The River is a young and highly active church in San Jose, California. Every year The River sends out around 150 of its church members for short-term missions trips all over the world. These trips generally have a strong social aid component and fall under The River’s Compassion Ministries Department. Jim Martin, pastor of this department, here talks about The River's missions strategy.

Marco Klaue: Compassion Ministries are the outreach groups here, the mission component of The River. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that entails.

Jim Martin: I think the broadest way to talk about it would be to say that Compassion Ministries is The River’s expression of the idea that the Gospel that Jesus taught includes concepts of mercy and justice, and that any church that’s to be a reflection of the true global church of Jesus has to reflect these characteristics as well. So this is expressed for us both locally and internationally.

MK: You have a lot of international teams that will go out on annual trips to different parts of the world. Maybe you can say a little about that.

JM: We have developed partnerships that have allowed us to send ten different teams out this year to different parts all over the world, from Mexico to Russia to Southern Africa. Those have been great experiences for our people, both giving them a sense of cultures outside of our own, (which we are in dire need of -- our folks really need to be educated), as well as, that out of these experiences has grown the desire in people to be more deeply involved in ministry in an ongoing way.

MK: Are there any full-time people that not just go out a couple of times a year but are actually out there all the time?

JM: Currently we have two people who are serving full-time – one in Southern California and Northern Mexico, and another in Greece, working with refugees. We don’t talk so much about these people as missionaries, but as people who have embraced a whole life: service of God. For some people this works out that they end up working in ministry. For others it may not necessarily, but this has been an important step in their discipleship.

MK: So with ten teams heading out and about a dozen members per team, plus two full-time missionaries, how is this all sponsored, how are the finances carried and handled?

JM: They’re handled somewhat separately. Each team that goes out engages in its own fundraising, we have training that we offer to all the participants and so they are each responsible to raise a target amount. The leader has to raise money just like the participants. We acknowledge that each member has a different fundraising potential, so that it’s not a requirement that everybody raise the amount that is needed, but that is given as the target. Some people raise much more, some people raise much less. We also require that our folks give to their own experience of the trip. In the past we’ve tried to talk about it in different ways, they give 50% and raise 50%, but again, people’s giving potential varies so much that we’ve said, “before you know how much you’re gonna raise, please make a donation yourself”, and suggest that a 50% donation might be a good place to start.

And the full-time people are funded largely through the church’s own giving fund. The church gives away 20% of its annual budget. I worked in self-supported ministry for eight years, and it is a really, really difficult task. For anybody who’s done it, they know. So one of the ways we try to deal with that is that people who are gonna step up and go full-time for two years or more, the church commits to giving 50% of their total budget for the first two years, and then backing up as their support base increases.

MK: Regarding the short-term missions work: you are no doubt aware that one of the great criticisms of short-term missions is that for an American or a European to do a ten-day stint or twelve-day stint in one of the “developing nations” often costs as much as supporting a local missionary there for a full year. You obviously see the value of short-term mission, what do you see as the arguments on the other side that would balance out this objection?

JM: That’s a great question. We think about that long and hard. Last year the total that was raised was about a quarter of a million dollars to send the people that we sent out – about 150 people last year. And every year when I look at that figure it staggers me a little bit and I think, “boy, I need to certainly be living in a tension between what the money is doing and what it could be doing.”—in terms of supporting full-time work or even given directly to need, or however you would want to look at that. So my thought process that has allowed us to get to where we’re at in terms of spending that much money -- essentially, as some could argue, on ourselves -- is that there are two purposes that need to be held in tension. At least two. One of them is that there is – because we do all of these trips in partnership – there is a sense that we can make a contribution while we’re there (which is a very small one, and we acknowledge that with all of our teams before we send them out). For example, I’m taking a team to Honduras in about a month. And the partnership that we have with Iglesia en Transformacion in Honduras is of value to them because it gives them a sense of connection to the world-wide church. They’re not isolated, they have relationships with people on our staff and people in our church who have gone to visit for longer term. But also our church, through the giving that we do, has been deeply committed to supporting and resourcing the church’s own mission. And anything we do we want to do under their leadership when we’re there. So we’re trying to acknowledge that there’s a power dynamic that exists when people from a developed nation visit an underdeveloped nation, and trying in every way possible to follow their lead and to encourage them to lead us. So over the course of the last four years that we’ve been going to Honduras, we’ve given over $100,000 to the mission of Iglesia en Transformacion as well.

