Rise of the Maverick Missionary

The future of missions does not belong to large institutions alone.

At least, that is what Erwin Van Laar is seeing from his vantage point inside Great Commission Foundation, a Canadian-based organization that provides administrative, legal, and charitable infrastructure for missionaries, ministries, and church planters around the world.

After spending four decades in fundraising, Van Laar says he now occupies a very different role: helping people who feel called to ministry actually move forward.

“If you really want to start ministry,” he says, “you can do it in three days.”

That speed reflects a much larger shift unfolding across global Christianity. Traditional mission agencies — once defined by centralized structures, denominational pipelines, and long-term institutional processes — are increasingly being joined by a rising wave of independent, entrepreneurial, and highly specialized ministries.

Van Laar describes these workers as “mavericks,” people who often pursue unconventional callings that larger organizations may overlook or struggle to accommodate.

“We attract people who are called by God to do something no one else wants to do,” he explains.

Rather than functioning like a traditional employer-based mission agency, Great Commission Foundation operates more like a support platform — enabling missionaries and ministries to receive charitable donations, administrative support, compliance assistance, and financial accountability while remaining independent in their calling.

The model reflects broader trends within Christianity itself. Researchers have noted the continued decentralization of ministry, accelerated in part by the disruptions of the COVID-19 era. Many churches and younger leaders increasingly prioritize flexible, grassroots, and community-based expressions of ministry over traditional institutional structures.

Van Laar believes that change is already reshaping the mission landscape.

“I see the church waking up and saying, ‘We want to send.’”

That awakening is producing everything from independent church plants to missionaries pursuing work among unreached communities, often outside the conventional pathways that once dominated global missions.

Yet with freedom comes risk. Van Laar openly acknowledges the challenge of discernment when working with highly independent personalities and unconventional visions. Much of his role, he says, involves carefully listening for humility, spiritual maturity, and evidence of genuine calling.

“You hear their story,” he says. “You see the fruits of the Spirit in their character.”

What surprises him most is not the decline of older systems, but the sheer number of people still sensing a call to ministry.

Despite growing secularization in much of the West, Van Laar says requests continue rising across Canada, the United States, and internationally. In his view, the demand reveals something deeper than organizational change.

“God wants the Gospel to go into places where there’s no one there,” he says.

For Van Laar, this emerging movement is not the collapse of missions — it is its reinvention.

And perhaps, its renewal.