Description
How to Develop a Missions Leader Role in Your Church
By Mike Easton
The role of the missions leader in the church is crucial for implementing the global missions vision of the church. For churches that do not have a missions leader, this resource can help form what you would envision for the role. For existing missions leaders, this resource can help clarify and improve your role. It provides practical insights on planning, team leadership, and aligning global missions with the heart of the church.
The missions leader in a church carries a unique and strategic calling. This role invites the whole congregation to look beyond its local roots and participate in God’s global mission. Yet, while the opportunities are vast, the responsibilities can feel overwhelming and varied.
Whether your church is re-evaluating an existing role or drafting a new job description for the first time, it helps to understand the kinds of leaders who often step into this position. No two missions leaders are alike. Each brings distinct strengths, blind spots, and approaches to ministry. Recognizing these differences can help churches better align their expectations, build balanced teams, and set leaders up for long-term faithfulness and fruitfulness.
The Missions Leader Personality Profile
Ellen Livingood of Catalyst Services has written extensively about these dynamics. In her article “What’s Your Missions Pastor Profile,” she outlines five common “personality profiles” of missions leaders. These profiles serve as a helpful starting point for churches discerning what kind of leader they have—or need—in this vital role. They are as follows:
The Strategic Visionary - This missions leader develops visionary plans, but is often drained by the details.
The Administrator - This type of missions leader builds on already developed plans and strategies and executes them excellently. However, they may struggle with creating excitement.
The Missionary’s Pastor - This type of missions leader loves to focus on care of missionaries and partners. While they make great shepherds, they may lack the ability to develop a strategy.
The Mentor/Mobilizer - This type of missions leader loves to help members become effective in their global outreach. As they build relationships with missionaries, though, difficult decisions may be hard for them.
The Field Leader/Partnership Developer - This type of missions leader may find their employment in your church, but their heart is on the front lines of global missions. Field-focused leaders may struggle to bring the members of a church to where their heart is on the field.
As with any personality or gifting profile, these may not reflect all missions leaders and their strengths and weaknesses. In general, though, for the church developing a missions leader job description, this is a helpful tool for understanding the candidates you are considering hiring or placing in the volunteer role of missions leader in your church. For the church re-evaluating the role of their current missions leader, this tool can be helpful for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your global missions leader and adjusting their job description accordingly.
Once those strengths and weaknesses have been identified, you can look at developing a missions leadership team that will complement their strengths and help in their weaknesses. See the Upstream resource “How to Develop a Missions Leadership Team” for more on this topic.
Categories of Missions Leadership
The next action in creating or re-evaluating a missions leader job description is determining the scope of their role. There are certain categories that tend to be included in a missions leader’s job description that we’ve included below. This is not an exhaustive list, but it represents the roles that are found in churches that have had missions staff for a while. These roles could be divided out through multiple staff, multiple church members as volunteers, or one full-time or part-time staffer. Determine whether the following roles are necessary for your church in this season of ministry and shape the job description or job re-evaluation around the ones you choose.
Local ministry to the city
Local missions among internationals
Domestic church planting
Global Missions
Global church planting
Global church strengthening
Global community development
Global short-term trips
Another Church Role
Small groups
Hospitality
Operations
Kids
Worship
Etc.
Many churches will not be able to afford to hire someone to do full-time missions, so they offer a part-time role in missions and a part-time role in another ministry. See the Upstream resource “How to Balance Multiple Church Roles as a Missions Leader” for practical ideas on navigating those different areas of responsibility.
Let’s look at each of the four potential roles a missions leader might have underneath their purview. As you read, consider what you are looking for in a new or current missions leader’s role.
Local Ministry to the City
This might be called “City Ministries” and is sometimes called “Local Missions.” We are going to distinguish for our purposes between local cross-cultural ministry (missions) and local ministry to those who are impacted by poverty in your community.
Build a Vision and Strategy - Determine the needs in your community and a vision and strategy for how you would meet those needs.
Develop Partnerships - Determine what other churches or organizations are helping those who have been impacted by poverty. Consider who you can partner with and how.
Mobilization of Members - Determine how members can be involved in helping those impacted by poverty. Consider what training they would need and who should do this type of ministry.
Financial Stewardship - With your vision, determine how you allocate your church’s financial resources towards these partnerships.
Local Missions Among Internationals
This ministry would include work with international students, refugees, or migrants in your community. Depending on the makeup of your community, it may be an important job role and critical to your missions vision. In smaller or more homogeneous cities, this may not be the case. If your church doesn’t have many internationals in your area, consider the different socio-economic demographics in your city as a ministry focus. Especially for those preparing to become cross-cultural missionaries, reaching out to those of different socioeconomic backgrounds can be a great training ground for cross-cultural missions.
Build a Vision and Strategy - Develop a vision and strategy paper that will outline how the church will impact the nations in your own community.
