background on Missionaries

In 1258, Islam stood on the brink of collapse, with Egypt as its last stronghold. While Islam was struggling, the vast Mongol Empire, under the rule of Kublai Khan, stretched from the Black Sea to the...

If we are honest with ourselves, for many of us who celebrate the sacraments on a regular basis, at times we take them for granted. We lose sight of their nature to inspire and remind us of our covena...

Even more germane to the concerns of this book, it is important to remember how the American concern for enumerating Christian work can look to non-Americans. Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) was a Japanese...

What shall I say of the Romans themselves, who fortify their own empire with garrisons of their own legions, nor can extend the might of their kingdom beyond these nations? But Christ’s name is extend...

its simplest form, the term “missional” is the noun “missionary” modified to be an adjective. Missional churches do what missionaries do, regardless of the context. They can parachute-drop into a vill...

Don’t over-spiritualize. You can serve the Lord in a thousand different jobs. We need missionaries and we need pastors. But we also need entrepreneurs who create jobs so people can make money so they ...

As the center of Christianity shifts from the West (North America and Western Europe) to the Global South, grinding poverty is on the front doorstep — and in the front pews — of the church of Jesus Ch...

Regarding the average human’s awareness of their own culture, career anthropologist Darrell Whiteman has said that “it is scarcely a fish who would discover water.” This is a reliable statement. Human...

Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University and half the namesake of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, was an American minister who began his ministry in 1880. While he wrote and preached countle...

The streets of Cairo were hot and dusty. Our missionary friends Pat and Rakel Thurman took us down an alley. We drove past Arabic signs to an overgrown graveyard for American missionaries. As Nanci an...

The temptation to sculpt God according to our expectations and presuppositions, to make this God much like another, is strong with us. You see it all down through history: in the Middle Ages it seemed...

[Jesus] sends us into the world as he was sent into the world (John 17:18; 20:21). We have to penetrate other people’s worlds, as he penetrated ours: the world of their thinking (as we struggle to und...

Few stories are more deserving of documentaries and a movie than the story of Mama Heidi. After missionary Heidi Baker and her husband earned their PhDs, God told Heidi, “Sit in the dust.” She had no ...

In the United States and most other highly developed and industrialized nations that have been exporters of Christ’s gospel, it is generally accepted that the avoidance of suffering is a respected pri...

A lesson often learned the hard way in each of our spiritual journeys is mistaking goodwill for vocation. Sometimes we feel deeply about an experience we have, whether it be on a mission trip or even ...

James Brownson describes what he calls a “missional hermeneutic” as observed throughout the New Testament: I call the model I am developing a missional hermeneutic because it springs from a basic obs...

In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling shares the powerful story of the missionary Frank Laubach: Frank Laubach, a missionary to the Philippines known for his Letters by a Modern Myst...

I’ve always thought that Jesus gave a very odd first step to completing the Great Commission, basically telling them, “Do nothing until the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (Luke 24:49, my paraphrase). Wit...

Several years ago I was conducting a seminar in the interpretation of Scripture in a theological seminary…Our topic that day was Jesus’ parables…One of the priests, Tony Byrnne, was a Jesuit missionar...

Compassion International’s story strikingly parallels that of World Vision. Compassion traces its roots to 1952 when a Swedish American traveling evangelist named Everett Swanson found his way to Kore...

During the 1960s the Lord raised up an indigenous leader in the church in Mozambique named Martinho Campos. The story of his ministry, Life Out of Death in Mozambique, is a remarkable testimony to God...

In 1947, budding theologian Carl F. H. Henry wrote a short book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he surveys the American fundamentalist movement’s engagement with the most ...

Vikings made long open-sea voyages when most European cultures were sticking close to the coasts. This allowed them to reach Iceland, Greenland, and even the tip of North America. But this was long be...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

[Saint] Valentine was a priest in Rome when Emperor Claudius II began his hostile reign. Valentine was arrested for performing Christian weddings. While imprisoned, Valentine befriended the jailer’s d...

These disciples turned the world upside down because they saw a dead man come back to life by the power of God. And whatever that “knowing” and “seeing” did in them, it did it at a deep level because ...

In seminary I had read about the phenomenon of transference, whereby human beings sometimes transfer the feelings they have for one pivotal person in their lives to another pivotal person in their liv...

Jesus never concealed the fact that his religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed, the demand was as total as the offer was free. His offer of salvation always brings with it the requirem...

Towards the end of his life, the great missionary, theologian, cultural critic (and even bishop!) Lesslie Newbigin gave an interview. His interviewer asked him an interesting question, made even more ...