The Allocation of Cross-Cultural Missionaries

Summary: Given our commitment to the nations, it is important to follow the thread of how we worked at prioritizing and placing our limited supply of new cross-cultural missionaries. This article traces our trend toward sharpening our criteria for new sending in the 1970s, followed by a broader emphasis on large ethno-religious blocs in 1982. Our criteria loosened toward the end of the 1980s and, as we moved into the 1990s, bilateral negotiations supplanted our centralized system

Contents

Missionary Sending in the 1960s and 1970s
A Slowdown in Sending, 1975
Missionary Sending Outside The Navigators
Developing and Allocations System
Global Imperatives, 1980s
Conclusion

Missionary Sending in the 1960s and 1970s

The contrast between the centralized system that we built in the 1970s to guide the supply of new cross-cultural missionaries1 and the freedom of local leaders to move staff within their own countries is striking.

Across the years, we found that roughly one-third of our Reps were able to function well in a new culture, and it happened that this was around the percentage that we could in any case afford to maintain and service. Missionaries usually cost more, often much more, than home-based staff, and their departure for another country leaves a relational and geographical gap which is costly to fill. Indeed, the US Navigators have observed that even sending one in three staff is only sustainable in short bursts.2

It was of course true that, as early as our Overseas Policy Conference in 1961, decisions were made on the most strategic countries for the next ten years and the additional personnel needed to accomplish our objectives in such countries.3 Also, the OPC4 explored our missionary strategy, assessing to what extent we should concentrate our personnel in key areas. Although “it has somewhat permeated our general thinking that to have a man or couple in a country with our particular vision means that that country is occupied,” we were increasingly conscious of the importance of teams. Thus:

If only one or two members of a needed team of four to six men are present in a strategic area, they must double and triple their output and often fulfill a ministry that is not their specialty. For a time, this is good for their own diversified training, but to go on indefinitely can be a waste of specific gifts, and can and probably has led to frustration and accompanying discouragement.

Later in the OPC, Warren Myers put forward five reasons that had slowed down our production outside the USA:

Entrance (inadequate invitation)
Language and culture
Mobility has been too great
Lack of materials (possibly)
Inadequate personnel concentration

Our preaching on what was usually called “world vision” was passionate and frequent in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereafter, it receded. Nevertheless, there are at least thirty messages directly addressing this topic in our Discipleship Library.

By the end of the 1960s, our personnel policies were recording5 our priorities for ministries outside the US:

International staff are those appointed by the president and are those to whom The Navigators has made a long-term commitment.
Assignment of international staff is made by the president assisted as he desires by the International Board. Assignment of international staff members within the US areas of work may be made as the US area director deems best, provided the assignment is consistent with the time for which staff member is assigned to the US areas.
Criteria for establishing personnel priorities:

Emergency needs to keep from losing ground in present work.
Bring present teams to maximize productivity (two or three Reps).
Good potential areas where we have some contacts.
Strengthening new areas.

These criteria are somewhat loose and ambiguous.

Soon, the scramble for the best resources, or indeed any resources, was competitive. “A Strategy for the 70s” turned up the heat from 1972 onwards. In it, Waldron Scott projected that, in order to accomplish his overall goal of 835 Reps by 1983,6 the US should send one in every two new staff, and our younger sending countries should send one in every three new staff. This was extremely ambitious.

This pressure led to some excesses, when enthusiasm carried us beyond reality. For example, in requesting new American missionaries, one leader “demonstrated” that Norway-Sweden was culturally a single unit and thus justified a larger allocation than was apparent, if the two countries had been assessed separately. Another leader admitted that he habitually requested twice the number of missionaries he would need, knowing that most requests would be halved. These are extreme examples, but it was recognized that such deceptive games had to stop.

More generally, it was well understood that for prospective missionaries to raise the large expense budgets that many cities in the Developing World required and to transition their home ministries successfully to their replacements required many months. Furthermore, staff were often designated as future missionaries a couple of years before their target date for departure.

We should recall at this point that The Navigators was committed to “grow our own,” so that it took years to qualify as staff, as well as to sustain strong and perennially fruitful home bases in the manpower pools scattered throughout our sending countries. These two commitments, combined, are found in only a few sending agencies. Given these constraints, a sending rate as high as half of one’s new staff was beyond our capacity.

It would not be until the late 1980s that we began seriously to recruit staff from beyond our ministries, as well as growing our own. We did so quite tentatively at first.

