationships
We also collected comments on the question: “What did you struggle with in your local relationships?”

Themes commonly mentioned were language barriers, developing intimacy and trust, the time required to build friendship as an outsider, differing relationship expectations, and distinguishing between true friendships and ministry.

Conclusion
Culture shock and culture stress are common, but also expected and apparently not a primary direct cause of missionary attrition. But they certainly affect the quality of the missionary experience and impact the overall resilience of the missionary. And lowered resilience certainly does affect missionary attrition.

Conclusions and recommendations include preparing missionaries to cross-cultures well, including a list of topics to cover in training and coaching; learning and using the skill of cognitive reframing to minimize ethnocentrism; curbing certain Western tendencies to adjust to different settings; and self-care.

To see the full detailed report and discussion of results, click here. You can subscribe on the website for notifications when future results are published. You can also email andrea.d.sears@gmail.com for a pdf if you want to save or share the results.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

New data confirms that team conflict is one of the primary factors in missionary attrition

by Andrea Sears

Finally, what is certainly the longest of the survey report sections is finished: team factors. (You can explore other results from the missionary attrition survey here, here, and here.) These results confirmed that team conflict is a primary factor for attrition, but it is not the primary factor.

It is important to note that no single agency represented more than 7% of the total sample. 221 mission or sending agencies were represented. 68% of those had only one participant in the study, 27% had 2-9 participants in the study, and only 5% had more than 10 participants in the study. This shows that the survey results represent a broad sample of missionaries with a diverse representation of agencies, and that the sampling from any given agency did not disproportionately influence the results.

This section of the report measured responses to the following statements:

My missionary term was up.
There was a conflict on the team.
There was a scandal on the team.
I struggled to understand my role on the team.
I did not have a team.
I struggled to balance my role(s) as a spouse/parent with ministry expectations.
As a woman, I felt marginalized or devalued, or that men were given more opportunities to lead/contribute.
I had insufficient local supervision/accountability.
I had too much local supervision/accountability.
I received too little missionary care.
I did not feel at liberty to pursue my passion and call within the team/agency that I was a part of.
I disconnected with the vision of the mission.
I had too little administrative support from my home base.
I felt that some of my team members/leaders lacked integrity.
It was time for me to retire.

Past studies have indicated that conflict with other missionaries has been a frequent or predominant reason for attrition. We wanted to dig into this issue and try to find some clues about the reasons that conflict occurs. We also analyzed the responses of younger missionaries as a subset to see if generational differences exist in expectations about how a team should work.

The strongest factors explored in this section are seen in the areas of team conflict, role confusion, the lack of missionary care, feeling restricted in the pursuit of one’s passion/call, and feeling that other team members lacked integrity. While team conflict does feature in the top factors, it is not THE strongest factor. It is merely on par with the other three top factors in this section. And while many people do leave the field because their term was officially up, there are typically other reasons in the background that explain why they aren’t doing another term, and those are revealed in the strength of their survey responses to certain factors.

We also collected open comments on the following questions:

If there was conflict on your team and you feel comfortable sharing, what do you think was the most frequent cause of the conflict?
If you are a woman and you felt marginalized or that men were given more opportunities than you, in what ways did you experience this?

Issues that people believed caused conflict on their team tended to fall into 5 general categories: personal sin and dysfunction, poor leadership, differing boundaries, poor communication, and disagreements about how resources should be obtained/used.

Women shared concerns about:

being explicitly excluded from ministry roles,
having to balance full responsibility for the family with a ministry role,
local cultural limitations on women’s roles and ministry engagement,
policies and practices that favor men (such as men not being willing to work with closely with women, or not allowing men to work less than full-time so that their wives can also have a ministry),
being assigned to stereotypically “female” roles (like childcare, hospitality/event management, or administrative work),
being excluded from communications and meeting invitations,
their opinions and roles treated as “less than” in comparison to male counterparts,
being scrutinized more than male counterparts,
being excluded from leadership, and
being openly belittled or patronized by male leadership.

