Hearing a Voice from the Field

Dear Ministry Partner Development Leaders

Missionaries historically are funded by the giving of their friends, family, churches, friends churches, and strangers. Their livelihood is dependent on the cultivation of what many missions organizations call Ministry Partners. This relationship between missionary and Ministry Partner is the most important relationship to the missionary, second only to their relationship to God. A relationship is built through communication. Communication with the supporter about what their money is doing, how they are investing in the kingdom and what is going on in the lives of the missionaries that they support. When this communication is lacking and there is no sense of relationship the supporter will pull their support of the missionary. As of now the only major way for missionaries to update their supporters is through the writing of letters and mass email communication though there are some experimenting with video. Yet not everyone is wired for that communication and there must be some sort of alternative provided. Oral updates via podcasts are that much needed alternative to mass letter writing for missionaries to update their friends, families, supporters and supporting churches about what God is doing on the mission field.

The Need

The first major goal of all communication between missionaries and supporters is the development and maintaining of a relationship. This idea then hinges on the creation of meaningful media. Theoretically how is meaning made then. Meaning cannot be created, it can only be discovered. Meaning is discovered and then given to specific things based on the relationship between the sender and the receiver. A ring of gold means nothing unless it is given in a wedding ceremony by a spouse, then it is the physical representation of the covenant of marriage. This is an important concept for missionaries to understand when communicating with their supporters and supporting churches. They must continue to maintain the relationship from afar that they built in person, either through friendship or through speaking at the church. Looking at missionary communication through this lense the quality of the communication becomes more important than the quantity of the communication. Which would be more meaningful to receive, a handwritten letter updating you on one specific story that they thought you would love to hear about how your funds are helping spread the gospel around the world, or an email blast sent to 100 different people with simple bullet point updates on what God is doing. The former is by far the better communication practice. For more on the making of meaning read Ministry Media Matters pages 7-9This difficulty with creating meaningful relationships is why churches support has fallen in recent years. Steve Storkel, the missions pastor of Berean Baptist church and a member of the Converge Worldwide Denomination Mission board told me in an interview,

"New missionaries when being trained on support raising are told to count on only 40% of their total goal from churches and that number is continuing to shrink." (Storkel)

Churches are decreasing their support for a very simple reason, out of sight, out of mind. The communication is not happening between the congregation and the missionary, only between the missionary and the missions pastor, or whatever person on the mission board assigned to the missionary. This issue not only prevents the missionary from maintaining a relationship with the church, but it also puts all the relationship responsibility on the missionary. Everything becomes extremely one sided. Various missionaries have discussed their frustration on not hearing anything from a church until they become “missionary of the week” and then all they get is a request for prayer requests but no real desire for updates on what God is doing. (Shirk) When it comes to maintaining that ministry partner relationship with sending churches, the creation of meaning, the development of rituals is extremely important to the missionary. Here specifically quality is way more important than quantity of the communication. Clarity is also extremely important since the relationship dynamic is 1-100 or so as opposed to one to one.

Creating Ritual

The best way to create any form of meaning or to maintain relationship through forms of disembodied communication is to create rituals. James Cary discusses the idea of making transmissional media, media that is designed to reach maximum number of people, an effective ritual in his article “A Cultural Approach to Communications” In his article Cary uses the communications medium of news to convey the difference in attitude of the different models of communications. If a person looks at a newspaper as purely transmissional then the main goal is to convey knowledge, to learn something new, however if one looks at the news as a ritual then they will focus on what worldview is being portrayed, what is happening. It will become less of a lecture, conveying knowledge, and a story that the reader can be apart of. (Cary 6) This is the kind of attitude that all missionaries want their supporters to read their updates yet when it comes to crafting their communications they are fairly boring.

"Most often missionary stories are just a boring list of “this happened, and then we did this, and then God did this” and it is all very boring, but God’s work is not boring. (Seaborn)

Missionaries need to tell good concise stories that give a brief snapshot of what life is like on their missions field. The best way to begin is to give the missionaries the ability to update their supporters and churches the way they are most comfortable, not everyone is comfortable with writing so an alternative is needed.

