Global mission keynoter: Missionaries called home

TACOMA
For the first time in its history, the ELCA recently recalled a handful of its missionaries, due to budget cuts.
That somber news was delivered by the Rev. Twila Schock, ELCA director for mission support, at a synod global mission event Nov. 13 at St. Mark's by The Narrows Lutheran Church of Tacoma.
The average annual $70,000 cost to support a missionary could not be sustained at a time when the ELCA's budget was shrinking, due to fallout from the 2009 churchwide sexuality vote, she said.
The pullbacks are particularly painful because they come at a time when relationships between the ELCA and its companion churches are growing fast. Its relationship with its partners in Ethiopia, for instance, grew 475 percent in the past two decades, she said.
Today, the ELCA has 250 missionaries in 48 countries, 63 of them in Europe, where the ranks of practicing Christians are diminishing in some places. Even in Wittenberg, Germany, only 27 percent of residents are practicing Christians, she said.