Miscellaneous Mission Conference Ideas

• Make preparations for the conference several months prior to the meeting.
• Have special prayer meetings.
• Plan special music.
• Treat your conference like a revival rather than a money-raising week.
• Choose your missionaries carefully. The quality of missionaries determines how excited your people will be about missions.
• Be sure to correspond well with the missionary before the conference. Let them know when to arrive, directions to the church, what you expect from them, and where they will be staying.
• Be sure to budget a portion of your faith-promise budget to take care of your conference expenses. Make sure that the budget includes a good love offering to each missionary plus his traveling expenses.
• If your missionary is not staying in a motel, plan to have a host family for him to stay. This host will be responsible for missionary and be in contact with him to meet his needs or answer questions.
• Develop a personal-type questionnaire for your people to use with the missionaries. Anything you can do to encourage interaction with the missionaries will be a blessing to your people. Questions such as favorite verse, signature, birthday, wedding anniversary, home church, favorite food, and other interesting facts.
• Provide name tags for the missionaries with the name of their country. Also provide the same type of tag for the deacons, pastor, staff, and members so that the missionary will can get to know everyone. Use a different format for church people. (Example: use flag for missionary and church logo for church people)
• Pass out a photograph and biographical sketch about each missionary a few weeks before the conference, especially to the Sunday school classes where the missionary will be teaching. Your people should know the missionary when he arrives.
• Prepare a video or slide update each year about everything the church and mission dollar is doing around the world.
• Prepare a special missionary passport for children to take to the display that each missionary has set up during the conference. They will then get the passport stamped like one does going to another country. This will give the child an opportunity to meet the missionary and visit with him.
• Put up an eternity light that blinks a few times a second to remind them that each time the light flashes, someone else dies and goes to hell. Be sure to put up a sign reminding people of how many people are dying without the Lord Jesus Christ. Right now, you can safely say that over 106 people go into eternity every minute; and at least 75 of them will have died without Christ and gone to an eternal hell. The world statistics show that about 35% of the world calls itself “Christian.” Of those, how many truly know Jesus Christ as their personal Savior? Have light turn “On” and “Off” on minute intervals with a similar note or even every 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Just adjust the death rate by the minute. Right now, 1.7 people die somewhere in the world every second.
• Put up famous missionary sayings and challenges on the wall.
• Have a Shower of Blessings party for the missionaries. A number of people could be assigned to spend up to $25 on requests the missionary has given. (Gift cards are always a treat for traveling missionaries)
• Have a parade of the flags that represents different countries where you support missionaries. This can be done at the start of the conference to let your people feel the weight and influence that your church is having around the world.
• Be sure to put up lots of maps, flags, globes, and statistics to help people get a world vision. Use your flags to decorate your church. Place them on beautiful flag poles and stand them along the wall behind the choir.
• Call a missionary each week or even monthly on a speaker phone and have him lead the opening prayer in the service and also give a brief update of his work from the field.
• On Sunday mornings, in between announcements on your big screen, rotate pictures of your missionaries and their fields to remind your people to pray for them.