I’ve known Josh Beck for quite a while, having attended and being sent out for overseas work by the same congregation. We’ve had a lot of good conversations over the years, and now that he’s recently completed his first year as the Executive Director/CEO of Barnabas International, I wanted to ask him a few questions about the importance of member care for those serving abroad.
First question, Josh: What has caused you to value the role of member care in cross-cultural work?
When we were serving overseas, my family and I were the recipients of member care, mainly from our sending church. We have some incredible stories of how they shepherded us before, during, and as we exited our ministry overseas. This impressed upon me the important role that pastoral care plays in living out our calling.
Sometimes, we can take the view that member care is not particularly essential to missions. Strategic thinkers hash out methodologies for witnessing, identify key areas of the world the gospel has yet to penetrate, and whiteboard inventive ways to utilize tools and resources to “accomplish the mission.” What is often overlooked is the fact that flourishing missionaries birth flourishing ministries. Who we are becoming while we follow our call is just as, if not more, important than what God is calling us to do!
What is the path that led you from missionary to executive director of a member-care organization?
The path that led me into my current role is a bit circuitous. A lot of discernment, prayer, and surrounding myself with good advisors. Upon our return to the states, I joined staff at our sending church. I had the privilege to serve as the Missions Pastor where I walked with and provided care and oversight for the missionaries that we had sent out. My wife, Denise, and I were so honored to get to do this. We got to be intimately involved in the lives and ministries of these families. During this season, I was asked to take on the role of Executive Pastor at the church to oversee and shepherd our staff. I had crossed paths with my predecessor at Barnabas, Perry Bradford, in the missions world as we attended conferences and got to know one another a bit. I approached him to ask if he would meet with me every couple of weeks to talk through leadership, life with God, pray, etc. . . . a mentoring type role for a season. To my delight, he agreed.
We had been meeting together for about seven months when he officially announced his retirement. It was to be a two-year plan involving a search (internal and external), prayer and fasting, interviews, etc. (A complicating factor—Denise, as the Exec Director of Velvet Ashes was on the board of Barnabas). I was excited, from a mentoring standpoint, to get to witness a transition at the executive level of Barnabas from a unique point of view, learn what not to do and what to do, and see how Perry led through it. However, four months into the search, Perry asked me if he could put my name forward as a possible candidate. I was humbled and felt the weight of even being asked such a thing. The next day, Denise and I asked three couples whom we deeply trust to walk with us and advise us through this process, and they agreed. Of course, if I said yes, Denise would immediately have to step off the board until the process was finished. After a couple weeks of prayer, fasting, and listening to our advisors, I called Perry and said yes. This put us on a five-month journey of discerning with our inner circle of advisors and with the Barnabas Board of Directors; and I was offered the position in February of 2023.
So, I guess you could say I did get a unique perspective of executive transition, just not in the way I anticipated. I stepped in as the fifth Executive Director/CEO of Barnabas International on July 1, 2023, and Perry stepped away. However, according to the plan we put together, the first six months of my leadership I still met weekly with Perry in order to learn the organization, ask questions, and onboard. The Barnabas board, through prayer and diligent work, set up the transition to go incredibly smoothly. The Lord’s faithful guidance and grace through the process has been evident. As of July 1 of this year, I’ve been in this role one year.
If I could be “a bit circuitous” myself . . . I want to get back to the role of the local church and para-church organizations, but first I want to ask, As you look over your years of involvement with cross-cultural work, how have you seen member care grow and change? I’ve often heard veteran workers talk about training, pastoral care, debriefing, and the like and say, “I wish that had been available for us when we were on the field.” What are we learning about supporting missionaries and what are we getting better at?
The term “member care” can be a bit weird to many people outside of missions circles. It’s really only been around for about 30 years or so. It’s also true that different organizations and groups will define it in different ways as there is no recognized minimum standard of care across the industry. Additionally, we’ve seen a movement toward “specialized” care similar to the US healthcare system. Member-care providers specialize in a particular discipline or area of care.
However, as member care continues to evolve, we’re seeing a movement towards multi-disciplinary team approaches to caring for missionaries. This allows for a more holistic approach. Rather than compartmentalizing care, collaboration in care for the missionary or missions team is becoming more prevalent. What does this look like practically? It looks like a team made up of clinicians, pastoral caregivers, spiritual directors, and debriefers working together and collaborating in care. Maybe it’s a group of member-care givers forming their own peer consultation group that meet every month to walk through particularly hard situations they might be dealing with within their care ministry (confidentiality policies would apply). It can look a lot of different ways. The key question is, what care does the missionary or team really need?
Just like in evangelism or church life cycles, there are also trends and development of disciplines in member care. Over the past few years we’ve seen a movement towards spiritual direction, both one-on-one and group spiritual direction. This has really been an effective way to walk with cross-cultural workers as they try to discern what the Lord is doing in them and through them. Additionally, this adds to the avenues of care that the missionary has access to. And I would imagine there will be emerging trends and tools for care in the coming years.