So that would be one purpose: developing partnerships that actually are a blessing to the churches we’re partnering with. Acknowledging that, for them, not only is there a cost associated with our going, but there’s a cost for them in receiving us and hosting us while we’re there, that we’re constantly trying to acknowledge and not overtax.

The other side is that the church in the United States, from my perspective, is the most myopic church in the world, and that looked at from another angle, a quarter of a million dollars is a small price to pay to have 150 people walking around the planet with a much larger sense of the mission of the Church of Jesus. So my primary purpose in developing this area of ministry within The River has been to both educate and develop the disciples who are here, who need very much to be educated and developed in ways that we really can’t accomplish on U. S. soil. So holding those two purposes in tension is, I think, what keeps us alive in what we’re doing right now.

MK: So what changes do you see happening when someone goes on a missions trip, gets to know a new country, a new context, gets to know a completely different way of life? They come back to the United States, obviously there is a lot of excitement, especially when they first get back. But do you see long-term changes in these people as well?

JM: Yes, we’re beginning to see that. The two people that are engaged full-time right now are people who have been through these short-term experiences. The people who are more deeply engaging in local ministry are primarily people who have had these experiences. So I would say that the kinds of changes that happen, happen on two levels: one has to do with being able to see U. S. culture and how individualistic and consumeristic it is, from a new perspective, on return. So we’re trying to do what we can to maximize that effect so that the “culture shock” that people experience will be greater upon returning than it was when entering the foreign country. The second thing I would say is that what we’re striving for in terms of partnerships are as a vehicle through which we can expose our people to strong leadership that is non-U. S. -- and hopefully, in some ways, non-Western -- that has its own sense of theological grounding, its own sense of a deep call to mission in and of itself. And that has been really transformational for people to see that “church is so much more than I thought it was, and has so many committed people that I never even dreamed of.” So those would be two categories of change that we’re actually looking for and trying to foster.

MK: The River is a church with an estimated weekly attendance of 800 people, of which around 150 people go annually on these missions trips. That’s a pretty high ratio, as churches go, for people to be involved in missions trips. What do you think The River is doing differently from other churches?

JM: I’ve never thought about that, I don’t know. We’ve had, I think, a good opportunity to be on the forefront of people’s minds, we’ve had a great opportunity to tell stories, to show videos, to use a lot of media. Anyone who’s been on an experience like this knows that it’s almost impossible to communicate fractions even of what the experience was like. So we’ve used video and music video to some effect, we’ve had some high-profile “success stories” early on, I think that helped us. We had a partnership with World Vision in Malawi, Africa, where we were able to fund 20 wells in a particularly underdeveloped region of Malawi. That changed the freshwater picture of that whole region of the country, and that was a fund drive that raised about a quarter of a million dollars to fund that project in an ongoing way for the drilling of those wells and the caring for them. And that was a success story that we experienced corporately as a church. Somehow we managed to do that. And the people who went and saw the difference that it made were able to tell that story publicly, and it’s just snowballed from there. I’m one of the teaching pastors as well, so people get regular exposure to me and to this side of our existence. The associate who works in the compassion area is also a great teacher and she’s extremely motivated and passionate. And so I would credit actually the snowballing in the last two years especially to her work and her passion.

MK: The church is relatively young as well, and already so active. How long has the church existed?

