This is George Anderson, and I'd like to tell you how we are helping our global mission dollars work harder. Well, the answer is that we have more money than we used to, and we do have candidates, but we're trying to use our dollars more efficiently. We believe that it's best to build on the successes of past generations of missionaries who have planted the church in many countries overseas. Those former mission fields have now organized into churches with their own congregations and evangelists, and the further evangelization of those countries can be done better by their own people than by missionaries from the West.
Missionaries are kind of like deep sea divers.
They require special equipping and support systems to function in a new environment. It makes a lot more sense and takes a lot fewer dollars to support the ministries of people who are naturally equipped by birth to work on those mission fields. You can see that those areas offer opportunities for lay people to share their expertise as short-term volunteers. And more and more lay people are checking out that possibility. That's part of our missionary work that's growing.