Holding Missionaries Accountable

What are the ways that sending churches can hold their missionaries accountable?

There are three primary ways for the churches that send missionaries overseas to hold them accountable.

1. Make them send you their time sheets: how they are learning language, what are they doing with their time. This isn't meant to be legalistic or overly binding but you are sending people overseas, so you should have a good accounting of what they're doing with their time, particularly when they're learning language.

2. When it's appropriate, and sometimes it's not the right time, but I would send over some teams, and have some of the pastoral staff in those teams. Not just people who are their family members or their close friends, but someone from leadership to go over.  

3. Have regular points of contact with them while they're overseas, either in phone calls or otherwise. By God's grace we have Zoom now, we have FaceTime, those types of things to have regular points of contact and to see how their souls are doing, how they're walking with God. By God's grace if they're in an E2 context, a context where a church exists, are they fitting into that local church? I hope they don't bypass the church in the context where they're learning the national language. There's ways that home churches can really help their missionaries by helping them fit in overseas but holding them accountable in some key things.

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