One of the least implemented decisions that Lorne Sanny and his team made was, as early as the end of 1974, to place a moratorium7 for three years on entering new countries, in order to reduce the mounting pressure on the US Navs.8 In fact, because of the entries that were “in progress” and the zeal of our staff to penetrate the nations, we actually entered Venezuela (Brad Adkins), Egypt (N.J.), Nigeria (Bernie Dodd, a Briton), India (John R, an Australian), and Iran during the ensuing three years. Here we see missionary pioneers of other nationalities stepping out. It was indeed a remarkably dynamic period. Both Munro (Briton) and John R. (Australian) were examples of missionaries determined to press on, whatever our decisions might formally restrict. Their hearts were set on God’s calling.

A Slowdown in Sending, 1975

When the International Leadership Team met in December 1975, they applied the brakes as regards the sending of Representatives. Sanny communicated this decision9 to our staff:

While approving thirty-two missionary positions for area Reps during the next three years, the International Leadership Team felt it necessary to defer twenty-two requests. Prominent among the reasons are the lack of sufficiently developed country plans, the inability of the receiving team to adequately assimilate the resources, or the unacceptable financial cost.

This occasioned some questions, so his next letter sought to clarify:

Some misinterpreted this to mean that only eleven requests were approved. Note that fifty-five slots from the country plans were considered; of these thrity-three (sic) were approved and twenty-two were deferred (not necessarily denied). . . . This in no way implies a moratorium on sending missionaries. It does say that the answer to a need is not necessarily more men or more money. It may be better planning, better training, or a totally new approach that is less costly.

In fact, the team built a framework during their meeting “which would allow us to make our decisions on the international allocation of resources . . . .” This framework was, according to my December 30, 1975 overview of our discussion, “a most useful new tool. It attempts a balance between rigid determinism (rates, ratios, scales, etc.) and unplanned vacillation, with which we have also sometimes been afflicted. It preserves freedom for local leadership teams to fashion their own plans yet allows the ILT to lead in matters where some explicit strategic guidance is needed. It is opportunity-oriented . . . .”10

Because this represents the start of what would become an allocations system that endured for more than a decade, we should look more closely at how this December 1975 ILT meeting addressed the matter. Several months earlier, Jack Mayhall had written to the divisional directors (Skip Gray, Jim Petersen, Joe Simmons, Doug Sparks) setting out the four guidelines that we had used in the recent past:

Country plans
Knowledge and experience of the divisional directors
Replacement of returning missionaries
Zonal considerations

Gray and Simmons wanted to change the order of these guidelines, and Petersen wanted to add a fifth: “the prognosis for success in the country.” However, the strongest response came from Sparks:

We should not continue using these four guidelines. They are vague. The country plans and divisional director recommendations are inadequate and the zonal considerations can carry too wide a variety of interpretations. Our guidelines should major not only on future sending potential, but also on receiving ministry opportunities and needs which are present and foreseeable. This introduces more emphasis on the criteria for receiving, whereas previously, the heart of the strategy—based purely on what was then our chief corporate objective—was producing sending countries. Long-range prediction of sending countries has proved unreliable. Emphasizing criteria for receiving focuses attention on present and short-range opportunities and needs and, therefore, eliminates the guesswork of long-range predictions. . . . These can be determined by our customary emphases of:

• Is the country right in terms of global perspective?
• Are the ministry opportunities there?
• Is the leadership available to best utilize fresh resources?11

The supporting paper from Sparks’s assistant pointed out how our “Strategy for the 70s” had compelled us to move from “where is our next area representative most needed now” to “where should our next area representative be positioned in order that certain results may, in a number of years, best flow out from that country . . . a prediction—effectively five-to-ten years ahead—which appeared to be several degrees too hazardous for us.”

We should not, he continued, move into additional countries “for at least three years until there is a unanimous agreement of the ILT that God is leading us. India, Egypt, and Nigeria are enough to digest. This would act as a symbolic recognition that we must ease up on geographical expansion in order to pursue other varieties of development. This also removes, for some time, the need to rank countries in the abstract.”

His paper also proposed that we prepare a receiving ministry profile. “Our accent should not be so much on processing missionaries as on locating receptive soil. Let pressure for production give way to the delineation of open doors. Let the receivers make their case with care and skill. It appears, for example, that the majority of job descriptions are still a flimsy basis on which to bid for a $100,000 investment . . . an area Rep for one overseas term.” The paper ended with nine suggestions for such a profile.

