Hello, missionary Matthew Stuckey here to the island of Luzon and I want to make a quick
video just talking about the deputation system that most churches use when they send out
missionaries.
You might say, what is deputation?
Well, deputation is generally a two to three year process where basically you go around
from church to church and you have a presentation and you preach a sermon and you try to get
that church to financially support you because your end goal is that you can go out to the
mission field and be full time from day one, not have to work a secular job and that's
the general system.
Now, there's a lot of problems with this and it's not a scriptural method.
You don't see that with Paul the Apostle as he's going to start churches.
You see him working a job, but why is this not a good method?
Why is it not scriptural?
Well, I see two major problems with this.
Number one is that it teaches you and makes you become watered down and so as you're going
from church to church for a couple years preaching sermons, instead of actually preaching
the whole counsel of God and preaching hard, your goal is actually to try to get support
from people.
Look, if you're trying to get money from people, you're trying to get offerings, then the result
is your sermons aren't going to be that hard because you don't want to offend the pastor.
You're not going to bring up controversial issues like repentance of sins or things such
as Calvinism or anything that's going to be controversial because your goal is to actually
get financial support.
It teaches you to be watered down because for a couple of years you're basically not
preaching hard sermons.
Not only that, it also shows that you're basically not having faith in what God wants you to
do and so that teaches you to be watered down because we need to live our lives based on
faith as opposed to just always expecting everything to be easy in life.
Life's not easy.
Not only that, but also there's very little soul winning done over those couple of years
and people are going to be full-time missionaries on the field and yet for a couple of years
they very rarely go soul winning as they're going from church to church.
I understand there's exceptions here and there, but by and large when they come, they never
actually go soul winning and so why would I think when they go out to the foreign field
they're going to do much soul winning?
So basically they learn to be watered down, but not only that, the other big problem is
they're not really accountable to anyone.
Basically they have a lot of churches that are going to support them and so they're not
really accountable to one church and when you're accountable to 100 people, you're accountable
to nobody and so not being accountable, it's going to be hard for them to be motivated
to do a lot of soul winning or really make an effort to bring people to church and build
the church and basically they'll send out monthly reports of what they're doing out
in the mission field and the two general things I see in those missionary reports are the
fact that they never mention any soul winning whatsoever and they either have altar calls
where they count like 200 kids as they have the special event that got saved or they basically
count no results, but soul winning is not the real emphasis and it doesn't really bother
the churches that are supporting them because they're only supporting with $50 a month.
Now there's a lot of other problems with the deputation system, but those are the big things
I see that there's just no accountability and quite frankly, you know, most missionaries,
they learn to be watered down over a couple years and when they go out to the field they
learn to, they've already learned to preach short sermons that don't offend people with
little soul winning.
Why would we think it's going to be any different once they get to the field?
Thank you and God bless.
God bless.