I started a series on an effective missionary last week. We all want to be “effective” to what the Lord has called each of us. Sometimes it is hard to know how. Today’s lesson on how to be an effective missionary is to report back to the churches that support you. The good news is that with the technology we have today missionaries can easily report back each month. I am blessed to have wonderful churches who have supported us for years. Most of them require a missionary letter once every three months. I recommend that you send a prayer letter every month. It doesn’t cost that much, it is very easy to do in comparison to missionaries who were on the field 50+ years ago, and it is a blessing to those churches that support you.

Send physical letters through the mail: Monthly prayer letters should be sent as a physical letter to the churches, and as a backup they can be sent via email. The reason for sending the prayer letter through the mail instead of only email is because in the future, the email address you have for a church may no longer be a valid email address. If it is the pastor’s email, he may get a new email address, God may lead him to a new ministry, or he may retire. The church will think you have stopped sending prayer letters altogether, even if you are consistently sending them. If you send monthly prayer letters through the mail, they will always receive your prayer letters.

Give details about your ministry in the prayer letters: Your prayer letters should include details about your ministry, specifically what happened the last month, and what is planned for the present month. Give specific details about what is going on, about specific people you are witnessing to, about steps of faith you are taking. It is a prayer letter, so give the readers specific requests to pray about!

Keep your prayer letters simple and easy to read: I am addressing the format of the letter. I was an assistant pastor at my sending church. At one time, Pastor Lawrence asked me to work in the missions ministry. We had stacks of prayer letters, many from missionaries we never supported, that would come in each month. Each prayer letter was different, for some of them it was hard to identify the missionary, the field, the contact information, and/or the support address. All of that information was on the prayer letter (well… most of the time the information was all there), but the layout was complicated. Make it clear and easy to read. At a glance, the reader should know who the missionary is, where he serves, and how to contact him.

Your prayer letter should fit on one piece of paper: Some churches like to display their missionaries’ prayer letters. When a missionary sends a two page letter, it makes it harder to display. Format your prayer letters so that they fit on one page (and on one side of one page).

Don’t preach in your prayer letter: This may be controversial and I don’t want to offend anyone, but I do think this is a valid point. Your prayer letter is supposed to update churches about your ministry and give them requests so that they can pray for you and those specific requests. Whenever I saw a prayer letter that started out with 2-3 Bible verses and included some sort of comments on the verses, I thought, “this is filler”. Missionary, save your teaching and preaching for the pulpit, use your prayer letters for updates and prayer requests.

Be honest and forthright: Don’t embellish what is going on in the ministry. Be totally honest. If you are on furlough, make that clear, the same whether you are on deputation or in language school. Don’t misrepresent anything. Be honest and be positive. Every ministry has problems. I can remember when I was in Bible College, at times, pastors would come in to preach chapel, and a running joke was, “The ministry would be easy if it weren’t for people.” It was just a joke, obviously the ministry is all about Jesus and about people. You can be honest, but you don’t have to sound like the world is ending and everything is horrible. Just like every ministry has problems, every ministry also has blessings! Share both, but focus on the blessings (that is a general rule for life, not just for prayer letters). Be clear with what stage you are in, I am on furlough right now, I am visiting churches, and the ministry is still continuing in Argentina. To put it bluntly, If you are on furlough, don’t make it sound like you are on the field.

Be consistent: Send a prayer letter every month. With technology today, a missionary can send their letter to the states from almost anywhere in the world. There may be some place deep in the jungle where a missionary cannot send correspondents, and if that is the case then it is completely understandable why they cannot send a prayer letter every month, but that is an exception, and not the rule.

An effective missionary sends prayer letters to churches every month. People want to know what is going on in your ministry, they have invested in you, they believe God is using you, let them know all about it!

We have been missionaries since 2014. Like every missionary I want to be an effective missionary, but sometimes it is not easy to understand how. Although it is clear that every missionary wants to be effective, how to be effective is not so clear. How can I be effective on deputation? How can I be effective during my first two years as an apprentice missionary? How do I become effective on the foreign field? How can I be effective to the churches that support me back in the States? These are all very good questions, but perhaps not all are easy to answer. That is what this series of posts aims to do, I would like to take a few weeks to share clear principles on how to be an effective missionary. I have accomplished some of these principles by God’s grace, while I am still working on others, but I believe they are all attainable.

• Being a missionary is a great honor to me, and it is also a great responsibility. We are representing Jesus, we are representing our home church, and we are representing the other churches who have partnered with us over the years.
• Being a missionary is a challenge. It is learning another language, it is living in a different culture, it is trying to understand things that sometimes don’t make sense.
• Being a missionary is a blessing! It is planting a Bible preaching church where there wasn’t one. It is preaching the Gospel, seeing people saved, baptized, and discipled, and seeing Jesus build something out of nothing!

As I said, I want to be an effective missionary and I am sure every other missionary has the same desire. I look forward to sharing a few principles about how to be an effective missionary.

It is winter in Argentina, and in the cold of winter our church had a baptismal service. We baptize new believers in a small “portable” vinyl pool. We have to fill it up the day before, and although we try to heat it, it stays very cold. That did not stop three new believers from being baptized! It is exciting to hear how God blessed this special service! I have included some pictures below.

Serving Together, 

Patrick, Leslie, Lily, Piper, Ivy, and Isla Henry

We have used the same basic format for our emails since 2014, and have used the same blog outline since around 2016. I have thought about doing a redesign for well over a year and thought that I would have more time to invest in this project during our furlough. Well, here we are halfway through the year and we have finally transitioned into a new look. This includes our blog, our prayer letters, and our emails. Our goal is to send one email per week, in that email there will be access to a printable version of our latest prayer letter, as well as a link to the latest blog post. My goal is to release a post every week. These posts will be about Argentina, about missions, about serving the Lord, and about our family. I have already started writing blogs about deputation, church planting, and a few pointers on how to be an affective missionary. I will be publishing a new post each week.

I can remember being an assistant pastor at our home church. At one point, Pastor Lawrence asked me to be over the missions ministry. One of my responsibilities was to read the prayer letters, and contact the missionaries periodically. I can remember being frustrated as I read the latest prayer letter, but only to find that it was 6 – 8 months old! My frustration would continue as I looked for some way to contact the missionary but not being able to easily find that information (that was not the case with every missionary, many were very thorough and I understand there may be missionaries in some extreme remote location with little/no internet access, but at that time and even more so now, with the ever-growing technological advances, such places seem to be the exception, not the rule). I thought to myself, “If I ever become a missionary, I will make sure to keep everyone updated often and make my contact information clear and easy for others to find”. We have been missionaries since March of 2014 and we have tried to do just that! So with this new set up for our blog, weekly emails, and monthly prayer letters, we hope to take you with us on this important mission of church-planting in Argentina! You can expect our quick updates each Friday (excluding the first Friday of every month, that Friday is when we send a copy of our latest prayer letter). These quick updates our just quick, 4-6 sentence emails to keep you up-to-date on the ministry God has given us.

This is the new look for our blog, emails, and prayer letters. With it comes new opportunities to find out more about ministry in general, about what is going on in Argentina, and more about our family. We hope that you will walk with us weekly, come on this journey with us! Serving the Lord, whether in context of your local church or on the mission field, can have high “highs” and low “lows”, but I am sure if you are a child of God, you agree with me that it is an honor, privilege, and joy to serve Jesus!