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“Hi, my name is David and I'm a missions mobilizer.” Sometimes,
I've felt I needed to make this kind of confession when meeting with colleagues
who do church planting, leadership development or student evangelism and discipleship.
I realize that some folks aren't quite clear what we “mobilizers”
really do. What are we trying to accomplish? In order to provide a helpful
answer to this question, I've been working on a model for mobilization. This
isn't brand new; it's derived from other paradigms for persuasion and communication.
First, let's clarify the objective of mobilization. The result of mobilization
is not, as some might imagine, being “mobilized,” whatever that
means. The result of mobilization is resources for world evangelization. The
primary resources needed to see the Church established in every people group
are prayer for God's power and blessing, workers for the harvest and the financial/material
resources necessary to carry on the ministry. So in visualizing the work of
mobilizers, on one end of the model we see individuals and churches involved
in providing key resources for the harvest: prayer, people and funding. At
the other end of the model we begin with people who are not yet aware of world
evangelization. At this stage, our model looks like this:
Unaware..........................................Involved
.......................................................Prayer
.......................................................People
.......................................................Resources
The
three intervening stages of the model include making people aware of world
evangelization, attracting their interest and awakening their concern. The
figure below shows how these elements relate to the model.
One
thing to note at this point is that the model makes a “cone” shape
- with the widest part at the beginning and the narrow part at the end of
the mobilization process. This illustrates the realization that at each step
of the process there will be those who do not move on to the next stage, but
rather move out of the mobilization process for a variety of reasons. This
figure demonstrates some of those reasons.
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