That’s not a complaint. It’s a structural description, and it’s the single most important fact about how my family makes decisions.
Living on missionary support means exactly that: all of it, with no second job, no side stream, and nothing underneath to catch anything. Every dollar that arrives in our account arrived because a person or a church chose, again, this month, to send it.
Most months that works. In a bad year for everybody else, it works less.
Nobody Did Anything Wrong
I want this part at the top, because if you read the rest of it without this it turns into a different and much worse article.
Our support went down over the last couple of years. Some sponsors reduced what they give and some stopped, and in every case I know about the reason was the same: their own situation got harder. Costs went up where they live too. Their income moved. Their church’s giving moved.
Nobody was careless with us. Nobody quietly decided we weren’t worth it. People who had been generous for years hit a stretch where they couldn’t be, which is a thing that happens to households and it happened to theirs.
There is no villain in this. There’s just an economy, and we’re downstream of it in a way most families aren’t.
Living on Missionary Support Means Two Numbers, Not One
The part people don’t see is that it isn’t one number. It’s two, and they can both move against you at once.
The first is how much comes in. That’s the sponsorship, and that’s what dropped.
The second is what it’s worth when it lands. Our support is raised in Korean won. We live in Cambodia, which effectively prices in US dollars. So there’s a currency conversion sitting between what somebody generously gives and what actually buys groceries here, and I don’t control it and neither do they.
The won was around 1,240 to the dollar in early 2024. It went to roughly 1,534. Nothing about anyone’s generosity changed during that stretch — the same faithful gift simply arrived about a fifth smaller.
Stack the two together and, at the bottom of it, we were down about thirty percent in real terms.
Thirty percent is the kind of number that would trigger a serious conversation in any household that had a salary to point at. We didn’t have a conversation, because there was nothing to negotiate with. You can’t ask the exchange rate for a review, and you can’t ask a family whose own costs went up to make up the difference.
The Relief That Isn’t Relief
The rate has come back. It’s running near 1,340 now, which is meaningfully better than 1,534 and meaningfully worse than 1,240.
So a bit under two-thirds of the currency damage has reversed. That’s real and I’m grateful for it.
But notice what that sentence doesn’t say. It doesn’t say we’re back. One of the two things that hit us has partly eased and the other one hasn’t moved at all. The sponsorship is still where it went.
This is the part I never see written down, because the crisis version of this story is easy to tell and this version isn’t. There’s no moment. Nothing collapses. A number improves and you’re still smaller than you were, and you go on making slightly narrower decisions than you made in 2024 without ever having a conversation about it.
What It Changes Is Which Doors Are Open
Thirty percent is an abstraction until it turns into a specific thing you don’t do.
Here’s ours. Our boys were at a school in Phnom Penh that cost three hundred dollars a month per child — nearly a thousand a month across them. It was one of the cheaper options available to us at the time, and it wasn’t the right fit for other reasons, so I’m not telling you we were driven out of a school we loved.
I’m telling you something narrower and more permanent: that tier of school is no longer a decision I get to make. It isn’t a thing I’m weighing and declining on principle. The door is shut, and it shut without anybody doing anything to us.
That’s what a support drop actually is, day to day. Not hunger. Not drama. A quiet reduction in the number of options that are yours to consider.
The Second Income Question Is Being Asked Wrong
Here’s one thing I’d like to see my own tradition think about again.
For Korean missionaries — and for plenty sent from elsewhere — a second income is quietly disapproved of. It is never written down anywhere. Nobody hands you a document. But the expectation is understood: your support is your provision, and going and earning money looks like a lack of faith, or a distraction, or a quiet insult to the people funding you.
That expectation was built for a different set of conditions than the ones I’m living in.
None of this is new, incidentally. Paul made tents. The practice even has a name — tentmaking — and it describes something the church understood for most of its history. We’ve grown more cautious about it fairly recently, and I don’t think the reasons have been examined much lately.
I’m not arguing that every missionary should go get a job. I’m arguing that the question the church is asking is the wrong one. It keeps asking may I, which is a question about permission and suspicion. The useful question is how should I — what does honest, non-exploitative work on the field actually look like, what safeguards does it need, how does it get reported, how does it stay from becoming the tail that wags the ministry.
That’s a harder conversation, but it produces something a family can actually use. The question as it’s currently framed mostly leaves households with a single point of failure and no sanctioned way to build a second.
And I’d ask one question rather than make an accusation, because I don’t think anyone designed it this way on purpose: when the taboo holds and the numbers move, who ends up absorbing it? I’m not sure we’ve looked at that squarely.
Why I’m Writing This Down
I want to be extremely clear about what this is not.
This is not an appeal. Nothing here is a request, and if you support us and you’re reading this with a slightly guilty feeling, that’s the opposite of what I intended and you should let it go. The people who reduced their giving did it for reasons I respect, and I’d have done the same in their position.
I’m writing it because it’s the honest financial shape of this life and almost nobody describes it. The version that gets published is either a triumphant one — God provided, isn’t he faithful — or a desperate one. Both are real. Neither is what most months look like.
Most months look like arithmetic. Two variables, neither of them yours, multiplied together, and a family adjusting what it considers possible without much ceremony.
God has provided, incidentally. We are fine. My kids are in school, we run a car, nobody has gone without. That’s not a rhetorical flourish, it’s just true, and it’s true at the same time as everything else in this article. Both things fit.
What I’d Tell Another Family Living On This
Two things, and they’re both unglamorous.
Know your two numbers separately. Not “support is tight” — how much came in, and what the exchange rate did to it. They fail independently and they need watching independently, and I went a while treating them as one thing and misreading which one was actually hurting us.
And don’t build your family’s assumptions at the top of the range. This is the mistake I actually made. Living on missionary support for years without a bad stretch had quietly taught me to treat the good rate as the normal one, and everything I planned sat on top of that assumption. The version of our life that worked at 1,240 was not a version I should have treated as the baseline, because I don’t control the rate and neither does anyone who loves us. Build at the bottom of the range and a good year is a surplus instead of a correction.
A hundred percent of our income is somebody else’s decision. That’s not a grievance. It’s just the shape of the thing, and the shape doesn’t change because I’d prefer a different one.