Missionary Sending Outside The Navigators

Lest it seem that this article is focusing too much on the minutiae of allocations, we should note the four responsibilities12 of the ILT during 1975:

To identify and prioritize strategic needs globally
To formulate guideline objectives to meet the strategic needs
To evaluate progress in the ministry and finances worldwide and country by country
To approve international allocation slots requiring area Reps and women Reps13

When the divisional directors met in December 1975, as mentioned, they constructed and used a framework (attachment A). This has four parts. Except for countries in category A, the ILT processed only the allocations and not the candidates. As will be readily understood, the resulting approval of thirty-three area Rep slots required considerable interaction.14

Before the December 1975 conference began, Dr. Ralph Winter taught a seminar for the ILT on ten topics, including the use of money in missions. This further sensitized us to the climate among leaders in at least some of what were then called the “receiving” countries. Some notes on this climate follow, because it is useful to understand the background context in which our sending program was operating.

Beyond The Navigators, the pros and cons of a moratorium on missionaries from developed countries15 were being argued in many articles and forums. The proposal for such a moratorium had first been promoted by John Gatu, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in East Africa. He maintained that many churches in the Global South need “all missionaries to be withdrawn in order to allow a period of not less than five years for each side to rethink and formulate what is going to be their future relationship. . . . The churches in the Third World must be allowed to find their own identity,16 and the continuation of the present missionary movement is a hindrance to the selfhood of the Church.”

In support, Emilio Castro of the World Council of Churches observed that “the Church today is present in all parts of the world; indeed, it is difficult to find a place without Christian witness.” What is missing here is an awareness (which Dr. Winter was underlining) of the cultural distance often found between peoples in the same country. Winter added, a few years later, that “to assume that there are no frontiers yet to be penetrated . . . is the most disastrous assumption characterizing the American church in our time.”17

In another evangelical response, Gerald Anderson began by pointing out that “so sweeping a moratorium would promote the domestication of the churches in their respective cultures and this in turn would promote the further encroachment on them of tribal religion. . . . It would limit us to mission where we are—an altogether unbiblical concept—and negate the concept of mission as the whole Church bringing the whole Gospel to the whole world.”18

Observe that we were not caught up in this wider debate, though it reverberated in the background during the early 1970s. Our concern was rather to avoid spreading our resources too thinly, a concern that turned out later to have been prudent!

Developing an Allocations System

By the end of 1975, as mentioned, we were investing considerable attention in devising and improving what we generally called an allocations system. Our focus was, intentionally, almost entirely on deciding which requests from our receiving countries should be given priority rather than on how the missionaries performed after they arrived on the field. The latter was largely a responsibility that the missionaries shared with their receiving supervisors.19

This allocations system only applied to requests for Reps and contact staff. Trainees and associates were generally handled bi-laterally, between receivers and senders.

Let’s look next at the allocations system a couple of years later, in 1977,20 after our moratorium on new countries ended, in order to see how and why it evolved.

First were some general guidelines which were not controversial, such as “discouraging the supply of resources to unresolved problems.” Then came the sequence of priorities, in descending order.

To ensure adequate leadership in countries to which we are already committed.
To provide the initial team necessary to get a ministry going in countries to which we are already committed.
To provide the specialized resources necessary to advance a growing ministry significantly.
To expand the ministry in strategic larger countries which have adequate leadership.
To enter new countries.

Assuming that a country qualified under at least one of these priorities, the decision-makers then turned to criteria that should characterize the receiving country, such as a “most needy and receptive soil for winning and discipling—as regards our targets” and a convincing country plan.21

The final step in the assessment looked at the candidate, with criteria such as:

He/she has the necessary character, knowledge, and skills.
He/she has the language aptitude and cultural sensitivity.
He/she can be replaced with an acceptable loss to the sending ministry.

This was a much more thorough assessment protected by prayer and by information contributed by those who knew the candidate well.22 It also reflected our increasing caution, during a period in which the negative effects of our earlier and looser decisions were becoming painfully clear.

