Missionaries Terminated - Reversal of the Great Commission - Done With Church

Look closely at a broad cross-section of church budgets and a clear trend appears: churches are spending more and more of their money internally, and sending less and less of it out to causes like missions and local benevolence. This has been the direction for a long time. And here is the telling part — when giving dips, internal spending does not always drop with it. Instead, the cuts tend to fall on missions and benevolence first, so that salaries, facilities, and programs can be protected.

The result on the field

The consequence is that funding for missions has steadily declined, and missionaries are being recalled and let go at record rates. The International Mission Board terminated 1,132 mission workers in 2016 alone. That brought the number of IMB missionaries in the field down from roughly 4,700 to about 3,800 — a return to 1993 levels.

Listen to the way this is usually explained from the pulpit, and you would think the problem is that members are not giving enough. There are sermons calling on people to repent and give more. But the data tells a different story.

Where the money actually goes

The budget shortfalls line up with a decrease in what the churches pass along to the mission boards — not with a decrease in what members put in the plate. In other words, people are still giving. The churches receiving those gifts are simply keeping a larger share and forwarding less of it on.

The long-term numbers make the shift hard to miss:

In 1971, churches passed on an average of about 12% of their budgets to missions.
By 2000, that had fallen to roughly 6.2%.
More recently it has dropped to around 4.2%.

So the contraction in missions is not primarily a story about members closing their wallets. It is a story about how the institutions in the middle are choosing to allocate the money they receive.

The cycle this creates

When members come to understand that this is happening, many respond by dropping out and giving less — or nothing at all. That, in turn, deepens the very shortfall the churches were citing, and the cycle feeds itself. Worth noting, too: not every religious movement is pulling back. Some, such as the Latter-day Saints, have continued to send large numbers of missionaries out even as mainstream Protestant missions have shrunk.

All of this runs against the plain instruction the church was given at its founding:

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” — Matthew 28:19–20

For people who take that commission seriously, watching missionaries called home while internal budgets hold steady is more than a financial footnote. It is one more reason they conclude their giving — and their commitment — would do more good somewhere else.