While this can be good because we can share stories of what God is doing around the world and get more people excited and involved, it has some significant downsides we need to think through and train for before we send people, or go, on STMs.
Read More“Indeed, it is as though Christianity, wherever it went in the modern colonies, inverted its sense of hospitality. It claimed to be the host, the owner of the spaces it entered, and demanded native peoples enter its cultural logics, its ways of being in the world, and its conceptualities.” – Willie James Jennings
Read More“I can’t get many people in my world interested in global missions. It seems to many of them that missions is a black hole that consumes vast resources and produces little impact.”
Read More“When the Missionaries came, they brough us the Bread of Life in the plastic bag of western culture. We ate it in the bag, never really tasted it, and now we are constipated.”
Read More“Brother Bouchelle, how do we defeat the Pentecostals?” This was one of the more surprising questions anyone ever asked me.
Read MoreThere is much we can learn from businesspeople. There is a place to talk about efficiency and impact. We are called to be good stewards. That said, there are times when God calls us to do things that don't make sense to the business mind. Not everything God is up to can be justified on a balance sheet.
Read More“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” - Eph. 6:12
Read MoreMissions is fraught with challenges because it is based on partnerships between people who are separated across vast distances of space, culture, training, experience, expertise, and roles. What is not as well understood is the gap in understanding between field workers and many of their donors.
Read MoreThe COVID-19 pandemic created endless problems and shut many things down. But it also gave us a chance to step back and evaluate what we were so busy doing that we may have lost an objective perspective on it. In at least that respect, the pandemic was a gift hidden in a tragedy. This is certainly true when it comes to short term missions (STM).
Read MoreIt was a perplexing time for me. While things looked good on the surface at the church where I served, I could see massive obstacles ahead and didn’t know how to move through them without losing the critical mass of the congregation in the process. The demographic trends were going to overwhelm us in the next decade. I did not know what to do. We were working too hard for the results we were seeing.
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