By Brian Jose, Radstock's Executive Director

Last year I had a great two-hour visit with a pastor and a missions advocate in a church, thanking them their continuing support of our work over a decade. They were excited about converting a facility they had just bought into a church and community ministry centre. A few weeks later their regular gifts suddenly stopped. I wrote and asked if I’d missed something in the conversation. Had I somehow caused offence? I got an embarrassed reply in a few days to the effect that the new building program was straining the church budget and so their missions giving had to be cut to pay for the bricks, mortar, carpets and chairs — and sorry that they’d not mentioned that when we were together or before they stopped their support.

An exceptional story? Not so much. I’ve seen this general scenario many times before. How enlightening, then, to meet a church last summer who were talking about their policy with budget cuts for missionaries: “We cut our Senior Pastor’s salary by the same percent as we cut any missionary’s support. We find that tends to keep the missionary support flowing.” Indeed.

Another church added ten percent to their total for their building fund in order to send it to help “build churches” in line with their missionary commitments.

Do you have ideas that help avoid global mission from becoming the “emergency fund” for other ministries? I’d like to hear them. Write me at , tweet @brianjose or send me a facebook message. We’ll post/tweet the most creative ones.