Clearly, there are important lessons for us to learn about caring for missionaries in extremely vulnerable and high-pressured life situations, preventing and navigating conflict well, and better including the 2/3 of our missions workforce who are women.

To learn more and read the full 26-page report, check out this page.

More resources about team conflict:

Power or concerns: Contrasting perspectives on missionary conflict

Let’s Get Real About Missionary Team Chemistry

Humility: The Remedy for Mission Team Conflict

More resources about gender and missions:

The Gender Divide in Missions

Women in Missions: Facing the 21st Century

Why Are Women More Eager Missionaries?

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

Family Factors in Missionary Attrition

by Andrea Sears

Forging ahead with the results of our returned missionary survey…

The first major section of the report has to do with factors related to family dynamics (nuclear and extended). We measured the frequency and strength of influence on the return decision for the following statements considered to be family-related factors:

I was single and I felt that I would find my spouse back in my home country.
I wanted to start a family and have children in my home country.
I experienced marital issues.
My kids were not adjusting well.
There was a lack of options for my child/children’s education.
I sent my kids to college.
I wanted to be close to my adult children.
I wanted to be close to my grandchildren.
I wanted to be close to my aging/ailing parents.
I felt that my extended family needed me.

For each of these statements, we asked them to choose one of the following 5 answers:

I did not experience this on the mission field.
I did experience this, but it had no effect on my decision to leave.
This had a slight effect on my decision to leave.
This had a moderate effect on my decision to leave.
This had a strong effect on my decision to leave.

Click here to see the full report with tables and charts and all sorts of cool data. I can’t include near that level of detail here.

Discussion of Quantitative Results

The first striking observation is the sheer number of missionaries that are experiencing these family stress factors. Six out of ten of the factors have higher than 50% incidence rates, indicating that the majority of missionary families will deal with them at some point.

Compared to people living in their passport countries, who may not have the additional marital, family, and educational challenges of the mission field (not to mention factors from the other sections of this study, including financial, cultural, etc.), missionaries are subject to a compounding effect as these stressors accumulate. The high percentages of missionaries experiencing each factor guarantees that each family is experiencing multiple family stressors, perhaps serially over time, or perhaps at the same time.

Marital issues, adjustment and education of the children, and wanting to be near family that need them in their passport country (college students, adult children, parents, or other extended family) are all important issues for missionaries to balance with their overseas ministry, since over 50% of participants who experienced those issues felt that they affected their return decision to some degree.

Educational options for the children and having aging/ailing parents that need care are the two strongest family factors in making a decision to return to the passport country, according to the weighting of responses given.

The full report gives a more detailed discussion of the results for each question and the possible reasons for those results.

We also wanted to compare the responses generationally to see if there are factor differences related to age. Do younger and older missionaries have a different experience or different values that impact their return decisions? To check for this, we selected the subset of survey respondents who were under 30 when they went to the mission field, on the field less than 10 years, and left the field less than 10 years ago. This subset accounted for 190 of the surveyed individuals.

When the subset of younger missionaries is compared with the overall sample on family factors, several differences can be seen. Younger missionaries were:

More likely to report the experience of singles feeling their spouse would be found in their passport country (89% versus 71% in the overall sample).
More likely to report that they wanted to start their family in their passport country (49% versus 27%).
Less likely to report marital problems (41% versus 54%).
Less likely to report kids’ adjustment problems (33% versus 58%).
Less likely to report concern about educational options for their children (38% versus 64%).
Less likely to report wanting to be near aging/ailing parents (35% versus 50%), but it was still the highest strength index in the family factor group (1.11).

This makes sense, as given the age of the missionaries while they were on the field, they were more likely to still be in the single or child-bearing years. If they had children, they were likely young enough to be more adaptable and easier to educate with available options. And this generation of missionaries didn’t experience issues like sending kids off to college or wanting to be closer to adult children or grandchildren at all.

Qualitative Data on Marital Issues

In addition to the quantitative scaled information, we collected open comments on the following question: “If you experienced marital issues and you feel comfortable sharing, please describe them.”

Hundreds of comments were provided and helped to delve into the reasons that missionaries struggle with marriage and family issues on the field.

