Neil Cole's Letter About Starling Initiatives

MISSIONS IS BROKEN AND NEEDS TO CHANGE 
Missions is broken and needs to change
As I have traveled all over the world equipping the church to do mission I have discovered that the way missions has been done for the past 100+ years is broken.
For two decades we helped to get the missional church on track but we found the avenues for international missions were not suitable for this new breed of kingdom minded missionaries. There was a breakdown in the mission. Those trained in organic church struggled in suffocating organizational structures. At the same time, the mission organizations that have been in place were often threatened by the emerging new forms of church and leadership and were also incapable of initiating works with this new paradigm. In fact, their livelihood depended upon them not understanding and accepting the new paradigm.
In just ten years time (ca 47-57 AD) the apostle Paul was able to establish a thriving expression of the kingdom of God in five different provinces of the Roman Empire: Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, Asia Minor and Illyricum. After that he had nothing more to do there and was off to other places further west. Today we do not see even one people group reached in the same amount of time. We have air travel, mobile phones, the internet, rapid transit, computers, Bible aids, mass communication and a an abundance of publications, none of which was available to Paul. At the same time, we also have the same God, the same empowering presence of the Holy Spirit and the same powerful good news that he had. Nevertheless we are struggling to see even a fraction of the fruitfulness he saw and it is taking us a whole lot longer for what little fruit we see. Surely we are doing something wrong.
I am convinced that we can save billions of dollars and accomplish 10 times the results if we have the courage to do missions differently. Mission agency dysfunction has been a well-known secret that can no longer be denied or contained, yet is unpopular to speak about. We are sending too many people, the wrong kind of people, who are staying too long, costing too much, and not leaving behind a healthy, well-rounded and indigenous movement that is strong enough to endure let alone send missionaries to other places. This must change. The past 20 years God called me to give mission back to the church. Now God is calling me to bring the healthy church back into missions.
We simply cannot expect current mission agencies to correct a problem that they are contributing to and not designed to fix...and one that they actually benefit from maintaining. More of the same will only produce more of the same. So I, and a few others, feel called to start something new, something more organic, movemental and indigenously empowering. And we need to start something that does not produce a dependence upon US dollars, leadership and models of ministry. This is why we are starting Starling Initiatives.