JM: The church was planted about 6 years ago to be basically a post-modern version of what Willow Creek was able to do for baby boomers. We’re going through an identity change now as a church, but that was the idea. The leading pastor is just an exceptional teacher and a great leader and the kind of person to whom people are just drawn. So it was started as a big thing, I think the first startup numbers were about 250 on a Sunday morning, and it grew pretty quickly from there. Again, I’m not sure how, people ask us that all the time. I think the very real – sounds sort of like the easy – answer is that God had His hand on what was happening for some reason. He really infused us with His own presence. And people would come. And you’d often hear stories of people coming to services, people who were not Christ-followers but were drawn to church, and would cry through church the first few weeks that they were here, and not know why. And we’d say, “well, it’s the presence of God, that’s what happens, you know, He’s touching you deeply.” And we’d try to help them through that process, and there have been a lot of conversions and baptisms that we have been able to experience with people that have been really exciting.

MK: Along similar lines, you were also mentioning the local ministry. I imagine San Jose, like any other city of similar size in North America, also has its share of opportunities and tasks for the Christian community to reach out.

JM: Like I said, part of the way we’re answering the question “how do we become a church that can impact a city like San Jose, a church that’s in the city for the city” has had to do with these international partnerships. We take people out for training – though they don’t realize that’s what’s happening – and bring them home much more ready to engage. The trick has been, San Jose -- being the 11th largest city in the U. S. – is a strange city. It’s been in Silicon Valley, and has experienced the boom that Silicon Valley experienced through the nineties. There’s been no shortage of money here at all, it’s just starting to happen now. So it has been service-rich, in terms of how it’s cared for its homeless, its undereducated, its underprivileged. The traditional entrees for a church is into these kinds of service areas, but there really aren’t many service gaps. So it’s been an interesting journey for us over the past few years to try to figure out what’s our niche, where are we gonna fit in? And I think we’re just beginning to discover that, and it’s been a very organic process. Our whole approach has been infusing people with a sense of vision that God wants to get a hold of their whole life -- not just their Sunday and their small group time, but their whole life -- and put them to work, that He’s developed them and given them gifts and skills in ministry and industry for a purpose that’s aligned with His Kingdom, and that the whole reason we’re here is to figure out what that is, and to work in alignment with what God is doing. So as we’re trying to infuse people with that sense of cosmology – that that’s how the world works – the people that really grasp it are taking off. So for example, there’s a small group that’s about a year old that’s working in the area of homelessness in the city. And they just started out simply by serving meals at one of the local shelters, and then around Christmastime they started offering a church service after the meals, and had some great response. Now there are two Bible studies that meet weekly at the shelter, that actually the shelter residents are leading under the tutelage of some of the folks from the small group. And it’s been a great experience. We’re at the point now where we’re beginning to spin off non-profit organizations to house these ministries that are starting up. So I believe that, over the next few years, this will be the next growth edge that we experience, that it will be highly organic as God raises up people with passion to lead these things – we will go to the mat to figure out how to resource them, both in terms of training the leaders and finding out where the money is gonna come from -- the resources to run these ministries.

MK: Is The River a somewhat unique church, or is there a strong sense of denomination or conference that you feel you belong to, nationwide or internationally? Or do you try to avoid questions of denomination, theology, doctrine, things like that?

JM: No, we don’t try to avoid them. The reality is that it’s been hard to find “like” churches. They’re there, here in the U. S., more and more. Some of our leadership team was just at a conference in Dallas with a bunch of other “outwardly focused churches”, so there is a discernible movement that’s happening. I think it’s very, very young, and I think also, in its own way, it’s suffering from the myopia that the U. S. church does. This church movement doesn’t seem to know much about other things that are happening worldwide, and churches -- like throughout Latin America and other places – that have been outwardly focused from the beginning. So, as often happens in the U. S., something happens to us and we think it’s the latest and the greatest thing that God is doing. So I think we have a lot to learn still, but as we’re trying to band together with churches that are like-minded, we’re discovering that there are churches out there – and there have always been a lot of great denominational churches too. I don’t personally, and we don’t as a church, want to project any sense of a negative outlook on the work that other people have been doing all along. So we are not directly affiliated with any denomination. We are planted out of another independent church six years ago, and our leadership structure has always been independent from that church as well. We’ve been part of the Willow Creek Association, just for lack of another organization to join, and we’re investigating other possibilities as well.

June 2003

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