Occasionally, a very different approach was suggested. For example, in 1978, Sanny had this to propose. “Since our missionary expansion is totally dependent upon the availability of qualified missionary candidates, our international planning should begin with a roster of approved candidates—not with geographical allocations. Then, we would look for the best place to assign them according to guidelines already established by the ILT.”23 This was not adopted. Indeed, it would have tended to place our requesting countries in competitive tension.24

However, it became clear that all was not well with our sending program. The US Navigators gave sacrificially, including some of their best staff, but the demands placed on them proved unsustainable. The table below (see link) is a revealing summary:

Table 1: American Missionaries 1972 to 1978

So, given the very disquieting reality that our staff returning from missionary assignments rose from fifteen to thirty-five in successive four-year periods, we made a careful analysis of the principal reasons. This was circulated only among our international leaders in 1979. It was a thorough study which distilled thirteen primary reasons why missionaries had been returning, including those who had successfully completed their normal tours of duty.25

Nevertheless, the conclusions were alarming: Coming home prematurely, because of either immaturity or ineffectiveness in light of the tough challenge of cross-cultural success, was thought to account for 43 percent of the cases analyzed.26

The pressure showed also in the overall level of resignations from our US staff. These had been running at less than 1 percent for several years from 1971 onwards, but peaked at 6 percent in 1978.

Global Imperatives, 1980s

Early in 1980, our International Leadership Conference affirmed several strategic global imperatives. The fifth was:

We must improve our selection, orientation, and placement of missionaries in obedience to our Lord’s command to go to every nation (Acts 13:1-3).

This imperative was supported by five action points of which the first was that our countries would make this “a matter of special and protracted times of prayer, under the guidance of our “international prayer stimulator.”

Next, as soon as the ILT was formed in 1980, replacing the divisional directors’ conferences, they introduced a new May 1980 framework for allocations27 that had seven categories. A useful addition addressed the situation of the candidate: Was he or she capable, replaceable, acceptable, and available28 (summarized in priority sequence)? This framework sought to:

Maintain leadership
Complete an initial team
Replace key missionary
Provide specialized resources
Expand ministry in external sending country
Expand ministry in internal sending country
Enter a new country

Category 7 was noted as the president’s decision. By now, the framework for allocations only applied to slots for Representatives and contact staff, of any nationality. It may be helpful to summarize29 the decisions on prioritizing which had recently been made by Sanny, in our transitional period, with advice from Sanchez and McGilchrist, as confirmed during this June 1980 ILT conference:

Table 2: Prioritizing Decisions, 1980 ILT Conference30

After the June 1980 ILT conference ended, decisions were made by an allocations committee initially comprising Lorne Sanny, George Sanchez, and Donald McGilchrist that responded to requests from the field. Several ways of emphasizing priorities were discussed. The ILT decided that 80 percent of newly filled slots during the following six months must be in categories 1 to 4.

At the second ILT conference, in December 1980, we acceded to a request from Sparks (Asia) that a new category 3 be established for staff developers. This ILT session also considered an October 1980 draft of a framework with further improvements, but this work was subsumed into Sanny’s presentation of a tentative list of large ethno-religious entities which would be known as “blocs.”

This committee continued to meet as necessary,31 usually without Sanny. Because Sanchez had become our international ministries director in late 1980, this provided a smooth line for decisions, which still had to be approved by the IET, and any decision to enter a new country required Sanny’s approval.32 The committee ensured that the framework was scrupulously followed.33 It is interesting to see, for example, that they approved allocation 83081 for an executive director within International Headquarters as a category 5 opening: “A specialized resource necessary to advance a growing ministry significantly.” This, of course, was a slot for Jerry White!

Our framework for allocations was again updated in April 1982.34

In late 1981, the committee began to intersect with our emerging geographic priorities, first proposed by Sanny in December 1980, in terms of our new strategic tool of ethno-religious blocs. This innovation became very helpful once every bloc leader had prepared his strategy. By October 1982, a review35 of alternative systems for allocation embraced blocs. After critiquing several approaches, it recommended that:

For allocations requested—other than leaders and developers of staff—to arrive on field during the three years ending August 31, 1986, the allocations committee will ensure that at least 70 percent of their cumulative approvals are for blocs of which the receiving priorities are high and very high, and will do so in conjunction with the use of the framework for allocations.

Every bloc had been assigned separate levels of priority for sending and for receiving new missionaries.36

For 1984, American area Reps37 were allocated through a new process in which the International Ministries Leadership Team (IMLT) would decide on their requirements for the coming year, with three provisos:

Not more than double the average number of men (area Reps and contact staff) sent in each of the last three years.
At least 50 percent to be in blocs rated very high or high for receiving.38
Including any allocations declared by the IET to be of prime importance.

On this basis, sixteen allocations were selected by the IMLT in January 1984.

The intent of this new process was to address the following problems:

Disheartened senders, who never filled more than a small percentage of what had been approved
Disabled receivers, whose plans depended upon resources that they did not receive
Two systems—a framework for allocations and our priority blocs—that in practice did not mesh well together.
A failure to involve the senior receivers (international regional directors) in explaining their most urgent needs and relating those needs to their bloc strategies.
Job descriptions were, sometimes, bland and uninformative.