These were the most common issues we heard about that produced marital stress:

extreme stress, coupled with the isolation, of living overseas
a lack of friends to talk to about problems
the all-consuming nature of the mission work and the pressures of working closely together in a shared career
not taking the necessary time out of the work context to nurture their marriage and spouse or to process things together
temptations to neglect those closest to them in order to perform well in the ministry
one spouse’s depression, burnout, or anxiety that affected their closest relationships negatively
anger at the way a spouse was (or was not perceived to be) coping with life overseas
disappointment (usually of the wife) with her lack of a fulfilling role in the ministry
the pain of the trailing spouse (again, more frequently the wife) who didn’t want to be on the mission field but had submitted to her husband’s call to life overseas

The full report contains more detail and quotes from comments given to illustrate these points if you want to delve in deeper.

Qualitative Data on Children’s Adjustment Issues

We also collected open comments on the following question: “If your kids were not adjusting well and you feel comfortable sharing, describe specifically why.”

Again, hundreds of comments were provided. Here are some of the most common:

looking different, standing out, and receiving unwanted attention in the form of staring, touching, teasing, or even bullying
isolation and the lack of friends or a social group
grief as a result of leaving behind friends, family, or adult siblings in their passport country
resentment or anger toward parents over their decision to go to the mission field
having parents that are distracted by a million other things and find their ability to parent compromised in the chaos
depression and anxiety as they struggle to cope with the many transitions in their lives

Again, more details and stories on this in the full report.

Conclusions

While family factors have typically been considered non-preventable by other studies, some of them ARE preventable with the proper preparation, care, and treatment. The following areas should be revisited within mission agencies and sending churches, regarding how well they promote the health and welfare of marriages and families:

the selection process
preparation, training, and expectation-setting
missionary care
mission policy
work-life balance

(More detail and a discussion of each area in the full report.)

But in the end, no matter how phenomenal a job our mission agencies or sending churches do in safeguarding and caring for our families, it is every missionary’s responsibility to ask him/herself some hard questions:

Am I too proud to reach out for help when I need it and be real about struggles with my friends, family, supporters, sending church, or mission agency? Am I trying to perpetuate the missionary pedestal or save my funding by presenting only the best face?
Am I driving a wedge in my marriage by judging my spouse, or not offering the emotional support that they need?
Am I a workaholic? Am I willing to sacrifice the needs of my family to the ministry?
Am I allowing life overseas and my ministry to distract me from parenting and tending to my children’s needs (and griefs?

Our families have been granted to us by God and are our most important ministry and opportunity to serve. Our intimacy with our spouse or the well-being of our children should never be sacrificed to our ministry. Our ministry vision must be realigned to include ministry within our families (for both women AND men) if we want longevity and health on the mission field.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

More Results: Continued Analysis of the Missionary Attrition Survey

by Andrea Sears

Remember that survey of returned missionaries? The missionary who conducted it (me) wrapped up her furlough, headed back to Costa Rica, weathered 2 months of absolute craziness (only part of which is contained in this blog post) and is now finally able to refocus on publishing the results. I am sorry for the delay, as I know many have shown interest in seeing the results!

The decision to “head home” from the mission field is a complex one, to put it lightly. Sometimes that decision is made for us (our term is up, the agency doesn’t allow us to stay longer, it’s time to retire, etc.), but other times we have to decide when the time is right to move on.

We have a lot of different things to consider. Here are just a few of them:

Of course there’s our “call” and whether it’s “completed” or we feel a “release” from the call by God, or if we believe He wishes us to continue.
Then there’s fundraising: “do we have enough money to live on?”
Practical things can’t be ignored, like how our kids are doing, options for their schooling, and who might need us back home.
Our own physical or mental health, or that of our spouse or children, can create a need to return for healing’s sake.
Life happens, sometimes creating trauma, injury, war, or other conditions that preclude our continuing.
And difficulties with our team or agency or co-workers may seem too dysfunctional to overcome, or we might be part of the problem and unwilling to admit it and make changes.
And sadly, if we are honest, in the mix of all of this is our own pride:
- Does leaving mean I have failed?
- What will God feel about me if I leave?
- What will my donors think if I leave?
- Being a missionary makes me “somebody.” What will I be back in my own culture?

