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 […]
Tag Archives: missions
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 […]
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 […]
How Language Learning Glorifies God (Part 1)
The trouble with career missionaries is that it takes so long to get them started. There’s training to be done, financial support to be raised, and languages to be studied. All told, you’re talking about an investment of several years (in most cases) before these families get to hammering away at the task for which […]
Intro to Missions Course – Part 6
This is the audio from an introductory course on missions that a friend and I taught at our home church. In the sixth lesson, Aaron, my missionary friend in Morocco, discusses the vital work of establishing believers. Aaron talks about the mission of the church and shows that it really cannot be reduced to anything less than reproducing ourselves […]
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