Let's talk missions. Now to preface this - I've been a little fearful of treading here, because being a missionary is part and parcel of identity. Missions is not part of my direct experience (discounting street evangelism), but the study of soul care is. In that vein, I've had a fair number of soul-care-related conversations with missionaries at various stages of their journeys. While experiences differ (of course), I've seen a few common threads that deserve to be traced.

I don't know about you, but when I was growing up in large-independent-missions-minded-church Christianity, I got an earful about how missions was this amazing life experience. Hard work, for sure - but you get to see the Lord opening doors in places that had never seen the gospel light before. And our church did a great job with supporting missions, in the financial sense.

That's a good thing. It's the Great Commission, from Jesus himself, sending the church to bring the gospel to all nations. It's a bread-and-butter activity of the church - it brings strength to the church, and it brings focus.

The 20th-century church in America may have done a fantastic job broadcasting the message of salvation throughout the world. The gospel may indeed have been sent through more open doors than ever before, and to massive numbers of people. All that said, I believe we have a bit of learning to do when it comes to caring for the souls of our missionaries.

Sending people to unfamiliar lands to effectively communicate a message is no small feat. The machinery that's been developed around training and deploying is truly impressive. And these activities have been accomplished on a large scale. Now, this may be where I step in it a little bit. I may be speaking a little bit out of turn here. But here's what is: the fog exists for missionaries, and many of them spend significant periods within its mists.

I've seen some sides of the machinery of training and sending that weren't the public-facing, ready-for-prime-time experience I saw when I was a kid. The journeyman who ends up on the other side of the world with heavy depression for a couple of years. The long-term missionary family whose marriage ends up on the rocks. The big-dreaming family in training, who gets sent to a training program almost cult-like in its lack of boundaries. The family who experiences a traumatic event in the field but hears crickets from their sending agency.

Almost all of them have come away with a sense of, "what's wrong with me? Why wasn't I able to just share the gospel, like so many missionaries before me? Why couldn't I set the feelings and experiences to the side, for the sake of Jesus?" Some of it, to be sure, gets attributed to spiritual warfare. But more of it, deep down, gets internalized as the battles not won, the prayers not answered, the message not effectively communicated.

Then they look in the mirror, and just like the rest of us in the fog, they don't like what they see.

And to that, I respond, these are some of the more mature and godly believers I have ever met. They have sought after God's call, they have vulnerably opened their life's plans and put some dreams on hold. And the church has let each one of them down.

For the vast majority of missionaries I've had the privilege of interacting with, each of them has experienced a certain kind of trauma, whether on the field or before they even got there. And instead of an intentional, soul-care-based response from their missions agency, they received either silence or pressure.

With silence, they were left to their own devices, to just deal with the trauma as best they could, within their own resources. Calling on a counselor could even be considered a red flag on their record. The agency, in these cases, would be content to provide structure for financial support, but there was a decided lack of care for the missionaries' souls.

Now, I understand that for many missions agencies, resources are quite finite. For many, the activity of trying to sustain the mission financially is a full-time endeavor, and there just isn't money left for having a counselor on staff. Fair enough. But I find it hard to believe that well-trained counselors would not consider providing some pro bono sessions for their missionary brothers and sisters. I have to think there would be immense value in, at the very least, listening to and  validating our missionaries' experiences, even if we don't end up with full counseling programs. (Perhaps this already happens to a certain extent. Those I have interacted with haven't seen these sorts of options.)

I mentioned pressure, in addition to silence. For missionaries, as with many pastors, their livelihood depends on some kind of result. For a missionary, it is entirely conceivable to experience trauma, and then have to think about how their response to trauma may affect their income, and hence their ability to continue. Their identity as an active missionary can become threatened by something that was completely outside their control.

Because of that pressure shaping the response to trauma, the victims end up needing to play-act a way through the situation instead of processing the experience itself. What we know from trauma-informed care, though, is that forcing someone through dealing with the situation and recovery in that way does no good.

Some of that trauma can happen before they even get to the field. I've been told of training programs that consistently violated boundaries of the psyche and of relationships - frankly, the type of training I've observed in cult schools. These are toxic environments where you learn to play a game of keep-away: satisfy the demands to share inner thoughts, but be sure to keep the problematic ones out of focus. And learn to sort through the double-speak.

But the missionaries-in-training have to tough it out. After all, if they do not, they won't attain their dream of being in the field. This, they have been told, is the way to get there. And they can't provide an honest assessment of the training, lest the sending agency decide to withdraw support.

Others have trauma in the field, and the pressure is to act a certain way through it all, lest their agency leadership get a bad impression that affects their standing in the community. In that case, a missionary family can feel their entire term is threatened, to an extent. Their standing, both in their target community and the agency community with which they associate, can rise and fall in an arbitrary evaluation of their response to trauma.

And that response, friends, is precisely what cannot be learned. Especially when a family braves that many unknowns, stepping into a separate culture in another part of the world - an unfamiliar situation that is, in its very essence, unpracticed.

Now, of course, there are situations where it may be best to bring a family home. At least, for a while. But the support cannot end there. And many situations and experiences can certainly be dealt with and resolved on the field. But the resources and communication have to be there, for an agency to proactively say to their missionaries, "We have your back. If you run into anything, we have people who will listen. We may not know how to solve everything, but we'll be in it together."

Because if I've heard one thing while listening, it's that a large number of missionaries feel like they are alone. We the people of the church need to bring a mission to our missionaries, because the same gospel they're sharing says they aren't.

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