Remember Moneyball? The story of how the Oakland A’s built a powerful baseball team by scooping up undervalued players? The central premise of their restructuring of the organization was this: teams are measuring the wrong things to determine if a player is worth their salary. By changing what they were measuring, they were able to […]
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Ecclesioporosis, Part 3
To recap after a long intermission, by ‘ecclesioporosis’ I mean the new generation of Western believers’ lack of confidence in the local church as the vehicle for realizing change in the world. In the first post, we looked at some of the factors contributing to this condition. In the second, we examined some reasons that […]
The Role of the Foreign Missionary in China
Recently I had the privilege to teach a modular course at the Our Generation Training Center in Georgia. The OGTC provides the best missionary training that I know of in the States. I personally have benefited immeasurably from the teaching and challenge of the missionary team associated with the OGTC. Whenever I meet a student […]
Ecclesioporosis Case Study: Adoption
Well, nothing like a nine-month hiatus to get your thoughts together! I am terribly sorry about that, for those who might have wondered where I’d gone. There have been a couple big things in my life that have kept me from writing. The first of which is the adoption of our daughter, which has had […]
Ecclesioporosis
Recent generations of overseas Christian workers, especially in ‘frontier’ mission fields, have been plagued by a brittle bone ecclesiology – a lack of confidence in the church to effect change in the world. Instead, many missionaries seem to believe in a fragile, fractured church that is unable to support the weight of the body of […]
The Church that Paul Built
There’s a lot at stake when we address our understanding of Paul’s ministry. The bulk of our missiology comes from his missionary travels. What is the missionary’s goal? How is the missionary supported? Who does the missionary target? When does the missionary move on? How does the missionary preach? These are all questions that are […]
WHERE: To People Groups?
Over recent decades a certain theory has grown to be the informed, missions-minded Christian’s default answer to the question: WHERE does the Great Commission send us? The people-groups-focused understanding of the Great Commission goes something like this: ‘The Gospel is to be taken to all the different ethnolinguistic groups of the world; the priority of […]
WHO > WHERE
It is becoming increasingly common to hear Christian leaders say something like this: ‘the problem in modern missions is that the church is sending missionaries to all the wrong places.’ Contrary to impressions I may have given with my previous posts, I do not think that. The hang-up in the Great Commission is not primarily […]
WHERE: Some Clarifications
There is no surely no more accurate test of a writer’s ability than the way he is understood by his readers. So, yeah, I stink. Anyway, my point is missed… The feedback I’ve gotten from the last couple posts is good, but those who are disagreeing with me are the ones I’m trying to agree […]
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