As we began our journey into missions, one thing that caught us off guard is how many missions agencies (including ABWE) made a big deal about your “sending church” involvement. In truth, we weren’t knowledgeable about why that would matter so much. So if you’re like me, here’s a helpful way to re-frame it:

• The New Testament model for church planting is the local church.
• The New Testament model for feeding the hungry is the local church.
• The New Testament model for making disciples is the local church.
• The New Testament model for widows and orphans is the local church.
• The New Testament model for worship is the local church.
• The New Testament model for evangelism is arguing with people on sidewalks the local church.

So guess what the New Testament model for missions? If you guessed “the local church,” you get a cookie.

This is not a new idea. It is not a missions agency talking point. It is simply what the Bible describes when it describes the church doing what the church is supposed to do. And yet, for many congregations, the connection between “our church” and “missionaries on the other side of the world” can feel abstract at best and disconnected at worst.

At a “24-Hour Demo” event, ABWE’s Doug Martin said something that has stuck with me since the first time I heard it: “every church is a local church to somebody. Which means that missions, at its core, is best understood as ‘local church to local church’ ministry.”

Biblically, it is not an organization sending a missionary to a foreign country. There is a community of believers in West Virginia walking alongside a community of believers in South Africa. That reframe changes everything.

But here is the honest question: if that is what missions is supposed to look like, why do so many churches feel underprepared to do it well?

Most churches that support missionaries do so genuinely and generously. They give financially. They pray, at least occasionally. They celebrate when the missionary comes home on furlough and shares slides from the field.

But sending a missionary well is a different category of involvement. It means understanding what a missionary’s life actually looks like — the budgets, the logistics, the emotional and spiritual weight of cross-cultural ministry. It means knowing what your church can do to sustain someone on the field for the long haul, not just get them there.

ABWE has developed a pair of workshops specifically designed to help churches move from “we support a missionary” to “we are a sending church.” The Sending Church Workshop covers what it means to prepare and launch a missionary well. The Sustaining Church Workshop picks up where that leaves off, focusing on how a church continues to invest in their missionary once they are on the field.

Each workshop normally runs four to four and a half hours. In February, ABWE brought both of them to Horizons Church — and we did them both in a single afternoon.

Ken Lorow, ABWE’s Director of Prefield Training, made the trip down to walk our church through both workshops back to back.

Compressing eight-plus hours of material into four and a half is no small feat. But having been through a week-long missionary orientation myself, I can say with confidence that the workshop did an exceptional job of covering what matters most.

One area that stood out was the honest, practical breakdown of what a missionary budget actually includes. This is not something most churchgoers think about, and understandably so. When someone says “we’re raising support to go to South Africa,” it is easy to imagine that support as a straightforward salary replacement. The reality is considerably more layered.

International health insurance, for example. Housing in a foreign country. Travel between the field and home for furloughs. Agency fees that fund the infrastructure supporting missionaries around the world. And shouldn’t your missionaries get together, regionally, every couple of years for encouragement, support, and ideas?

A missionary budget is not fluff or padding: it is the real cost of sustaining a family in cross-cultural ministry over years and decades, not just months.

When a church understands those line items, something shifts. The financial commitment stops feeling like a charitable donation and starts feeling like a partnership investment. The ABWE workshop created space for that shift to happen at Horizons, and the conversations that followed reflected it.

The clearest sign that a training event worked is not what happens in the room. It is what happens in the weeks afterward, when the energy of the day has settled and people are back in their normal routines.

At Horizons, the ‘afterward’ has been encouraging.

Our Connect Pastor, Pastor Lucas, walked out of the workshop with a specific vision. He encouraged small group leaders across the church to reach out to Abbey and me directly — to invite us into their groups for more personal, conversational time with church members. Two of those leaders have already been in touch to schedule visits. That kind of organic, relational follow-through is exactly what the Sending Church model is designed to produce.

In the same vein, we are a multi-campus church, and one of the campus pastors immediately booked a Sunday for us to come speak to his congregation.

Additionally, a church member who attended the workshop approached me in the lobby shortly afterward. He mentioned that he knew a pastor who oversees a small circuit of three churches, and she asked whether she could pass along our contact information. We are in the early stages of that conversation, but the fact that it started at all is the point. When a church understands what it means to send a missionary, they start thinking about how they can use their own networks to help.

That is “local church to local church” ministry in action.

If you are reading this as a pastor, elder, or church leader, and your church supports a missionary (or is considering it) I would encourage you to look into the ABWE Sending Church Workshop. It is not a sales pitch, and it is not a guilt trip. It is a practical, grounded afternoon that gives your congregation the context they need to be genuinely useful to the people they are trying to support.

Your missionary will thank you. Probably more than once.

And if you are a pre-field missionary wondering whether to ask your sending church to host one of these: ask. The workshop exists for exactly this purpose. We are glad we did it, and the conversations it has generated are already opening doors we did not know to knock on.

The New Testament model for missions is the local church. Workshops like this one help the local church actually live that out.