New independent mission sending agency is not history repeating itself By Paula R. Kincaid The Layman Online Wednesday, July 26, 2006 TULSA – The announcement of the formation of an independent mission sending agency by Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship and The Outreach Foundation was made just before the 2006 General Assembly intentionally. Bill Young, executive director of PFF, said the announcement was rushed because "we didn't want it to seem like a reaction to the assembly." He said they felt that whatever the outcome of the assembly, the independent agency would be needed. Speaking at a Networking for Missions workshop held at the New Wineskins Convocation on July 21, Young gave three reasons for the new agency: 1. The decreasing of mission personnel. Young said that in 1959 the preceding Presbyterian denominations had 2,063 missionaries. Today the PCUSA has 235 missionaries. 2. The re-organization of the General Assembly Council and its staff. "There is no way it is going to turn around," he said. "It's not going to change, just get worse." 3. "People don't want to send money to Louisville," Young said, "so there is a need to send out Presbyterian missionaries that isn't through the system there." "We can do things in creative ways," he said, that the Worldwide Ministries Division, the mission sending arm of the GAC can't do. "They are locked into one way of doing things," he said. Young said a meeting will be held in the near future to "lay out some specific directions we are going in," including staffing decisions. Jeff Ritchie, associate director of The Outreach Foundation, said the answer was "No" to a question he has been frequently asked: Is history repeating itself? The question relates to when Rev. J. Gresham Machen, a former Princeton Theological Seminary professor, formed an Independent Board of Foreign Missions in 1933 because of the denomination's refusal to require missionaries to subscribe in writing to essential beliefs of the Christian faith. Following a decision of the 1934 General Assembly which called on Presbyterian ministers to cease their involvement in the board and encouraged presbyteries to prosecute any offending ministers who didn't, Machen was stripped of his ordination in March of 1935. Ritchie said both PFF and the Outreach Foundation would continue to support some Presbyterian missionaries, but "God wants to do more than that so we are adding new opportunities and new ways … it's a both/and situation." "Presbyterians have lost trust in our system," said Young. "So have many of our partners." He spoke of an Ethiopian who said his church had given up on the PCUSA because they did not think that the PCUSA was interested in the same things their church was. They now see PFF as a way they can connect with Presbyterians here. "It is a both sides of the water kind of thing," he said, echoing words spoken earlier in the workshop by Caroline Kurtz, an associate director at PFF. "Our historic Presbyterian mission partners are a precious gift from God, in danger of being abandoned in our fragmented church," she said. "Our Ethiopian partners feel betrayed by the PCUSA because of shrinking mission dollars and the shrinking presence of missionaries." Kurtz used Ethiopia as the main example during her portion of the workshop because she is a daughter of former Ethiopian missionaries and also went back to the country as an adult missionary. She said Presbyterians have also lost faith in PCUSA missions. Her reasons included: "We don't know any more that Presbyterians have cutting edge evangelical mission. "We don't trust the funding system. "We don't meet the missionaries any more (There are so few, they take shorter furloughs and don't itinerate like they used to). "We are in danger of throwing out the baby." Mission networking Earlier in the workshop, Kurtz spoke about the mission networks, which she called challenging, exciting and cutting edge. "Networks are the way things are happening," she said. "We can't do a credible and good job in mission work without networks. … In today's mission culture it couldn't be done any other way." She said the church needs people who live in the areas where missionaries go and who know the people. "They know how the gospel can be given without changing their ethnic identity. The local church doesn't have the resources to do this," she said. Kurtz said the local two-thirds world leaders initiate, plan and run the mission programs. She said that when she went back to the country as an adult mission worker, she was working under an Ethiopian in an Ethiopian school. "It is much more Ethiopian than it used to be when I went with my parents … what they did was American because that was what they knew." "We must network in order to be faithful and do mission well," she said.

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