Walking with and shepherding missionaries is not a formula that we can copy and paste in each situation. Different cultural contexts produce different wrestlings and problems. At the same time, there can be general emerging tensions and pressure points. At Barnabas, one of those pressure points that we’re beginning to dig into is spiritual and emotional abuse and how it presents itself in the missions world. This is a big one. We’ve seen this become more prominent in the Western church as sin is exposed. And missionaries, member-care providers, mission teams, and mission organizations are not immune to this.
Here’s the thing, as member-care providers, we need to be ministering out of an overflow of our own relationship to the Father. Tim Keller once said, “It’s not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.” We need to put our faith and dependence in the right place, and that’s Christ. Our methodologies and disciplines are helpful tools, but if my faith is in my training or certification then I will have a hard time walking missionaries towards a flourishing life in ministry.
Could you elaborate more on the “pressure point” of spiritual and emotional abuse? It certainly is a big concern, and it can also be difficult to discern and address. What should people in the missions community be attentive to?
Frankly, this is something we are currently learning about and digging into. At Barnabas, this is something we see increasingly present in the missions community. So the question is, how do we walk with individuals, teams, and orgs to help assure that we are honoring Christ in the way we live our callings? I’m particularly interested in systems and structures that create soil in which abuse can grow. Christian leadership should never be lorded over those we are leading (1 Peter 5:3) and this includes on the mission field and in mission orgs, not just the local church. We are to be shepherds who are submitted to the Chief Shepherd. That same verse also talks about being “examples to the flock.” So right now, we at Barnabas are in the process of asking questions about our own organization and leadership first and foremost.
All of this to say, I am not an expert on spiritual or emotional abuse, so I want to be careful about speaking right now with an assumed authority on the subject. What we do want to do is submit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ as we minister to those we serve. This is so “real time” for us right now. If you ask this same question in six months or so, I hopefully will understand more about this dynamic and how to walk with people through this.
Thanks for your candor and your commitment to focusing on this issue. And yes, maybe we can revisit it here in the future.
So you talk about the member care you received from your sending church. Ideally, how can local churches, pastoral organizations—such as Barnabas—and sending agencies work together to provide needed care? How can they complement each in giving the holistic support you refer to?
This is a great question, man. I really think that first and foremost we have to engage the whole church/para-church tension. We are not competing. I love that you used the word “complement.” It’s important that local churches thrive at sending and that there are other orgs that help them do that.
After we’re able to resolve that tension, then we can creatively look at ways that partnership can happen. One of those ways is for us all to learn from one another. It’s relational and it is focused on sending, sustaining, and supporting those we send. As you know, different churches have different capacities when it comes to sending. But all churches are called to participate in some way in God’s global mission. Sending organizations and member-care organizations can aid in this. One great example is the organizations out there like TRAIN International, who have specific programs to train and equip local church leaders to send and care for their missionaries. On the flip side, sending organizations and member-care organizations have a lot to learn from local congregations also in the areas of generous care and investment. We need both during this season.
Something that’s also important to keep in mind is that the global center of Christianity has shifted from North America and Europe to the Global South. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. However, with this shift having taken place, there are growing pockets of sending churches in countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. I think there’s some real opportunity for those of us in the West who have lived through a few cycles of sending and caring for missionaries to come alongside these emerging sending communities to humbly offer what we’ve learned . . . in particular, what we’ve not done well. A focus on member care usually lags behind the focus on sending. However, there’s opportunity for these non-Western sending communities to grasp and implement member-care practices to help missionaries being sent out to really minister from a place of abiding and overflowing with Christ.
Finally, even with the many member-care resources available, some missionaries feel alone and isolated. What advice would you give to them? How can they best advocate for themselves?
I do think there are way more self-access member-care avenues that missionaries can tap into now than there have been in the past. Organizations like Velvet Ashes, VALEO, and others have paved the way for digital support, care, learning, and counseling. My advice would be to courageously pursue care through some of these avenues.
To be quite frank, I think sending churches and orgs have a role to play in this in the pre-field process. Many times, we send passionate but immature Christians to do ministry overseas. The process of member care starts before we even get foreign soil on our shoes. There is nothing magical that happens on a flight over an ocean. Who we are in our passport country is who we are overseas. So if we are abiding in Jesus in our home country, we’ll do that overseas.
But I do recognize that the missionary reading this now that didn’t receive that training and care ahead of time can feel disheartened in their situation. At Barnabas, to give a shameless plug, we have an easy starting point. If they go to our “contact us” page on our website, there’s a form there a worker can fill out. Our intake team will receive that form and within three days will contact them to refer them to a Barnabas staff member or to a partner agency for care and counsel.
Thanks, Craig, for the opportunity to engage in this. I really think care of the missionaries around the world is so strategic to the kingdom and to what Jesus wants to do in so many places. If we’re not exemplifying and embodying the love and grace of Jesus in our own lives, it’s pretty hard to point people in his direction. People smell fake from a long way off.
Thank you, Josh!
[photo: “Talk,” by Georgie Pauwels, used under a Creative Commons license]
