What Challenges Do Missionaries Face?

What are some of the biggest challenges that missionaries face?

These men and these families that go to unreached people groups face all kinds of challenges that most people who stay behind can hardly even imagine. There are challenges to their own families. There are challenges in terms of who they've left behind. Their parents often have a difficult time seeing children and grandchildren get on a plane, knowing that they they might never see them again and that if they do it could be years from then. Those are emotional struggles.

Then there are the struggles of being on the field, struggles with sickness, struggles with rejection, struggles with the frustration of not understanding what's being said to you and not knowing how to communicate. There are all the normal struggles that accompany any kind of team work––the dynamics of working together. The frustrations of dealing with other people who are sinners. These struggles are are not trifles. These are significant things and so they have to be undergirded with prayer, they need to be supported in whatever ways they can be.

Ultimately, if a work is done, if a church is planted we step back and say, "Amidst all these struggles God's grace was sufficient." His power is perfected in weakness. Nowhere is that more clearly seen than, I think, on the frontier with these missionaries who do hard things.

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