According to the information we have from our churches across Canada, approximately half our congregations have a missions committee of some sort—though how they function varies.

Why is it so important that a local church has a missional focus, and why is a committee approach so valuable? Let me encourage you with some ways to strengthen your existing role in the church, or even launch a new committee if your church doesn’t have one.

To begin with, the beauty of discipleship is that it seeks to produce maturing and equipped followers of Jesus to faithfully serve as Christ’s ambassadors in a broken and needy world. While many programs and relationships within the church, formal and informal, do the actual work of discipleship, a case could be made that the missions committee is the body that directs every growing believer into specific areas of ministry. It’s like the human resources department of your church, year after year guiding people into ministries that make use of their gifts.

Which leads into the second purpose of the missions committee, and that is to be the mechanism to help individuals identify their calling into service, both within and beyond the church walls. For a church to embrace its role of being missional, it needs to be intentional in calling and empowering men and women, young and old, into ministries that utilize their God-given gifts. As one woman in my church told me, she was praying for God to give wisdom to our young adults to discover the assignment God has placed on their lives. The missions committee can be the key group of mature, godly women and men who serve in this role of discernment.

Once the church has done the work of discipleship, and calling is determined, the missions committee becomes the advocate for each believer in sending them into these ministry opportunities. These opportunities may be within the church itself or out to the work of evangelism and discipleship in the community and cross-culturally around the world. Every one of us benefits greatly from knowing we have a sending body behind us that affirms us, supports us, that is praying for us, and that is carrying us through the ups and downs of not only focused ministry but the daily grind of living in a broken world.

Finally, the support from the committee for those who are sent needs to be tangible. This can be through offering professional development to workers, developing monthly prayer groups for specific ministries, sharing finances to help overseas workers, and so much more. And in the midst of all of this, the missions committee helps the local church keep its perspective on the bigger picture of what God is doing around the world.

What other areas of responsibility could the missions committee have in your church? The needs vary in every community, but how intentional we are to address those needs determines if we are being faithful to what God has assigned to every church collectively and individually to members within. May the Lord direct your church in the privilege of these ministries.