Jesus called the Twelve to be with Him before He ever sent them out. “He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). Being came first. Sending came second.
Our mission pipeline often reverses that order. We recruit gifted people, train them for the field, and commission them with a prayer at the altar. Formation, the slow shaping of character, conviction, and communion with Christ, gets treated as something the field will take care of. Then the field takes care of them.
The World Evangelical Alliance’s global attrition study found that 71 percent of missionaries who leave the field early do so for preventable reasons: conflict with peers, loneliness, stress, health breakdowns. Attrition at that scale is a formation crisis. An unformed inner life meets the pressure of the outer life, and something breaks.
Amy Newsome, who leads member care at Mission to the World, says it plainly: missionaries are “broken, flawed, sinful, and vulnerable in all the same ways every other member of God’s family is.” The field does not make anyone holy. It exposes what the church did not form.
Antioch understood this. The church there worshiped, fasted, and prayed before it sent anyone anywhere (Acts 13:1-3). Sending flowed from a community already formed around Christ.
So the question for every church that commissions missionaries is not only “Are they trained?” It is “Are they formed to last?”
What would change in your church if mission readiness were measured the way Jesus measured it, by nearness to Him before skill for the task?
