Hidden Ministries

Yesterday at Church I discovered that, as Christians, we are really good at hiding our Para-church ministries. You see for years I have been getting emails from Prison Fellowship USA and Breakpoint Newsletters from Chuck Colson, who founded the organization in the US: but was totally unaware that Prison Fellowship Australia existed.
This was disturbing because of the fact that it raised the question. How many other mission/ministry organisations are battling along, understaffed and potentially underfunded simply because they have suffered the stigma of being ignored, or have not been able to get into the Christian Public Profile?
As a consequence of this disquiet I did what most computer users do, I Googled “Australian Para-church Organisations”. Most of the usual high profile Missions turned up, I say “most” deliberately because both of the Missions Sue and I have been involved with were not there. One didn’t surprise me because of its size but the other was an international Mission. By the way I also did not find Prison Fellowship Aus, or one of its Sister organisations that I knew of from our days in Canberra.
The search did throw up about three dedicated search engines for those interested enough to apply but basically the positive feedback that I got from the Google search was limited not only in depth but also in terms of user friendliness. I did look at Wikipedia with an Australia filter in place and got a big list of names however most of them turned out to be in America.
Having all but declared the Google search a fail, except for a student booklet from Morling College, I tried a search on Bing. This was much more successful with a long list of missions and most had an active link, as well as a description of the focus of the organisation
The question that I have is this. How can these smaller missions be publicised and for that matter supported? Furthermore how is someone looking to serve in some capacity to find an organisation to offer their services? I still didn’t find our original mission, one that offered hospitality to young members, and not so young, of the Defence Force. I know that this organisation has a number of places that could be filled by Christian ex-members of the forces and others.
I am not talking about missions that go overseas exclusively. I am not even talking about Full-time Ministry; many places are available in many missions for Part-time volunteers but we are only capable of filling these places if we know about them.
Call me a “Cock eyed Optimist” if you like but wouldn’t it be God Honouring if we could have a comprehensive Directory of Missions and outreach organisations available, at least to Church fellowships so that when a person got a burden to do something for God there was a resource available to permit research into what they might do.
Jesus spoke about fields being white for harvest and told us to “pray the Lord of the harvest to send out workers” (Luke !0:2). It seems that we are being counterproductive if these places are not out in the open to be findable.