In order to be able to share the full-length survey results with anyone who is interested, I have set up a web site to publish the results section by section as I write them up. The site is www.themissionsexperience.weebly.com, for those who want to read the complete “Overview of Survey and Methodology” section. You can subscribe to get updates when new sections are published. And I’ve got a resource list of helpful books and web sites about different aspects of missions.

What follows is a blog-sized teaser of the overview section, setting the stage for understanding and contextualizing the results sections.

Overview

The survey was distributed electronically through a variety of networks including popular missionary blogs, the Missio Nexus web site, personal networks, and appeals to forward the survey on to other possible participants. Participants self-selected if they felt they had the time to participate in the survey and were former overseas missionaries who had returned to their “home” country.

Demographic information was collected for each participant, including:

gender,
ethnicity,
age (currently and at time of departure for the mission field),
marital status,
number of children in the home on the mission field,
passport country,
religious denomination,
mission agency,
years on the mission field,
countries served,
type of work done,
language study,
funding, and
years since leaving the mission field.

Survey questions were grouped into the following 8 sub-topics:

Family
Team
Host country
Physical Health
Expectations
Spiritual
Financial
Mental health

For each sub-topic, a list of statements (e.g., “I was homesick.”) was provided with instructions for the participant to rate each statement with an answer from the following 5-point scale:

I did not experience this on the mission field.
I did experience this, but it had no effect on my decision to leave.
This had a slight effect on my decision to leave.
This had a moderate effect on my decision to leave.
This had a strong effect on my decision to leave.

These response options allowed us to measure three important pieces of information for each potential factor, increasing in specificity at each level:

The proportion of missionaries experiencing each factor (answering the question: “how common is this experience on the mission field?”),
The proportion of missionaries that felt that the experienced factor impacted their return decision (answering the question: “does this factor tend to impact the return decision or not?”), and
The strength of the impact of each factor on the return decision (answering the question: “how heavily does each relevant factor weigh in the return decision?”).

Open-Ended Questions

In addition to the scaled responses, several sub-topics had open-ended follow-up questions where participants could share more details or stories (e.g., “If you experienced marital issues and feel comfortable sharing more, please describe them.”). Many heartfelt stories were shared, for which we are grateful. These responses were analyzed qualitatively to look for central themes or particularly poignant quotes that illustrated an important concept.

Overall Factor Weighting Results

Finally, each participant was asked to try to quantify the weighting of each factor in their decision, summing to 100%.

When the overall weightings assigned to each factor are averaged across all survey participants, the following list shows the ranking of each category in terms of perceived importance in making the decision to return to the passport country:

Family: 25.7%
Team/agency: 22.3%
Other (miscellaneous factors not mentioned in other categories): 10.3%
Health: 10%
Mental health: 9.5%
Host country: 6.6%
Spiritual: 6.5%
Financial: 5.2%
Expectations: 3.9%

The next section of analysis will be about family factors, the most heavily weighted category in the return decision for many missionaries. Stay tuned.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and served as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.

Closer to the Truth about Current Missionary Attrition: An Initial Analysis of Results

by Katie Rowe

For those of you who participated in or have been following the missionary attrition study from last fall, this is the post that you have been waiting for. It is time for some initial results!

Back in November of 2017, Andrea Sears wrote a post that explained the necessity of research on current missionary attrition rates and the primary causes. Her post was a reaction to Craig Thompson’s post that asked the question “Is team conflict really the primary reason that missionaries choose to leave the field?” Thompson noted that in previous research, data about this question had only been collected from leadership within missionary agencies rather than from former missionaries themselves. We sought to close this gap in the results by surveying former missionaries from every habitable continent.

What was our question?

Our primary question in implementing the research study was “What are the greatest preventable reasons that missionaries choose to return to their passport countries?” We wanted to know what factors need additional attention by mission agencies and missionaries themselves in setting appropriate expectations, conducting training, and actually living life in community on the mission field.

