It’s not always easy to feel connected to your mission partners and keep them in your prayers. But the mutual benefits of committed partnerships are huge.

Church partnerships are vital to the work of Crosslinks mission partners, project partners and study partners. Each of our partners has a church or cluster of churches who support them in all kinds of ways, including financially and in prayer.

But how can you as a church help each other to keep mission partners in your prayers? We caught up with three partner churches to hear how and why they go about building meaningful partnerships with gospel workers overseas.

Why adopt a mission partner?

For all three of these churches, playing their part in the call to go and make disciples of all nations is a key motivator for adopting mission partners. But it’s not just about obedience.

Bow Baptist Church support a study partner, Franco Masereka, who studies at Uganda Baptist Seminary. For them, when their ministry feels weak and fragile, having partners around the UK and the world reminds them of what’s really true: ‘that Jesus’ kingdom is huge and growing, and we have a part to play’.

These partnerships are also strategic. Saint John’s Walthamstow completed a Church Mission Consultation with Crosslinks a few years ago, which helped them rethink their approach to partnerships. As a church family, they committed to ‘engage in mission in our parish and beyond by forming and nurturing a realistic number of committed gospel partnerships’. They’d noticed there are lots of Eastern Europeans in their local community, so they wanted to partner with someone working in Eastern Europe. Around the same time, Graeme and Bequi Innes were serving at a local partner church, so they deliberately grew their relationship with them before getting behind them as they left for Moldova.

St Helen’s Bishopsgate took a similar approach in choosing to partner with Tom and Liz Trump and Steve and Dawn Orange in Brussels. They saw an opportunity for both short- and longterm connections in French-speaking Europe, thanks to existing links and their geographical proximity. They could also see ‘gifting and godliness’ in both couples, and so the decision was made.

So, it doesn’t have to be complicated. There’s obedience to the big-picture call, but also some pragmatic thinking about how you can best partner with others to answer that call. Sounds great in theory, but how do you build meaningful partnerships in practice?

How to keep mission partners in your prayers

A key element of that is committing to them in prayer. But if you only see your mission partners once every few years, how do you help each other remember them in your prayers? Here are some of the ways these three churches are trying to do it:

  • Link your mission partners with a small group / homegroup or similar, who can commit to them in prayer and which the mission partners can join when they’re visiting
  • Invite them on your church day or weekend away so they can get to know people better
  • Encourage church family to take part in short-term mission trips, helping them to better understand how they can be praying for partners, and encouraging church family to do the same on their return
  • Have pictures of your mission partners up in church
  • Make sure they’re regularly included in your church prayer points – in prayer diaries, Sunday services and prayer meetings
  • Invite Crosslinks to present at church prayer meetings once or twice a year, to keep partners and the wider organisation on your radar
  • Use sermon applications to encourage people to pray for mission partners
  • Sign up for mission partners’ WhatsApp prayer groups or PrayerMate feeds, to get regular updates in between prayer letters

Mutually beneficial relationships

That’s by no means an exhaustive list. But maybe it already seems like a lot of onus is on the church. What’s in it for you?

Bow Baptist describe it is a privilege to ‘learn from their perseverance and faith’. Having a study partner is a humbling reminder of ‘the barriers our brothers and sisters often have to overcome to study God’s word’.

Both Saint John’s and St Helen’s speak of being spurred on in their evangelism too. Seeing and hearing of ‘God’s power and grace at work in other parts of the world’ and the sacrifices that mission partners make can encourage disciplemaking, including cross-culturally, in your local context.

So, it’s not a one-way crusade to take the gospel to the nations, or a distant, hands-off relationship. It’s an opportunity to learn from and be encouraged by brothers and sisters living out their faith in different places all over the world. And your mission partners really mean it when they say they want to know how they can be praying for you too – so tell them!

Where to start?

What, then, would these three ordinary churches say to anyone just starting out or thinking about adopting mission partners?

In a word: go for it! Do your research, do some thinking as a church about mission, and then pray about who you could commit to partnering with. ‘Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a “wealthy” church, you may find that what you can give has a much bigger impact than you might think.’

If you’d like to know more about adopting a mission partner, or how to deepen your existing partnerships, please get in touch with us! We’d love to hear from you at contact@crosslinks.org.

With huge thanks to Lizzie Jelfs (Bow Baptist), Kieran Bush (Saint John’s Walthamstow), and John Wood and Anna Lamb (St Helen’s Bishopsgate)