Many missionaries are plagued by doubt. Not usually about the message. At least, not most of the missionaries I’ve interacted with. But they have deep misgivings about their ministry. It is not uncommon for a missionary of many years to wonder if they’ve had any impact at all and to say something like, “What am I […]
Tag Archives: missionary
Rethinking Unreached People Groups (Part 3)
A long time ago, I started a blog series trying to show that a widespread, modern interpretation of the Great Commission was a novel innovation and in fact not what the mission entails. To clarify, I’m talking about the idea that the mission of the church is to reach people from each and every ethnolinguistic group […]
Increasing Your Church’s Missions Giving
I’ve had the great privilege over the past decade to visit many churches in the United States to talk about missions. One of the things that I’ve noticed in these travels is that there are some churches whose missions giving is out of all proportion to their size. That is, if you were to break […]
Creativity: the most overvalued trait in missions (Part 3)
In the previous two posts, we examined the reasons that creativity is so highly valued in missions as well as one reason to be concerned about this trend. Let me give another. 2. This tendency betrays a lack of confidence in the gospel The reason that creative thinking is an ongoing need in other endeavors […]
Creativity: the most overvalued trait in missions (Part 2)
In the previous post, we looked at some of the reasons that modern missions is majoring in innovation and creativity. Next I want to share a couple concerns about this trend. 1. This tendency betrays a lack of clarity about the mission itself Think for a moment about why creativity is so important in some […]
Creativity: the most overvalued trait in missions (Part 1)
When I meet people for the first time and they ask me what I do, I have found that it is not very helpful to answer, ‘I’m a missionary.’ The reason is that in modern parlance, the word missionary has come to have a wider and wider range of meaning. There are all sorts of […]
Systematician: Challenges for the Ministry of the Word on the Mission Field
I have been preaching parts of the book of Mark in our new church plant here in Kaohsiung. And I’m struck once again by what a truly unique ministry experience it is to plant a church in a highly unevangelized region! While we have ‘church services’, we don’t really have a church yet. That is, […]
Preview: Send Me, I’ll Go
Last week was an exciting one for me as CLC released my book ‘Send Me, I’ll Go’. A lot has gone into this project, and I’m very thankful for this new opportunity to talk about missions. As the purposes of the book and the purposes of this blog overlap considerably, I thought it would be […]
How We Got Here
I haven’t written yet about what our family has been up to since our deportation from China. So thought I would give a little update. We’ve been in Kaohsiung, Taiwan over four months now and are about two months into a new church plant. I never would have imagined in January of 2014 that I […]
How Language Learning Glorifies God (Part 2)
Some thoughts for missionaries about the great value of learning a language (continued from Part 1 here)… 3. Entering a culture is a modeling of the incarnation of Christ Jesus learned a language. Maybe more than one. He not only became fully human, he became fully Jewish, fully Galilean, fully Nazarene. You could brush shoulders […]
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