Partnership or In-House Ministry Development - Choose a mechanism by which church members will be mobilized to impact the nations. Leaders will either need to work toward developing an in-house ministry or find an outside partner to work with.
Mobilization of Members - The primary work of the church is more about the mobilization of people than simply finances. What most organizations will need are people who desire to love and serve those of different cultures.
Domestic Church Planting
If the church has a focus on domestic church planting, the role of funding and potentially even developing a church planting leadership team can fall to the missions leader. This role may include:
Developing a Domestic Church Planting Pipeline - Assessing and developing church planters and church staff, often in collaboration with a denominational or network entity.
Mobilization of Members - Giving church members a vision to move and join church plants.
Finances - Helping the church planter with fundraising and allocating funding from the church budget for the church plant.
Global Missions
Because Upstream focuses on helping churches send well, we’ve given the most space to this job description. Here are some primary roles of a global missions leader:
Cultivating Missions Awareness - Discovering and implementing ways to cultivate awareness through:
Sunday Mornings - Utilizing sermons, announcements, videos, etc.
Missions Classes - Implementing an Introduction to Missions class that would happen regularly in the life of the church to help members understand God’s heart for the nations.
Leadership - Creating awareness among leaders and staff in the church.
Building a Vision and Strategy
Working with leaders and staff to develop a working vision and strategy document.
Encouraging the leadership of the church to speak into and fully adopt the missions vision.
Leading the church to understand and follow the vision.
Identifying and Stewarding Partners
Identifying potential partnerships and deciding which ones to pursue.
Stewarding those partnerships relationally and through the church’s giving.
Short-Term Trips - Providing leadership and logistical support for the formation of short-term trips. Trips may fall into one of the following categories:
Stateside exposure trips that are easily accessed by families at a low cost and time commitment.
Exposure trips in the Americas that provide opportunities for members to leave the country with low cost.
Vision trips for leadership in the church to explore new global partnerships and bless current partnerships.
Overseas short-term trips with a high commitment level for those interested in making an ongoing impact in that location or returning to that location.
Identifying and Assessing Potential Missionaries
Observing, through short-term trips and other in-house opportunities, those who have potential and interest in long-term cross-cultural missions.
Assessing potential missionaries for their cross-cultural readiness alongside church leadership and outside counsel.
Developing Missionaries
Providing a group setting for interested missionaries to cultivate and nurture their interest.
Developing regular group settings for potential missionaries to prepare.
Caring for Missionaries
Maintaining ongoing communication with missionaries.
Developing care leaders and/or care teams for missionaries.
Re-Entry Care for Missionaries
Helping meet logistical needs for furloughing and returning missionaries.
Shepherding returning missionaries through church-centered debriefing and by connecting them with debriefing conferences and/or counseling opportunities.
Character Qualities of Missions Leaders
Having discussed the roles of missions leader, we now want to focus on their character. What characteristics are necessary to be a missions leader over all of these different areas? Here are some for consideration:
Christ-Likeness- As in any church role, a life modeling abiding in Jesus is foundational to developing healthy missions practice in others.
Visionary - The ability to come up with a compelling vision.
Energy - Some level of passion and the ability to promote global missions to other staff members and volunteers.
Strategy for Mobilization and Sending - The ability to develop a strategy for mobilizing volunteers and sending out missionaries.
Implementation and Administration - Capacity to manage administrative leadership needs, such as those related to short-term trips and annual planning.
Care - A desire and ability to care for those who are sent from the church and those who are being mobilized.
Financial Stewardship - A basic understanding of finance in order to steward the budget correctly.
Experience in Missions - Some measure of cross-cultural experience and/or personal involvement in local cross-cultural ministry or short-term trips.
Teacher and Mentor - The ability to teach formally and informally, serving as a guide to others.
Decision-Maker - The ability to make tough decisions, such as who to partner with, how much to give a partnership, and who should or should not be sent for cross-cultural missions.
On-Field Strategy - Some familiarity with current missions strategies, which ones their partners are utilizing, and what strategies the church does and does not endorse.
Is it possible for a person to fill all of these roles and possess all of these characteristics? No. Besides Jesus, no one is omnicompetent! That’s why it’s important to form a realistic job description for your current or future missions leader. Determine the strengths, weaknesses, and capacity of the leader you are considering, and then work to create a job description and support team that will help them succeed in the critical work of missions leadership in the local church.
Next Steps
The journey toward sending well happens one step at a time. Here are three ways you can continue moving upstream:
For more on this topic, read Upstream’s book Missiology for Missions Pastors: A Practical Introduction for Church Leaders, especially chapters 5 and 6.
Utilize Upstream’s Worksheet for Developing a Missions Leader Job Description to develop your church’s missions leader job or role description.
Ask for job descriptions from two or three other churches you’re connected with that have a global missions leader role.