sending church | Upstream Collective

Upstream Blog

The Upstream Blog has a range of short articles on various topics around sending. Look through the tags to discover articles that meet your need.

Most churches channel their efforts into cross-cultural missions through short-term trips, enabling church members to experience the...

Once while I was living in Uganda, I watched my Bible college students destroy an old termite mound. It looked to me just like a pile of...

My parents did a great job of teaching me how to work at a young age. In fourth grade I had an after-school paper route. (For those of...

The budget is one of the best ways to reflect the values of a church. Giving to global missions usually falls in one of four categories.

I still wince when I go to the grocery store to buy fruit or meat, remembering what those prices per pound used to be back when I...

No missions leader enjoys the part of their job where they let go of partnerships financially. Inevitably, if you want to be a strategic sen

There are biblical and pragmatic reasons that giving to global missions is helpful for your church's budget.

A sending church provides ongoing care in partnership with a missions organization by building a relational structure that nurtures the...

Sending someone does not mean letting them go. It means holding on tight to the relationship so that the nations may know the glory of God.

As a missions pastor, these are ten things I have learned in my role as I have served my church.

The question of what percentage of funds a sending church should give their Sent Ones can be tricky to answer, and there is certainly no...

I have been a support-raised missionary. It’s pretty awesome. Here are some of the challenges, along with a few pleasant surprises.

This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Holding the Rope: How the Local Church Can Care for Its Sent Ones by Ryan Martin, set to be...

In 2009, alpinists Fabrizio Zangrilli, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, and Simone Leorin stood at the base camp of K2, the world’s second tallest...

The coolest thing about 1984 wasn’t just that I was born, but that it was the year of the greatest comedy-horror film of all time:...

Recently, I was on a personal retreat at a nearby monastery. With my Bible and journal in hand, I tiptoed away to the surrounding knobby...

If you’ve been a missions leader for very long, you’ve likely had this experience: A married couple in your church emails you with the...

Going overseas involves many steps, and it is easy for a potential Sent One to get lost in the process. It is also easy for a missions...

In a previous blog post, I defined cross-cultural missional partnership as a kingdom-oriented relationship of culturally diverse groups...

There’s a lot of things in life that are really important but are also kind of boring: mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, filling out...