Wichita ? A convention that seeks to recruit new missionaries and support current ones is expected to draw more than 5,000 people this week.

The convention runs from Thursday to Sunday and is part of an effort to reverse the decline of missionaries sent to other countries, organizers said.

Hundreds of high school and college-age youths from across the nation have registered.

Short-term mission trips have exposed them to ministries that in turn result in increased enrollment at Bible colleges and missionary training schools, said Walter Birney, convention coordinator. He works with mission professors and church youth group leaders regionally.

“This generation of teenagers and college students is the most mission conscious,” he said, and could help shore up the growing missions movement abroad.

Melissa Scott, 18, a senior at Rose Hill High School, was part of a Wichita church youth group that spent spring break two years ago sharing the Gospel and building a new home for a woman in Juarez, Mexico.

“She basically cried every day,” Scott said. “It makes you feel that you have so much to give that you could actually do that as a career.”

Stories of American missionaries, including Gracia Burnham, whose husband, Martin, was killed serving in the Philippines earlier this year, have helped inspire other Christians to consider similar work abroad.

After increasing in each decade since World War II, the number of American missionaries serving in other countries dropped by 14 percent in the early 1990s, according to the Mission Handbook, a triennial census of Christian missionaries worldwide. But by the latter part of that decade, the number increased nearly 9 percent, or a total of almost 38,000 missionaries abroad.

Enoch Nyador, a missionary to his homeland of Ghana and a speaker at next week’s convention, said that in the past 30 years Americans have helped establish Bible colleges in his country. They in turn have trained people in Ghana for missionary work there. But his country needs more help from the United States, he said.

“Of course you are blessed with more resources than Ghana,” he said. “So if an American missionary comes, he can raise more support and bring more supplies. That promotes goodwill.”

That support depends in part on the commitment of local Christians like John Thornton, a flight dispatcher with Raytheon Aircraft Co. and missionary committee chairman at First Christian Church in Derby.

“I’ve got the resource and ability, and so why not use it?” he said.

His motivation, he said, is simple. “The common thread is just the love of Christ. You’re helping to bring people to God.”