What was our hypothesis?

Based on previous research, our hypothesis was that the most common preventable factor that influences missionaries’ decisions to return to their passport countries is team conflict or issues with peer missionaries.

Who participated?

In total, there were 745 former missionaries who filled out the research survey. The majority (more than 70%) were originally from the United States, but there were also people from Australia, Canada, Europe, and other places. The countries of service numbered over 140 different nations from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The majority (more than 65%) of the participants were women.

About 48% of participants were between the ages of 20-29 when they first went to the mission field, followed by about 35% being between 30-39 years of age. The age of every participant at the time of the survey was between 20-years-old and over 80-years-old, with the majority (about 30%) being between 30-39 years of age. The average time that the participants spent on the mission field was 9 years. All participants were people who had formerly been missionaries, yet, had decided to return to their passport country.

What did we find?

Of the 9 categories of factors listed in the survey (family, team/agency, host country, health, expectations, spiritual, financial, mental health, and other), two categories ranked significantly higher than the others. These two categories were family factors and team/agency factors. In the family category, most if not all of the factors would be considered unpreventable by a missionary agency, such as experiencing serious marital issues or needing to take care of extended family who live away from the mission field. In relationship to the hypothesis, this directs our focus to the team/agency category.

Of the team/agency factors, the highest rated factors in the decision to return to a passport country as perceived by former missionaries were lack of missionary care, lack of integrity on the team, lack of freedom to pursue calling, team conflict, and confusion over role on the team (see graph below).

While all of these factors were significantly higher than the other factors in this category, not all of these five results are significantly different from one another. At a glance, it may appear as though too little missionary care was perceived to be the most influential factor in the team/agency section. However, there was not a statistically significant difference between too little missionary care and perceived lack of team member integrity. While we cannot say for certain that too little missionary care is the single most influential preventable factor, we can say that it is certainly a significant factor for this population of missionaries.

What now?

An initial analysis of these results shows that unlike the results of previous studies, team conflict may not be the number one most preventable reason that missionaries choose to return to their passport countries. These results show that too little missionary care is at least equally important. In considering measures that need to be taken to avoid missionaries leaving for preventable causes, it would be useful to look at the top five factors that were rated significantly higher than the others. These factors were (1) too little missionary care, (2) lack of team member integrity, (3) lack of ability to pursue calling, (4) team conflict, and (5) role confusion. With these results, missionary agencies and organizations may focus their efforts in these areas.

While these results point to some intriguing conclusions, there is still much left to discover. In this study alone, there are thousands of open-ended responses that give context and meaning to the raw data. It would be impossible to compile such rich data in such a brief post as this. What you have just read is an initial analysis of the quantitative results.

It is our hope to continue analyzing the data, now looking at the qualitative data and summarizing common themes and noting exceptional comments on each issue identified as a factor. For example, when people provided comments about their team conflict, what themes emerge that warrant attention? Ideally, this will give us more insight into what the participants meant by the answers that they selected. In doing so, we hope to uncover valuable stories that will ultimately help missionaries better serve and be served in the future.

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Katie Rowe is in her junior year at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. She is working towards her Bachelor’s in Psychology and Intercultural Studies with hopes to become a licensed counselor. She has served on a few short-term mission trips to Central America and Asia with Missions.Me and she is preparing to spend the summer in Europe with Youth With A Mission. Katie and her fiance, Noah Brown, both feel that God has called them to be cross-cultural missionaries and they are looking forward to everything that He has for them.

Why do missionaries leave the field? Help us find out!

by Andrea Sears

Craig Thompson published a very informative article here at A Life Overseas in July about studies that have attempted to discover the primary reasons that missionaries return to their home countries.

What really struck me in that article was that:

The research is dated, as much has changed on the mission field in 20 years;
The definitions of missionary turnover have been convoluted, leading to cases being included that shouldn’t have been and vice versa; and
Working through mission agencies to get data, rather than asking the missionaries directly, leaves room for a host of problems that affect the data.

