Rob Rawson highlights the importance of prioritising our resources for mission.

IN our series on planning for mission, we come to the third question congregations need to ask beforehand: Does our spending reflect the high priority God gives to mission? In Mark 16:15, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.’ The totality of ‘all creation’ is hard to ignore. Here, Jesus underlines the priority he gives to spreading the Gospel message.

Back in January, I had to part company with our old family car. I was told: ‘Rob, you’re throwing good money after bad!’ It constantly needed repair, which drained our finances, but also drained our time, carting it back and forth to the garage – in some cases, it being towed there! We had to cut our losses, spend several weeks without a vehicle and eventually, to invest in a much newer, lowmileage and crucially, reliable car.

Planning for mission requires us to assess our own spending and not just in terms of money, but also in terms of our time, energy and talents. Are we seeing little return for our current ‘spending’? If we have a vision for reaching into our community, how do we prioritise for it? How intentional are we about it? There is a challenge for us here. We need to look at all the activities we do and consider how each might help (or hinder) us in moving towards our vision. This will lead to yet more questions and indeed, pertinent ones. What might we stop doing? What might we need to change? What might we begin to do?

“ If we value mission highly (as God does), then perhaps we need to reflect such value by prioritising it and letting other things work through it and revolve around it."

I have discovered over the years that it is rare to see ‘mission’ as a standing item on Kirk Session agendas, or to see a specific financial amount earmarked for local missional activity in church annual budgets. If we value mission highly (as God does), then perhaps we need to reflect such value by prioritising it and letting other things work through it and revolve around it. Mission cannot be treated as some kind of ‘add-on’ that needs to be fitted in amongst everything else, because when that happens, there is never any time, energy or money left for it! On the contrary, it needs to be a mindset that permeates through all our activities. It’s more about being missional, than about ‘doing a mission’.

Finally, mission is for all of us. Some of us may have mission conveners and mission task groups, but we must not expect them to carry out all the missional activity! They are there to facilitate the rest of us in helping to bring a missional culture to our fellowships and to develop an intentionality of sharing Jesus within our local communities. Last month we asked, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and explored the value of understanding our local demography. We must now invest in reaching out to them. ¤