This book represents an historic and unprecedented piece of research. The research project took nearly ten years to complete from start to finish. It is not a longitudinal study but rather a snapshot in time, which took far longer to process than it did to take. Nevertheless, the picture that developed was well worth the wait. Our hope is that this work will remain relevant for many years to come and promote much discussion and interest to foster more effective mission involvement.

As confirmation of the contemporary relevance of our project, while we were writing this book two localized studies were undertaken to investigate mission involvement in their contexts. How Australian Missionaries Are Being Called and Choose Mission Agencies (Hibbert, Hibbert, and Silberman, 2015) was researched in Sydney, Australia. Mobilizing More Missionaries: Insights from Surveys of Long-termers and Prospective Missionaries (McVay and Parrott, 2015) was the result of an online survey of 466 long-term missionaries from forty-six agencies undertaken in the United States.