It was noted that the process, in principle, was not intended to control the number of missionary Reps in any country, but merely the distribution of new missionary Reps.39 This, of course, was a fundamental distinction.

The process was judged to be working well.40 In fact, the fifteen Americans newly sent in 1984 were almost double the average number sent in recent years. One reason for this surge was probably the close analysis of sending that preceded the launch of the US missions department.

This new process41 was designed, in part, to protect American senders from unrealistic expectations. Thus, it did not allow unfilled allocations to be carried forward to the following year, without becoming part of a new annual selection.

So adamant were we about the placing rather than the productivity of missionaries, from an international perspective, that a policy blocked a missionary in country A from transferring to country B, even when A and B both agreed, unless he or she had been run through our system again to ensure that country B would be a priority and that the original sending country did not require the missionary to come home instead.42

Conclusion

The system for allocations had been simplified to cover only American Representatives and contact staff.43 During discussion in January 1988, when our Enabling Global Society was formally introduced, it was recognized that we were moving toward an experimental process which we called “resource exchanges”44 intended to stimulate broader ownership in the negotiation between senders and receivers, and broader participation in our global mission. The hope was to nurture an environment for creative synergy. Such exchanges were seen as a broad concept, “including ideas, information, missionaries, money, prayer, materials, opportunities, issues.” We wanted to stimulate dialogue between senders and receivers along natural relational lines.

We intended that such regional exchanges would maximize the involvement of national leaders in discussing needs and move the IHQ from making resource decisions (through an allocations committee) toward the role of facilitating, influencing, and serving.45 Though only one round of such exchanges took place, the underlying intent was embraced and continued into the 1990s.

In summary, we had worked hard during the 1970s and early 1980s to develop a system for approving the allocation of new missionaries, in light of our evolving priorities. Prompted by the stresses in our sending program in the late 1970s, our framework gave more attention to the caliber of the missionaries who were offered. Also, an emphasis on the priorities of our new ethno-religious blocs, rather than individual countries, gave us a much suppler canvas on which to assign new missionaries. Eventually, the system ended in favor of negotiations in the more localized and relational spirit of our Global Society.

Attachment A: ILT Framework for Missionary Allocations

See also articles on:
Overseas Policy Conference, 1961
The Nations
Global Planning: 1966-1975
Surge and Stress in the Seventies
Resigned Representatives: 1970s
Global Planning: 1976 –
Structures in the Early Eighties
Financing Foreigners
Internationalizing
Personal Calling
Fundamentals of Navigator Missions

