CMS and pastoral care: What is a Mission Personnel Secretary?
If we want long-term mission to be sustainable, then it comes with a requirement for good long-term care of missionaries. CMS Mission Personnel Secretary* Judith Calf gives us an overview of how CMS provides pastoral care support for all of our workers.
My role as a Mission Personnel Secretary is to help send missionaries to location and support them while they are there. Our duty of care is to ensure our missionaries are equipped to do the ministry to which God has called them. This involves the logistics of establishing their location and ministry, getting them physically there and providing some of the pastoral support once they are on the field.
Before departure, it includes organising such matters as visas, travel and what they will need to take with them, shipping belongings overseas, arranging for them to be met at the airport, the relationship with the partner organisation, housing and an appropriate vehicle, and language study and children’s education.
Once they are on location, I stay in regular contact with them through SMS, email and Skype. It means being proactive—contacting missionaries to see how they’re going—and being reactive—responding quickly when there is a request or a problem. Thankfully, improvements in technology have made communication much faster and easier. If there are ever reports of unrest or security problems in a location, I am able to make phone calls to each missionary to check how they are going.
Pastoral visits
Because everyone is different, there is a great diversity in the ways that CMS supports missionaries. However, every missionary unit (couple, family or single missionary) receives a pastoral visit from a CMS staff member each year. We aim to spend 48 hours with them and also try to spend time with people and the heads of organisations with whom our missionaries work. These visits give us a chance to see and understand the situation in which our missionaries are working—to smell the smells and feel the heat and the dust. They allow us a time to chat about work, spiritual life and health. Sometimes it is about providing a fresh pair of ears and eyes to a situation; other times it is about listening as a missionary family make decisions about where they should send their children to school.
Pastoral visits tell us more about the situation of the missionary and how to pray for them better. They also reveal other opportunities that might be there—opportunities that may be crucial in sending other missionaries to work with and support our workers already on the field.
CARE
While Mission Personnel Secretaries provide a very specific and necessary type of pastoral care for our missionaries, the role of CMS supporters in caring for missionaries while on location and back on Home Assignment is also vital. Click here for some ideas about how you can be supporting and caring for your link missionary as they commit themselves to long-term mission for the gospel.
*Now referred to as Regional Mission Director.