What is USCMA?

The United States Catholic Mission Association (USCMA) is the ONLY association of US Catholic mission-sending and mission-minded organizations and individuals. USCMA supports the activities and efforts of US-based home and international missionary groups by providing opportunities for these groups to gather, share, and learn from one another. USCMA strives to be a catalyst for fresh insights, broad involvement, creative approaches, and alternative structures, methods, and techniques for promoting mission.

Our Mission: To unite and support those committed to the cross-cultural and global mission of Jesus Christ in service to the Church and the world.
 
Our Purpose: The signs of our times call us to focus our engagement in Christian mission and to foster and support existing and new forms of cross-cultural and inter-religious partnerships.  At the heart of mission is a spirituality that summons us to accompany the poorest in the world, to raise our collective voice, to engage the new secularity, and to seek alternatives within the process of globalization.  As missioners, we have a unique ability to move humanity toward a transforming global community and to help overcome the polarities that characterize our era.
 
USCMA is a membership-based organization. Our members are involved in establishing the direction of the association and supporting its life. USCMA membership is comprised of religious and lay mission-sending groups, diocesan mission offices, mission-minded organizations, religious communities, active missionaries, and individuals who support mission. 
 
Based in service to the Church and the world, USCMA provides a forum in which people with a variety of experiences in mission can find a welcome, celebrate their faith, reflect on the signs of the times, foster leadership within mission organizations, explore emerging trends in mission, stimulate creative mission practices, and challenge one another to live lives more deeply rooted in mission spirituality.
 
Our Goals: The response to our baptismal call urges us to envision and witness to mission as a journey of hope, moving us toward the social transformation and reconciliation that proclaim the Reign of God in our midst.  As members of a multi-cultural, pilgrim church, that is “missionary by her very nature” (Ad Gentes, 2), we feel impelled to widen our net, gathering together people with a variety of mission experiences to reflect on our stories, enrich our spirituality, and stimulate creative mission practices.
 
Over the next five years, we will concentrate our efforts on the integration of the key elements of mission: proclamation, witness, dialogue, prayer, spirituality, reconciliation, and social transformation.