What Strategic Sending Is
The heart of Strategic Sending is a message to local churches to encourage the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world. The message is in the form of a letter from the Strategic Sending Team. There are 85 different letters for churches in 85 different regions. Every church in the world has one special letter. For instance, one of the 85 letters is specifically for the churches in France.
Strategic Sending “shrinks the task” of global mission for each local church. This makes it easier for the local church to join in our global mission. We have done this systematically. At a global level, we have analysed where the church is, where the world is and some simple affinities between different regions of the world. The two main affinities are any shared familiarity with a global language, and physical proximity.
Most of the wording in each letter is the same as all the others. There are three crucial differences. We do not say how much attention each church should give to its local area. But we recommend a rough percentage of effort to devote to their own region versus further away. This varies widely. We encourage churches in places like Afghanistan to give 98% of their attention to their own region and only 2% abroad. On the other hand we encourage churches in high-evangelical places like South-East Nigeria to devote only 15% on their own region and 85% elsewhere.
Secondly, we provide a list of other regions that need prayer and sending. It can be a short list. It is often only one region. It can be a long one, but it is always only a very small proportion of the world.
Finally, for high-evangelical regions only, we may give a warning that we are not encouraging others to help them with the gospel.
There is overlap in the assignments. If the churches in one region don’t pray for or send to a needy region, there will be others who will be encouraged to do it.
What Strategic Sending is Not
Strategic Sending is only a very small part of mission. It will not, in itself, educate the churches about mission. It says nothing about the methods of mission. It does not explain the importance and complexity of learning language and immersion in culture. It does not explicitly encourage you to going where there is no church and there are no disciples. It says nothing of disciple-making movements, of unreached peoples, of the primacy of evangelism or of holistic mission.
Strategic Sending is not compulsory. There may be good reasons for sending in other directions, following the Holy Spirit. You do not need to sign up. We welcome news and feedback to strategicsending@gmail.com. But there will be no management or monitoring.
Missiological Basis
In the run up to their Fourth Congress in Seoul, the Lausanne Movement published a series of three articles which laid out the missiological basis for Strategic Sending. These are foundational for the whole project.
The first article demonstrated that intentional, international sending is still needed for the sake of the kingdom in the 21st century: https://lausanne.org/about/blog/gods-mission-still-needs-missionaries
The second article explored the significance and power of a ‘sending message’: https://lausanne.org/about/blog/gods-mission-needs-the-right-message
The third and final article showed that, in a polycentric world, we will need many, complementary sending messages: https://lausanne.org/about/blog/gods-mission-needs-to-go-to-the-whole-world
History
You may want to know how Strategic Sending came about. This is the story (PDF)
Here are the “Vision, Objectives and Groundrules” of the Strategic Sending Team. Vision, Objectives and Groundrules (PDF)
Quick Start Guide
This guide may help mission mobilizers understand how to use Strategic Sending. Quick Start Guide (PDF)
Slides That You Can Use
You can use all or some of these PowerPoint Slides in your own presentations. (Note that some of them are animated so you need to use slideshow to get the full effect.) Public PowerPoint Slides (PPTX)