By Donald McGilchrist
5563 words

Endnotes

For simplicity, this article retains the traditional view that missionaries are those who move to a foreign country. It was accepted among us by the 1980s that missionaries also include those who cross cultural boundaries within their own countries, and indeed that the biblical mandate challenges us all to embrace our reality as missionaries advancing the kingdom.
How common has a geographical calling been within The Navigators? It is somewhat rare. See article on “Personal Calling.” In summary, we can say that many Navigators have been called to the nations, some to particular peoples, and a few to particular countries.
See OPC conclusions dated February 6, 1961.
Sessions 17 and 19.
Policies of February 26, 1969 in DDC agenda for November 1969, section 1. Quoted are policies A1-3. In this extract, “international staff” means what we usually called Representatives, those who form the permanent core of our work.
“A Strategy for the 70s,” December 1972, chapter 2, p. 32 (Waldron Scott’s copy); also expressed as 650 Reps by 1981. Within this, in order to develop sending countries, several priority options (countries) and timetable options (dates) were offered.
It is important to note that this pause in entering new countries was very different and much less restrictive than the wider missional debate outlined later in this article.
Roy Zinn to US regional directors of April 15, 1976.
See his “Dear Staff” letters of January 14 and March 8, 1976
Overview by McGilchrist of ILT discussion dated December 30, 1975. Attachment A is this early framework.
Sparks indicated that his assistant, Donald McGilchrist, would soon send a couple of exploratory papers in support of his concerns. See his paper of September 22, 1975, five pages, plus appendices in McGilchrist archive, box 4, “Allocations 1976-79.” This file reveals the complexity of correspondence required in the pursuit of clarity on competing priorities.
Responsibilities dated July 14, 1975, in December 1975 ILT agenda. April 1975 ILT minute 3.7 had noted “that each divisional director had two roles: as representative of his division and as contributor to the global perspective of the leadership team.” Though McGilchrist did not move to Colorado Springs until March 1976, the April 1975 ILT had confirmed his assignment.
Abbreviations for area Representatives and women Representatives, sometimes referred to merely as Reps.
Sanny proposed that a US overseas missions committee be set up, December 1975 ILT minute 5.2.
A small but richly symbolic precursor occurred in 1969 when the respected International Review of Missions began instead to use “Mission” in their title. It was an attempt to make the IRM “more palatable to Asian, African and Latin American readers, for many of whom the old title must have been uncomfortably reminiscent of an era in which their continents were the only targets of the inexorable thrust of one-way missions from north to south . . .”^[1] Source: explanatory editorial in IRM 230 for April 1969, p. 141.
From a different perspective, much later, a scathing critique of agencies devoted to global missions was presented by Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden under the title “The Two-thirds World Church and the Multinational Mission Agencies.” They sought “creative dialogue,” their thesis being that “in many areas, multinational missions agencies are hindering and even preventing the effective mission of the Gospel in the context where they operate.”
“Protestant Mission Societies: The American Experience,” presidential address to the ASM, 1978 in Missiology April 1979, p. 172.
Source for the articles by Castro and Anderson: Mission Trends, number 1, edited by Anderson and Stransky, Eerdmans, 1974.
Separating such responsibilities would not attract formal international attention until the Fundamentals of Navigator Missions in 1998 offered an outline of missionary tasks.
See attachment B.
Sensing the need for more grassroots input, annual country plans had been requested since 1975, putting flesh on Sanny’s mantra “top down, bottom up.”
Source: Extracted from the Decenber 1977 ILT conference.
Attached to Sanny’s “Summary of Reasons for Returned American Missionary Reps,” September 29, 1978.
Given our competitive nature, one can even imagine a slide toward an unseemly auction.
Because our sending rapidly increased in the early 1970s, one might naturally expect a few more returning missionaries four years later, but hardly this surge from fifteen to thirty-five.
Source: March 1979 study on returning missionaries. Fortunately, George Sanchez had committed himself to a counseling ministry, which he had launched in December 1975.
This framework followed the December 1977 framework, but adjusted and improved it.
The ILT recommended that the Warren Myers’s paper on “Selecting Overseas Personnel” be used as a guideline in assessing capability.
This framework treated three country groups as though they were single countries. Namely Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Chinese ministries, except Taiwan.
T= already there, C=confirmed.
Typically, new requests for allocations came annually with country plans.
The committee noted in January 1982 that we should maintain a distinction between merely having a ministry in a country and the commitment of international resources (an allocation) to that country.
The minutes of the committee exist in sequence until November 1983 (see McGilchrist archive, blue binder).
The Middle East region was still treated as a single country for purposes of allocation.
McGilchrist paper on “Geographic Priorities,” draft 4, October 29, 1982. An allocation is defined as an approved position for a Representative or contact staff which will last more than one year and which is outside his or her country.
See article on “Global Planning 1976 -.”
American MCS and MIS also from 1987-1988.
Very high: Black Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia; High: East Asia. Priorities for sending: Very High: North America; High: Australasia, East Asia. For more on our blocs, see article on “Global Planning 1976 -.”
See appendix I to November 1984 IET minutes for exceptions and review of year.
For an overview of what took place during the first four years, see McGilchrist paper of August 4, 1988 on the “Process for American Men,” with detailed annual summaries. McGilchrist archive, box 9, allocations August 1987.
For detailed correspondence on allocations from 1976 to 1987 (eleven files) and international assignments from 1980 to 1987 (three files) see McGilchrist archive, box 8 and 9.
This was the notorious policy 16.8: “At the end of his assignment, a missionary will revert to his home country unless his home country leader makes him available for reassignment.” This policy applied until the end of our global policies in 1986.
In January 1984, the INC approved various changes in our system for approving allocations, while retaining the use of priority blocs and bringing the receiving regional directors more fully into the definition of what was most important. Initially, the new system would only apply to American area Reps and MCS. See INC minutes, section 11.
According to “The Way Ahead,” which summarized the steps to be taken in gradually moving toward an enabling global society, the existing process for allocations would be maintained for the 1989-1990 cycle, in August 1988, after which an alternative should be proposed for use in resource exchanges.
The launch paper on “The International Resource Exchange Concept,” dated December 20, 1988, may be found in section 7 of the agenda for our February 1989 international council.