Orality vs Literacy

Oral updates are that needed alternative to writing because of the fact that speaking is required for writing. Orality predated writing and literacy. Almost everyone can speak but not everyone can write and for some people the only form of communication that they can understand is through the spoken word. There are many cultures where this is still the case today. Cultures where the primary form of communication is the spoken word. A person's primary form of communication affects the way that they think, literacy changes the physiology of the communicator and the invention of literacy has changed the way that people think and communicate. (Ong 1-3) Due to the temporary nature of sound, as the only medium that can not be stopped, paused or held on too, much of the brain is dependent on remembering what someone is saying. Ways of thinking become more simplistic, grounded in the world, and closer to the person doing the communicating. Orality requires a meter, a flow, some sort of device that solidifies it in the memory because there is no way to write it down. A primary oral person cannot be analytical or abstract, there is no room for that thought. Even memory is different in communities and cultures where there is no literacy. The oral memory is not based on verbatim memorization because there is no written standard to compare it to. The memorization is based on rhythm and rhyming structures built into the story to enable storyteller to get the gist and get as close as possible to the original. (Ong 31-56) This way of thinking changed fundamentally when writing came into the mix. No longer was sound by default temporary. Man now had the ability to write things down and to save them. They could build upon ideas and thoughts and ideas which created brain room for more conceptual, more abstract thoughts and ideas. This transition was necessary for man to continue to progress as a civilization. (Ong 94-98) This new technology of writing affected not only the way that we think but also our education system. The way that we communicate changes when the primary communication tool is written because words change their form and sometimes their meaning when written. There is a difference in a manuscript vs a speech. The way that the words are organized and the content is written changes based on whether or not it is to be read or it is to be written. C.S. Lewis discussed this idea in his preface to his radio speeches transformed into a book called Mere Christianity. He had to change the way the words were organized and written from the transcript of a speech to the written word. (Lewis 1-6) about This change in thought and learning has lead to a more individualized approach due to the individualized nature of literacy and then print. People do not go into a book looking for community, they go into it on their own, print made communications very individualized. (Ong 129-132)Since the invention of print technology has continued to grow, with the onset of electronic media there is a new “secondary orality” (Ong 133) This new orality is both similar and extremely different than the original form of orality. Much like primary orality, electronic media fosters community, not out of a sense of necessity but out of a want for community. That community is also much larger than the community that could be reached in primary orality. However this new form of orality is incredibly dependent on the literal mindset and even writing as a whole. (Ong 132-135) One such secondary oral medium is that of podcasts. Podcasts as a medium is incredibly reliant on writing to maintain its structure. This oral medium is different then other oral mediums because it does not follow any rhythmic or rhyming standards at all but it just purly spoken communication.

These storytellers need an anchor point to keep them from going on rabbit trails and to keep the story interesting.

In her book Out on the Wire, Jessica Abel interviews major audio storytellers about their process and one important aspect is the idea of scripting. All successful podcasts such as This American Life and Serial are scripted on various levels. Some are scripted post interviews and some are scripted interviews but all have some written element to them. (Abel 24) So why is this important to missionary storytelling? Well not all cultures are the western culture built on writing. There are many cultures that are still primarily oral. In addition to that the global culture is moving towards a secondary orality. This oral communication is moving the world towards a more united and communal spirit and missionaries need to stay up to date. If the goal is to create and maintain meaningful relationships with their supporters they should do so using new technologies and the way that feels most culturally familiar. If that is through oral communication then an alternative is required. Read Walter Ong's full analysis of Orality versus Literacy in his book Orality and Literacy.The difference in cultural upbringing based on communication styles is important and there needs to be an oral medium as an alternative to writing letters, because right now letters are the only endorsed way of updating ministry partners. There are a few people using videos and other facebook live but those mediums come with their own set of problems. In my interview with Dr. Timothy Sisk, the chair of the missions department at Moody Bible Institute, he mentioned that the thing that he values as a ministry partner is that they do not spend all of their time focused on communicating with him as a ministry partner. He is paying them so that the gospel is spread into the context that they feel God has called them and that is what they should be focusing on, not on how good their communications are. Yet this creates a catch 22 for missionaries because if their communications are not meaningful or powerful enough for their ministry partners to create rituals they will lose funding, yet if they focus to much on the quality of their communications they lose focus on the initial calling that God gave them.

Good Practice Influenced by Good Theory

Theory is really helpful in saying what should be, but what is? What are missionaries and missions organizations doing to help with ministry partner development. I was able to sit down with the head of Ministry Partner Development at Cru, formally Campus Crusade of Christ, Dave Dickens about what their training curriculum looks like when it comes to creating and developing strong ministry partners.

