According to a recent Missio Nexus survey, mission leaders globally view shallow discipleship as the largest risk facing missions over the next three to five years. Among the possible reasons for this discipleship gap, Missio Nexus President Dr. Ted Esler pointed to the numbers-driven preoccupation of many Western (in particular, North American) churches that value programs and strategies to the neglect of true Spirit-led, life-on-life transformative ministry. Yet as Esler points out, discipleship does not scale. When making disciples is reduced to the realm of activity, the church loses sight of the essential relational nature of its mission.
If true discipleship is not happening on the sending side, can we expect anything different on the field? At a time when many within the global mission community seek to come alongside China’s emerging mission force, this question deserves careful consideration. As this blog series has emphasized, glorifying God among the nations is not just about what we do, but about how we show up in the world. It is not a project, but the outgrowth of relationship, beginning with Christ and with oneself, and extending out to family and coworkers, to the larger body of Christ, and finally the communities in which believers seek to make a difference.
The Key to World Evangelization
At the personal level, Dr. David Bennett of the Lausanne Movement highlights the fallout that results when this vital relationship is neglected:
… In many Christian organizations, dysfunction does not stem mainly from a lack of biblical or theological education, or a lack of training in strategy, planning, and management. It often arises from deficiencies in emotional intelligence and in the ability to respond with understanding, wisdom, and empathy in interpersonal relationships—areas that become even more complex when cultural differences are involved. The question is not only whether leaders are trained, but whether they are being formed into the likeness of Christ.1
Writing thirty years earlier in Evangelical Missions Quarterly, then-editor Jim Reapsome called unity the church’s most overlooked strategy, then added, “No, strategy isn’t the right word, because Jesus didn’t give us strategies for world evangelization. He gave us relationships between himself and his Father and between himself and us.”2
Reflecting on the implications of Christ’s prayer in John 17 for unity among his followers, Reapsome went on to address the gap between knowing what Christ prayed for and living it out as his body:
We love to talk about resistant people and religious and political barriers to conversion across the world. We write books and conduct seminars. But we do not even ask if there might be something wrong with us. The static is always on the other person’s line, not ours.3
What Gets Measured
Returning to the balanced scorecard introduced in Part One of this series, the business world understands that what gets measured is ultimately what gets done; hence, the importance of assigning concrete measures to attributes that may seem intangible yet are vital to the completion of the mission. Taken together, these desired outcomes constitute the business’s strategy. Bringing these into a strategy map illuminates the cause-and-effect relationships underpinning business strategy. Without these, they are just a list of unrelated desired outcomes. The strategy map tells which are foundational and which build on one another, with the outputs from one stage becoming the inputs to the next.4
The last step in the strategy map is to set targets that quantify what successful strategy execution means for each measure. The more specific the measures, the more useful they are in evaluating performance.
The classic business strategy map (Figure One) has learning and growth at the foundation, then process (includes social processes), customer perspective, and, finally, financial perspective. Goals are attached to each strategy. These “critical performance variables” must be monitored; otherwise, the whole enterprise will fail.
Beyond Activities
Modern missions prioritize goals like new fields opened, Scripture translations underway, church planting, evangelistic activities, and numbers of people served, baptized, and trained. These are often at the core of strategy discussions on the field or in mission boardrooms, newsletters, and funding proposals. More financial support can produce more activities, which then attract more financial support.
While traditional missions may be fairly good at setting numerical targets for their anticipated activities, intangibles such as relationships, faith, and spiritual maturity are harder to quantify. Thus, the spiritual, emotional, and relational underpinnings essential for effective witness are easily overlooked or taken for granted, yet they become glaringly and painfully obvious when their absence manifests itself on the field.
Relationships as Strategy
Addressing this gap requires a different kind of strategy map that incorporates the relational domains explored earlier in this series. The foundation is the believer’s relationship to Christ and to self, which produces fruit in relationships with family and team members. These in turn build a foundation for unity within the larger body, and through this unity God is glorified in the world.
