Never before have all the CMS Chair­per­sons met in person from around the globe. For the past four years, CMS Chair­per­sons have met twice yearly via Zoom to build a sense of global fra­tern­ity, hear about each other’s plans, and learn from one another for the good of the mission world­wide. Last year it was decided that all the Chairs should meet in person to further foster this CMS global family. This inaug­ural meeting took place recently in Cam­bodia, where the CMS Asia staff had been meeting for their annual gath­er­ing and strategy plan­ning sessions.

All seven CMS Chairs atten­ded this forum, com­pris­ing of Aus­tralia, Asia, Africa, UK, Ireland, America (SAMS/​CMS) and NZ. The Chairs spent time listen­ing to one another’s approaches to mission, theo­logy and stra­tegic plan­ning, along with meeting the Asia CMS man­age­ment who cover Indone­sia, Malay­sia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. There was also a day spent vis­it­ing some of their CMS Asia mission pro­jects com­pris­ing of an orphan­age, church, and school and meeting fam­il­ies from a remote village. From this gath­er­ing I have sum­mar­ised a few of the inter­est­ing aspects of the chair’s dis­cus­sions for your interest.

The first two days involved learn­ing and exper­i­en­cing the culture and region of Cam­bodia. It was sober­ing to hear about the com­mun­ist gen­o­cide of the 1970’s where 2–3 million Cam­bod­ian people (espe­cially edu­cated people) were executed. Gen­er­a­tions later that impact is still being felt as the country con­tin­ues to slowly start its eco­nomic devel­op­ment again. The implic­a­tions of having 65% of the pop­u­la­tion under 30 years old is seen in the young work­force and lead­er­ship roles these young people have to step into. At a school project we visited I met a 30-year-old charm­ing and cheer­ful girl who I thought was an enthu­si­astic young teacher at the school, but no! She was the Prin­cipal! She had been raised as an orphan with the loss of her parents during the genocide.

As an aside, after the CMS Chairs met, we returned to Cam­bodia and visited Phnom Penh to visit the Dunbar family. We had a won­der­ful evening with them in their home. The three chil­dren are at Hope Inter­na­tional Chris­tian School, Neill is teach­ing English to stu­dents 2 days a week and serving the rest of his week at their local church plant and Rebekah is running a women’s Bible study group and con­tinu­ing with a private tutor to further her lan­guage skills. The hour-long trek back into the city in a Tuk-tuk in monsoon rain was a great adven­ture on a bust­ling Friday evening!

Back to our gath­er­ing with the CMS Chairs. We met and shared about our Board struc­tures, gov­ernance prac­tices, theo­lo­gical pos­i­tions, funding models, stra­tegic goals and chal­lenges we face. Overall, it became appar­ent that all the CMS glob­ally had many similar setups, theo­logy pos­i­tions, mission focus and global chal­lenges. Board struc­tures were all legal entit­ies, with board numbers ranging from 9–25 members with the average being 10–12 members. Gov­ernance policies focused on ‘Safe­guard­ing’ policies. Policies for Mission Part­ners care and well-being and safe­guard­ing pro­to­cols in their daily deploy­ment, for staff and volun­teers, and the mar­ginal people groups of young chil­dren, youth, dis­abled, illit­er­ate, elderly, and village people.

Theo­lo­gical dis­cus­sions around CMS State­ments of Belief were dis­cussed at length. Inter­est­ingly all CMS had taken a ‘con­ser­vat­ive, evan­gel­ical, ortho­dox theo­logy’ pos­i­tion linking it to the author­ity of the scrip­tures and the Lausanne Con­fer­ence declar­a­tion pre­vi­ously announced on these issues.

Funding models to support future strategies and com­pensate for tra­di­tional funding from churches were inter­est­ing. However, it was observed that church funding was increas­ingly tar­get­ing indi­vidu­als and/​or pro­jects more than just the mission organ­isa­tion. A mar­ket­ing-fun­drais­ing person for one CMS branch had iden­ti­fied 9 sub­groups of their sup­port­ers and designed a pro­mo­tional cam­paign spe­cific­ally for each of these subgroups.

Stra­tegic­ally CMS glob­ally is assess­ing the tra­di­tional model of sending Mission Part­ners vs expand­ing ‘co-part­ner­ship or ‘indi­gen­ous Mission Partner’ arrange­ments. To enter most coun­tries now Mission Part­ners will need spe­cific qual­i­fic­a­tions that will benefit that country. However, Cam­bodia remains open for direct gospel ministry.

A phrase used was ‘Majori­a­tal­ism’. This was where the dom­in­ant religion(s) of a country (espe­cially Asia-wide) start to exert polit­ical influ­ence to sup­press the impact of minor reli­gions within their country. This means Chris­ti­ans wanting to bring the Gospel to these coun­tries are likely to have their visa refused due to the pres­sures placed on Gov­ern­ments by the major reli­gion of that country.

To further foster part­ner­ship rela­tion­ships between CMS’s another phrase used was ‘Com­munity’.

CMS Boards — through their CEO’s/National Dir­ect­ors — should be ensur­ing that the host coun­tries that we are sending Mission Part­ners to have good rela­tion­ships with the CMS of that region. It was noted that CMS CEO’s/National Dir­ect­ors are now in regular contact with each other and this has been very advant­age­ous for working in increas­ing col­lab­or­at­ive partnerships.

In summary, estab­lish­ing the inaug­ural global CMS Chair­per­son’s ‘in-person’ gath­er­ing was uplift­ing and inspir­ing. CMS agen­cies glob­ally have many things in common, from their theo­lo­gical basis to the desire to bring the Gospel to ‘the edges/​the harder places’ as a pri­or­ity for their work.

There has been a growing col­legial approach by CMS man­age­ment staff glob­ally and this is leading to increased co-part­ner­ship arrange­ments devel­op­ing. I believe CMS is actu­ally growing in uni­ver­sal strength for the glory of God. CMS glob­ally is build­ing sig­ni­fic­ant momentum and Mission Part­ners, staff, volun­teers and sup­port­ers should be very encour­aged by these developments.

Graeme Mitchell
NZCMS Chair