If you were Chinese, what religion is a better political option for you? Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam? Yesterday I had a conversation with somebody who has been living and working in China for the past ten years or so. We were talking about the incredible growth of the church there. I asked him [...]
Our organization has a wise, old, experienced oracle. I mean, we really, literally do. "Uncle Jack" is a legend in the world of global Christian organizations. For decades he worked with one of the two large umbrella associations to help their members be more effective. He was a founder of SEND International, one of the [...]
Conducting Post-Mortem Debriefs “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana Intentional evaluation of your organization’s successful and failed efforts is crucial to improvement. Most of our best lessons can be learned by simple discussions about what went right and what went wrong. The “Post-Mortem” helps you [...]
The New York Times is now covering the contextualization issue, you can read it here. Like one would expect from the secular press, they don't really get the whole picture. However, it is further evidence that missionary issues that have been primarily fought in academic circles and in the hushed conference rooms of missionary get-together [...]
I have been working on a project for training missionaries who are planting churches. This has led me to consider the history of missionary strategy. I am concluding that we constantly repeat the same mistakes, over and over. In 1899, John Livingston Nevius was asked to speak on missions to the forming Korean church. Nevius [...]
Today I was sent a link to an excellent overview on the current state of affairs regarding contextualization by Christians in their outreach to Muslims. It is by Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo and is entitled, "Recent Changes in Christian Approaches to Islam." it's a pretty good writeup of the history of the issue. It is critical [...]
There is a lot of communication happening on the “contextualization” front. For some years, some missionaries have been using ministry forms which are highly indigenous in nature and rely on sources from within other religious traditions to make their case. Others have been highly critical of this approach. This dialogue has a language all its [...]
Matt Green shared this with me. It’s a must see for anybody who studies movements.
Tweet This PostI heard about it first on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 in the late afternoon. I was out cleaning up my minivan after an unusually messy week of kids, pop cans, and candy bar wrappers when my blackberry buzzed. A colleague was emailing me that 22 Christian families were being executed in Aghanistan and he was [...]
World Christian Podcast – Click here to listen RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS and ACORNS (Note: This material is largely based on the work of Gerlach and Hines, cited at the end of this article.) Something that fascinates many people is the idea of movements and how they form, and how they are generated; in fact, I’ve decided [...]
Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity by Mark A. Noll
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