Colour-coded Google calendars, email folders auto-sorted by topic and sender, spreadsheets with pop-out charts linking data across tabs, databases ready to run every possible report at a moment’s notice, graphically illustrated procedures with embedded links to other procedures… these are a few of my favourite things.

Administrative and organizational skills are valued in the business world, but the missions world has often lagged behind. Missionaries are all extraverted, passionate, jump-in-front-of-a-crowd evangelists, right?  What good are admin and IT skills to the Great Commission?  

If you have felt the pull to play a part in seeing the nations come to Christ but don’t see how your previous office experience could be of service, keep reading! I can promise you that there is a role for you.

Now more than ever, there is a huge need for administrative support in almost every kind of ministry in almost any country around the world . So often, today’s missionaries find themselves working with a laptop, regardless of their country of residence or occupation. The world is moving faster and getting smaller. And that’s good news for behind-the-scenes people out there.

More than a few years ago, when my husband and I first started seeking God’s will for our involvement in The Great Commission, we wondered how we could become “the typical missionary”, which seemed so far from the IT world he operated in and the legal world I operated in while living in the US. There seemed to be an unbreachable gap between the picture in our heads of what a missionary does and what we had the skills to do.  

We wrestled with whether or not God wanted us to throw away our years of education and work experience to live overseas. While our hearts were willing to do just that, it seemed wasteful. And God is not wasteful.

Gradually, God began to reveal to us that He gave us our skills and passions long before we were following Him. He never planned for us to be doctors in Mozambique or to build water systems in Cambodia. These are great things. They just weren’t our things. He created my husband to support missionaries through IT. He created me to plan, organize, write procedures, meet students all over the world, and use my colour-coded Google calendars every day.

Now, as the Director of the Online Missionary Training School for Global Frontier Missions, not a day goes by that I do not use what God had given me to glorify Him among the nations. My passion for administration allows me to reach more and more students to be trained wherever they live in the world.  My passion for organization allows me to help prepare students to fulfill whatever vision God has placed in their hearts. All along, God was preparing me and my husband for a day like today. And I promise that He has already been doing the same for you.  (If I may promote the Online Missionary Training School, we are looking for more people with administration skills!)

All of your skills, abilities, and passions come from God, and He has already created a place for you in taking the Gospel to all the nations. The question is not whether God is willing to use what He has already given you. The real question is whether you are willing to say, “Not my will, but Yours be done.”

Interested in using your skills to serve at GFM?