Beginning at the personal level with abiding in Christ, objectives would include intimacy with the Triune God, identity in Christ/self-awareness, dependence on God, and a lifestyle of communion in gratitude and worship. Progress might be measured in terms of emotional and spiritual healing, the ability to rest in Christ, being Spirit-led instead of self-driven in ministry, living from true identity rather than demonstrating a performance-based identity, and delighting in the Lord.
At the level of restored relationships, objectives would include developing conflict resolution skills, appreciating and valuing differences, practicing mutual submission, and enjoying friendships. Spiritual fruit as defined in Scripture, produced in and through relationships, provides the indicators of progress at this level.At the corporate level, unity in the body can only be realized by building on the first two domains, for true unity requires mutual love and respect in relationship. As Gary Corwin writes, “Commitment to common values, goals, and the means to achieve them is the stuff that makes unity possible; however, it is relationship that makes it an effective functioning reality.”6
Objectives at this level include a working knowledge of the unique gifts, resources, and callings within one’s own team or organization and those of other entities in the region or sphere in which one is working. This requires cultivating a posture of hospitality, mutual love, and acceptance, acknowledging differences and discerning common ground as well as challenges. All this makes collaboration possible. Success in this domain may be assessed in terms of how well the gifts and resources across the Christian community are being recognized and utilized and how well each member is being supported and empowered to serve.
Finally, at the level of Communal Witness, the fruit of abiding in Christ, healthy relationships, and true unity manifests in living from Kingdom culture while respecting and honoring local culture, Gospel proclamation through unity, the Gospel lived and demonstrated through compassionate works of mercy or service flowing from love, and creating a welcoming and safe community with people being drawn to the dynamic display of union with God and unity with one another.
Activities associated with these objectives may look similar to those traditionally associated with the work of missions. The difference is that we get here not out of a sense of duty or urgency but from the relational wholeness growing out of the first three domains. Rather than focusing solely on commonly recognized measures such as gospel penetration, conversions and baptisms, and church growth, the relational model also looks specifically at the connection between church and community, asking how well the community knows the church, understands why it is here, and acknowledges what it contributes to the community.
Figure Two summarizes the progression from individual to corporate and global witness. Operationalizing each of these domains with specific measures will require creativity and a shift from traditional metrics, along with attention to the unique needs of people in a given context. Our purpose here is to suggest that it is possible to construct a relational strategy that is rooted in biblical principles of how God is glorified in the world and that addresses gaps and inconsistencies evident in contemporary missions.
Although we know the importance of personal transformation and corporate unity, we are often drawn to tangible, measurable outcomes and tend to overlook the intangibles that are at the core of who we are as God’s people. In setting forth goals and strategies, it is not enough to simply measure activity; the intangibles must become non-negotiables.
If we are serious about effectiveness, we need to be intentional about the qualities that Christ said are key to the world knowing who he is. Saying that we can’t measure the work of the Spirit and can only measure our own work tends to result in an overemphasis on human enterprise and to shrink what’s possible down to what is measurable, effectively excluding the Spirit from the process. Our measures should be broad enough to account for the unexpected as part of God’s work in and through us, so that even when things go south (as, for example, during the global pandemic of 2020) and our best-laid plans go out the window, we still see God at work in the lives of his servants, who are called to do things totally unexpected yet perfectly aligned with his will.
- David Bennett, “A Fourfold Vision for Missiology in a New Generation,” Lausanne Highlights, April 24, 2026, https://lausanne.org/about/blog/a-fourfold-vision-for-missiology-in-a-new-generation. Accessed October 20, 2026.
- Jim Reapsome, “Our Most Overlooked Strategy,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1996). https://app.missionexus.org/resources/editorial-our-most-overlooked-strategy-2/. Accessed October 20, 2026.
- Reapsome, 1996.
- Catherine Cote, “What Is a Balanced Scorecard?” HBS Online, October 26, 2023, https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/balanced-scorecard. Accessed October 20, 2026.
- Adapted from “Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard” in Cote 2023.
- Gary Corwin, “Doing Diversity Well,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, October 1, 2008, https://app.missionexus.org/resources/doing-diversity-well-2. Accessed October 20, 2026.
