Questions to Ask Missionaries
Questions for a conversation with someone serving as a missionary, covering where they are and how they got there, language and funding, their relationship with churches already in place, what the work costs their family, and the criticisms they have had to answer.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Where are you serving, and how long have you been there?
Why ask it
Place and length together frame everything else, and the length is the part people forget to ask. A first-year answer and a fifteenth-year answer to any later question in this set will sound nothing alike.
How did you end up in that particular place?
Why ask it
Assignments come from organizations, invitations, family history, or whichever visa was obtainable. The answer usually shows how much choice was involved, which few accounts mention.
What does an ordinary day look like for you?
Why ask it
This dislodges the newsletter version. Real days include paperwork, transport that fails, long waits, teaching, and conversations that go nowhere in particular.
How well do you speak the local language now, and how did you learn it?
Why ask it
Fluency is the clearest available measure of how deep the work goes. Note whether they learned formally, from neighbors, or barely at all, and whether they still rely on an interpreter after years in place.
Who supports you financially, and how does that actually work?
Why ask it
Models differ: a salaried post, one sending congregation, personally raised pledges, or paid work alongside the mission. Funding also determines who they are accountable to, which is rarely obvious from outside.
What does your organization expect of you, and what are you free to decide yourself?
Why ask it
Sending bodies range from tightly directive to almost absent, and the answer shows where authority sits day to day. Ask what would happen if they disagreed with an instruction.
What did you assume before you went that turned out to be wrong?
Why ask it
Everyone who has stayed a while has a list. The recurring items are how long trust takes, how much of the need is material rather than spiritual, and how little of their training transferred.
Which part of your own culture has been hardest to set down?
Why ask it
This asks for self-awareness rather than adaptability in the abstract. Answers tend to name something small and revealing: punctuality, direct speech, privacy, treating time as personal property.
What have local believers taught you that you didn't learn at home?
Why ask it
The direction of the question is the point. Someone who can only describe what they have given is usually near the beginning, and the answers that do come back are often about patience, hospitality, or suffering.
How do you handle it when someone asks for money or help you can't give?
Why ask it
The requests are constant and everyone develops a policy they are not fully comfortable with. The answer shows how they think about the gap in power and resources between themselves and their neighbors.
What do you do when local practice and your own tradition point in different directions?
Why ask it
The concrete tensions cluster around funerals, marriage customs, alcohol, ancestor practices, and healing. Listen for whether they consult local believers before deciding, or decide and then explain.
How do you tell the difference between sharing your faith and pressuring someone?
Why ask it
This is the ethical center of the work, and an honest answer contains a real line: what they will not offer as an inducement, when they stop going back to someone. Visible discomfort here is not necessarily a bad sign.
What's your relationship with the churches and leaders who were already there?
Why ask it
In most places a church existed long before any outsider arrived. Whether they describe themselves as a partner, a guest, or the person in charge tells you a great deal about the whole enterprise.
What would you do differently if you were starting again in the same place?
Why ask it
Regret is more informative than plans. The answers are usually practical: learn the language first, arrive with fewer projects, spend the first year listening instead of building.
What does this cost your family, and how do they feel about it?
Why ask it
Children's schooling, aging parents, a spouse's interrupted career: these costs are real and largely absent from public accounts. Ask gently and let the answer stay complicated.
How do you keep yourself and your team from burning out?
Why ask it
Departures among long-term workers usually follow team conflict, isolation, and unclear expectations rather than danger. Look for named practices, actual rest, and someone supervising, rather than an appeal to resolve.
What's the strongest criticism of mission work you've heard, and what do you make of it?
Why ask it
Being able to state the criticism fairly is the substance of the answer. Dismissing all critique suggests the subject is not discussed internally either, which is worth knowing.
How will you know when your part of the work is finished?
Why ask it
Answers range from a handover to local leadership on a stated timeline to no end point at all. An open-ended answer is worth exploring, because it shapes how everything else gets built.
What do you tell supporters at home that you're careful not to say there, or the other way around?
Why ask it
Fundraising communication is written for one audience while daily life happens in front of another. Asking about the gap surfaces the pressure to report results, one of the least discussed strains of the work.
What are you afraid of in this work?
Why ask it
Fear cuts through presentation faster than anything else here, and the answers are seldom about violence. More often they involve failure, their children, losing their own faith, or returning home to nothing.
Having a real conversation with a missionary
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to get past the newsletter
Ask about the place before the mission
Questions about the city, the food, the language, and the neighbors produce concrete answers and make the harder questions easier. They also signal that you see the location as more than a backdrop.
Say that you are curious, not evaluating
Most missionaries speak mainly to supporters and arrive braced for certain questions. Making it clear you are not assessing them tends to change what you are told within a few minutes.
Ask about time and money plainly
Length of service, funding source, and who they report to are practical facts. People are usually relieved to explain them rather than be quietly wondered about.
Leave room for ambivalence
Long service produces mixed feelings about the organization, the results, and sometimes the calling itself. If you react to doubt as a problem, you will only ever get the confident version.
What closes the conversation down
Turning it into a theology exam
Doctrinal cross-examination produces careful, defended answers about doctrine and nothing about the actual work. If you want to discuss theology, say so and make it a separate conversation.
Asking for miracle stories
The request pushes toward performance and away from anything checkable. Asking what has surprised them gets you the same territory without the pressure to impress.
Assuming they arrived somewhere with no church
Christianity long predates most modern mission organizations in most places they work. Framing questions around what they brought erases whoever was already there, and thoughtful workers notice.
Treating a home visit as a debriefing
Furlough often means constant travel, repeated talks, and questions about money. Ask what they would rather be doing with the afternoon, and be willing to hear that it is nothing at all.
Follow-ups worth having ready
- Who their closest local friend is, and how they met
- What they cook now that they did not cook before
- Which local holiday they have come to look forward to
- What they read to stay sane
- What they will do when this ends
- Which question they wish supporters would stop asking