"Cru has a very simple strategy that exemplifies some very good theory. They require all of their ministry partner communications to revolve around a one page, one story, analog letter. Before email, before video, before any new technology or communications happens each missionary is required to write a one page letter."

The ideal Dave told me is as personal as possible, hand written to each supporter or supporting church if possible, and there are some Cru missionaries who do this and they have the most effective relationships with ministry partners. Surrounding that one page letter are all the extra things that the missionary chooses to use. There are videos, email blasts, and so on. It is here where podcasts could be added.  As a form of secondary orality a script of some sort is required which is why maintaining the anchor of a letter is important.Podcasts would improve the relationship building and solve many of the issues that were raised during the theory section of the paper. With podcasts you have the benefit of a vocal connection. The ministry partner is able to hear updates in the voice of the missionary giving the relationship a different dynamic then reading a letter. Churches are able to put the podcasts on their website giving the congregation the option to hear the updates at will, putting more of the relationship on the congregation and not all of it on the missionary. Finally a podcast is fairly easy to create with a small amount of education. Using the voice recorder apps that come standard with most smartphones and some knowledge of room the missionaries can record professional quality updates. There are many free softwares for editing audio and for the purposes of this type of project minimal editing is actually best and should not be needed if the missionaries follow the one page script that they wrote.

Case Study

As a case study I will describe how a podcasts could be added into what Cru is already doing for ministry partner development. First the desire to do podcasts will have to be expressed during training so that the education component could be started. Due to length and attention spans the podcasts should not be longer than 5 to 10 minutes. One story that can give a brief window into what the life on that specific missionary field is like. From there they would download the free audio editing software called Audacity. This software is fairly intuitive and provides the basic editing requirements necessary for producing podcasts of this size. As a new technology the issue then lies with how this is distributed. The benefit of the personal connection is lost when all they send is a disembodied link to a website or tell their supporters that they can find the audio on iTunes. This is why Cru’s model of having the one letter anchor is so crucial. The missionary is still required to send the analog letter, if possible, but can include instructions on how to access the podcasts, to hear the letter in their own voice, where they would have had the freedom to add a few more details to the story told in the letter. With the podcast accompanying the letter the communication is more fully embodied due to the access to tone and emotion that is lacking in print media. This will also give the essential information to those who are not familiar with the technology or simply  prefer the letter format. This two part communication system enables both the supporter and the missionary to also keep both an analog and digital form of the communication to look back on and see what God has done on the mission field.Missionaries depend on the support of other people, their literal livelihood is dependent on maintaining relationships with those who are supporting them. This relationship, like all relationships is maintained by meaningful communication and the creation of rituals. This requires the missionaries to communicate regularly using mediums that are personal, time sensitive, and create ritual. Due to the location and the distance between missionaries and their supporters the mediums must be transmissional by nature for they must travel over large distances. In addition to that not all cultures are wired for completely literate communications. Though literate thinking is widespread throughout the world, there are still a strong few primarily oral cultures. With broadcast mediums as well the communal benefits of orality can be spread across a larger audience uniting more people than primarily orality ever dreamed. Missionaries have missed an incredible opportunity in skipping over audio mediums and moving directly to video. Podcasts as broadcast media are time sensitive, personal, and fit within both oral and literal mindsets. Podcasts could be one part to the helping missionaries solve the almost impossible issue of effectively communicating with and maintaining quality ministry partners. 

For my exemplification I will be launching a podcast following this format. However for this podcast I will not be sharing Missionary Stories but Missionary Kid and other Third Culture Kid stories instead, since they is more access to these stories here on campus. Listen to the first episode here and subscribe to the whole series on Apple Podcasts; Google Play Podcasts; Overcast or Castbox

Works CitedAbel, Jessica. Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio. B/D/W/Y/Broadway Books, 2015.Brian Kammerzelt. Ministry Media Matters: An Exploration of a Theological Framework for Ministry Media & Culture.Cary, James W. “A Cultural Approach to Culture.” Communications and Media Studies Collection, 2009, pp. 11–28.John Shirk. Personal Interview. April 21, 2018Keith Seaborn. Personal Interview. April 16, 2018Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. William Collins, 2017.Ong, Walter J., and John Hartley. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.Steve Storkel. Personal Interview. March 15, 2018