This episode of Training for the Sending Church focuses on a very important and often neglected part of our evaluation. It zeroes in on discovering our present missions commitments and helps us understand the past and present status of those missions commitments and aim toward the future.

The questions here will guide you and your church missions leadership in creating the backdrop for development as a sending church.

Assessment or evaluation of the local church's sending church potential is essential. This episode discusses some dynamics facing the person or entity doing the evaluation. We cover key questions that will reveal doctrine, desires, and design affecting the evaluation. This can be very helpful in discovering strengths and weaknesses. The process accelerates direction and solutions toward seeing the local church prepared and equipped to become a good sending church.

Whether you have a missionary candidate urgently asking to be sent out ASAP or are just growing your church's missions vision, this series will help you. We'll walk through the evaluation, education, and elevation steps to equip you and your church in sending. This episode closes with some key resources to follow up.

It's not your job, but it's also not what the church does. Christians are free to participate in any number of interchurch activities. We are better together than alone. But there must be a clear movement of the ministry toward the centrality of the church for every believer. Why is the priority of the church so important and how can we maintain that?

A Christian's job can also be thought of as a parachurch ministry. It's important to make a distinction between what the church does and what a Christian does, and a distinction between what the gospel is and what the implications of the gospel are. Thus Christians live out their faith in the workplace and around the world while maintaining the primary importance of the work of the church and church planting missionaries.

Churches have two kinds of ministries they operate: essential and support ministries. In this episode, we talk about how to make a distinction between the two and why that is important, along with some potential dangers and some helpful implications. Did you ever consider that your church operates parachurch ministries from within? Perhaps what your church has considered really important should be viewed as a non-essential parachurch support ministry. May all of God's churches be healthy in how we spend our ministry efforts.

Once we understand what the essentials of the church are, then we are able to define a parachurch ministry. The definition proposed in this episode will help us to keep the priority of ministry on the local church. It will help us understand why missions is important for churches as we compare and contrast all churches everywhere. And hopefully, you will be motivated in your own ministry to not exceed its mandate and see how it rightfully sits in submission to the local church.

Getting the church right sets the foundation for understanding all Christian ministry. The church is God's institution for his purpose of global glory. The church is essential and when we see how important the church is, then everything else we do as Christians will fall into place. What is essential for a church?