The purpose of continued learning of Scripture is to help us in our life mission of harvest work. Equipping is always in the context of the rubber-meeting-the-road application. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge leads to aimless and harmful arguments fueled by intellectual pride...
VIDEO: Visualizing Population Growth to 7 Billion People
Plague Of Ambition-less Harvest Workers
What Sets IBMGlobal Apart?
Assisting Missionaries During Pre-Field Ministry...
For some pastors and churches, sending one of their own members to the mission field is new experience. Often times, they may think their involvement will be limited because, "Isn't that why they joined a mission board?" However, pastors can be a tremendous blessing and asset to the missionary who's started the daunting experience, DEPUTATION!
How Will We Adapt To The Changing Face of Africa?
How NOT To Drop A Missionary's Support
Missions Partnerships from a Field Worker's Perspective
Missions Partnerships from the Home Church Perspective
Mission leaders today talk about the desire among churches for more direct, personal partnership with international gospel workers. On the whole, I think such desires are very good. However, like anything in a fallen world, these partnerships can be done well or done poorly, resulting in fruit or frustration, respectively... I want to offer six principles for partnering with overseas workers for the purpose of global evangelism.
Avoiding Relationship Pitfalls
So often we from the west want to ensure that things are done in a certain way or at a certain standard, so we keep taking over from those young disciples who are trying to lead. We must allow them to make decisions, sometimes they will fail, and sometimes they will succeed extraordinarily, but if we never give our disciples opportunity for increased responsibility and leadership then we are setting them up for failure.
David Livingstone's Perspective Of Missions
David Livingstone is one of my favorite missionaries. Clearly he had an eternal perspective. On June 18, 1853 Livingstone wrote, "Our work and its fruits are cumulative. We work towards another state of things. Future missionaries will be rewarded by conversions for every sermon. We are their pioneers and helpers. Let them not forget the watchmen of the night, we how worked when all was gloom and no evidence of success in the way of conversion cheered our path."
Planting New Churches
If the churches missionaries plant have terminal life, after ten years their field will have 100 churches. If the missionaries die or return home, the number of churches remains static, for they do not plant other churches. The same ten missionaries, by planting churches that have germinal life, will in ten years have 5,110 churches in their field. If the missionaries die or return home, the churches will continue to multiply, because they have germinal life.
Missionary Training & Orientation
How To Get Businesspeople Into Missions
Business-as-Missions (BAM) is about creating legitimate businesses that enable church planting in areas that would otherwise be closed to evangelism. BAM is needed today because it is increasingly difficult for church planters to live and share the gospel in many countries around the world. Think places such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and China, where governments continue to crack down on mission work. If we make it our "ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named" (Rom. 15:20), then we need to help church planters find creative means for gaining access into these countries.
MissioMishmash: What Is Furlough?
Furlough conjures up many ideas to different people. Some think it is like paid vacation and all-expenses-paid site-seeing. I blogged about this some years ago and recently stumbled upon a nice post by a Nazarene missionary, Howard Culbertson, about what furlough is--he pretended that his list was "discovered in the belongings of a missionary who had to be carried off mumbling incoherently in a strait jacket" after eleven months of furlough.
Why Are So Many People Talking About Contexualization?
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How Do You Measure Missions?
It’s always been frustratingly difficult to appraise missionary ventures. What if Adoniram Judson’s church had pulled him off the field after nine years of what seemed to be fruitless work in Burma? It was the next twenty years that were so incredibly fruitful, and today there are hundreds of thousands of believers in Burma.
The Challenge Of Developing A Strong Indigenous Church Planting Movement In Africa
From the picturesque thatch-roofed villages to the bustling metropolises Africa is a study in contrasts. Africa is the continent where the number one killer is still mosquito-born malaria yet it is the place where the first heart-transplant was successfully carried out. Twenty-first century Africa is dominated by Islam in the north and Christianity across the central and southern regions yet African Traditional Religion remains the primary theological grid.