Missionaries

A missionary can be defined as one who is a member of a religious group who is tasked with either spreading the message of the religion or providing service to others in the name of the religion. In this way, missionaries may be concerned with the transcendent/eternal status of people, or with their more mundane issues such as complications of poverty.

Although outsiders typically see missions as the sending of adherents to work far away from their homes, faith communities themselves do not always embrace this definition. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, maintains both a home mission board designed for programming in the United States and an international mission board designed for programming in other countries. A ...