I would refer you to an arti­cle by Church of Christ, John William McGar­vey, “Mis­sion­ary Soci­eties” (1868), in which he argues that mis­sion­ary soci­eties are a mod­ern inven­tion which is unbiblical.

I think the issue here is very well put by McGar­vey, when he argues that we are not at lib­erty to “invent” new con­ven­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, and meth­ods (espe­cially not chang­ing the con­tent of the gospel message).

He argues that it is legit­i­mate to use the means avail­able (which best accom­plish our bib­li­cally set goals), but not part­ing from the method­ol­ogy and prece­dent set in the Bible.

Here the issue would come down to the fol­low­ing conclusion…

We “NEED” mis­sion boards because local churches refuse to obey Scrip­tures and be the send­ing orga­ni­za­tion that equally sup­ports with actual follow-up of activ­i­ties, money, time, per­son­nel, etc. to com­plete the mis­sion God gave us. Instead of doing the job God gave them to do, local churches have aban­doned this to unbil­i­cal third par­ties (i.e. mis­sion orga­ni­za­tions) which have no scrip­tural war­rant, and which today have taken over mis­sions. While they divert mil­lions of dol­lars into US state­side build­ings and self pro­mo­tions, they drain away pre­cious scarce mis­sion resources, per­son­nel, and dol­lars into“non-missions” min­istries, i.e. activ­i­ties which drain but do not directly get peo­ple saved, which do not directly dis­ci­ple peo­ple in a local church.

Today the major­ity of the money which is given in local churches to “mis­sions” does not com­ply with ful­fill­ing the great com­mis­sion, i.e. it does not pay the salary of an indi­vid­ual that goes into another coun­try to win the lost, nor to plant and raise up local churches. This is the great higher and bet­ter vision of mis­sion boards than local churches.

To be involved in mis­sions and to live from mis­sions, every mis­sions min­is­ter should be wit­ness­ing weekly in the street. To accept any­thing less is sheer hypocripsy. Why is it accept­able for a mission’s board direc­tor and office staff NOT WITNESS WEEKLY yet they demand their mis­sion­ar­ies to do it? Isn’t hypocripsy hold­ing (and beat­ing oth­ers with the thing) a higher stan­dard for oth­ers, yet accept a lower stan­dard for one’s own self?