#Addoptamissionary

3 min readOct 27, 2026

photo of the interactive map from www.globalmissions.com

Introduction

For as long as I have been alive, I have been a part of the United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI), and for much of that time, I have heard the preaching and gotten to meet very many of these missionaries. Up until recently, that was the extent of my knowledge of missionaries, but I learned so much more once I took my first overseas trip.

My first missions experience

In 2024, I went to a Holy Ghost Crusade to the Philippines, and recently in July of this year (2026), I went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I got to spend over a week with two full-time missionaries and helped their efforts in Brazil. I really started paying attention to the missionary process after 2024, especially in getting ready for and after Brazil, and there was so much that I learned about how it actually works.

The process

Missionaries in the UPCI have to first start out with short-term work with a full-time missionary in increments of 2–12 months. These are called AIMers (Associates in Missions) and work side by side with supporting the full-time missionaries. The next step is the Associate Missionary Program (AMP), which is similar to AIM, where it is a 12-month commitment, but it is the step before deputization, where you become a full-time missionary. Once you have done AIM and AMP and have been deputized, you can become a full-time missionary like my friends, the Andersons, in Brazil.

The problem

Being a full-time missionary sounds like you then stay in that nation full-time and never leave, but that is where you would be wrong. Unfortunately for these missionaries, they are working with smaller churches or establishing a church and then handing it off to a local to become the pastor and start a new church. While this is great and likely what they all really want, it means that income can be hard to come by oftentimes; even if the entire congregation faithfully gives money, it’s not enough. Missionaries are oftentimes forced to go to different churches asking for money so they can go back out and do the work they feel called to do, but this means months, sometimes even years, without being in their nation, so what can we do?

The #solution

#Adoptamissionary seeks to try and answer this pressing problem. The UPCI has a program called Partners in Missions, where you can directly give money to a missionary and set up regular payments to help them be funded. I am challenging everyone to pick one of the 1,246 missionaries, 963 short-term and 283 full-term missionaries, and fund them. This only works if everyone posts about it and encourages others to do it. The University of Maryland shows that small content creators end up having a higher rate of success when it comes to advertising, so it doesn’t matter if you have 10 followers or 10 million followers; post the #Adoptamissionary on Instagram, Facebook, and X, and fund all 1,246 missionaries so they can stay in their mission field for longer