While mission agency data is a convenient source of already-compiled information, it’s also subject to error and/or misinterpretation at several points. First, thoughts and feelings must be transferred from the returning missionary to a file at the agency. Then it must be collected and passed on to a researcher, who must “translate” this data to a standard set of factors to be used for the study. Things can be left out that might be relevant, simply because different agencies have different debriefing procedures and questions, and some do a better job than others with this process.

And finally, agency data can lack important pieces of the story because the missionaries may not have given full disclosure to their agency about all the reasons for their return, for many possible reasons. We’ve all probably known returning missionaries that have a “politically correct” reason that is given to the mission agency and donors, and another set of “behind-the-scenes” reasons that not everyone hears about.

Why this project?

Given the above background, it seems that we need (1) some new research, (2) based on the right population, (3) with a consistent set of questions and categories, and (4) addressed directly to a broad base of returned missionaries without having to filter responses through their agency.

Well, I just happen to be in an academic setting this year with people who need research ideas, while my husband and I serve as the Missionaries-in-Residence at John Brown University for our furlough. And this topic has been an interest of mine for some time.

Like any missionary on the field for any length of time (my family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years), I’ve seen my share of fellow missionaries come and go, and for a plethora of reasons. This has prompted some reflection about the keys to longevity on the mission field. As the U.S. church seems to move toward a short-term team model and away from long-term missions, this question is more relevant than ever. If fewer young people are willing to consider long-term missions, it becomes extremely important to figure out how to keep those long-term missionaries healthy and productive on the field as long as we can.

Missions is an amazing and complex endeavor. It’s both incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding, both gut-wrenching and fulfilling at varying times, or even at the same time. The factors that bring us to a sense of “calling” and the factors that end that season are complex, personal, and not easy to unravel. I want to try anyway. If it helps us to figure some things out, it’ll be so worth it.

What can you do?

We’ve developed an online survey with the supervision of JBU faculty and a student research assistant. This is where you come in. If you are a missionary who has returned home, please take 15 minutes to complete the survey (linked here and below).

A missionary who has returned home is defined as a person who has done missions work for longer than a short-term team engagement, and has returned “permanently” to their passport country (i.e., not on furlough or medical leave, for example).

Important things to remember about this survey:

While we never know if something is permanent and we could conceivably be called back to the field, go ahead and fill out the survey if you do not currently have plans in motion to go back overseas.
DO NOT fill out the survey if you changed mission agencies or host countries, but remained on the mission field.
DO fill out the survey if you still work with your mission agency, but are now placed in a role in your passport country.

Please be totally honest. It’s an anonymous survey and results will not be published by agency. There is a blank for entering your mission agency, but only to make sure that the responses are not heavily weighted for one agency only (and therefore potentially biased based on one organization’s policies or practices). Our hope is to include participants from a broad range of mission agencies and faith backgrounds, and seeing varied responses in that field will help us to make sure we are doing that.

If you are still on the field, please forward the survey to those returned missionaries that you know. I know it takes a few minutes to think about who you should send it on to, but getting a good sample is critical to being able to interpret and apply the results to a broad population. It doesn’t matter where they served, how much time has passed since they returned to their home country, what led them to return or what type of missions work they did. The more people participate, the more valid the results, and the more useful (and credible) the findings.

The survey will only be open until December 6th, so please participate and encourage others to do so promptly.

Again, here is the link to the survey.

How will the results be used?

Access to better information about what missionaries experience on the field will help to improve their preparation, their experiences on the mission field, and the care they receive through the hard stuff. Your participation (or forwarding to others who can participate) will provide valuable insight that can be shared with mission agencies and the general missions community about where we can direct our efforts to better support missionaries.

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Andrea Sears is co-founder of the ministry giveDIGNITY, which works in the marginalized community of La Carpio in San Jose, Costa Rica. The ministry focuses on Christ-centered community development initiatives in education, vocation, and violence prevention. Her family has been in Costa Rica for 8 years, and is serving as the Missionaries in Residence at John Brown University during the 2017-2018 year while on furlough.