Mission and Culture

Madness is in the eye of the beholder…

by Eddie 01.05.2010

Today’s Telegraph has a fascinating story from an island in the Pacific: The people of Yaohnanen on the island of Tanna believe a man descended from one of their spirit ancestors will return next month to live among them. While he was away he lived in a vast palace, but when he comes home he [...]

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Bible Translation and Culture Change

by Eddie 19.04.2010

Talking about Christian mission work and its impact on culture is always difficult. There is an excellent example of this in the GlobalPost today in an article about Bible translation in Mali. The article is about the translation of the Bible into Toro-So, one of the many Dogon languages in Mali. Back in the mid-1990s [...]

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Mission and the Election 2: Nurturing Believers

by Eddie 16.04.2010

This is the second in a series which looks at the UK election through the grid of the Five Marks of Mission. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers. I don’t see anything that any of the parties are planning to do which will seriously impinge on the ability of the church to teach, baptise [...]

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Cross Cultural Missionaries Don’t All Fit A Stereotype

by Eddie 22.02.2010

I don’t know what your stereotypical view of a cross-cultural missionary is; it almost certainly involves a North American or a European working in some tropical part of the world. However, the reality is often very different; as this story shows. Since 2000, Deva and Sudha Subir have been working to commit the language of [...]

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Community and Communication

by Eddie 13.02.2010

Over the last few days, I’ve been on the fringes of a new community and it’s been a fascinating experience. After years of using MS-DOS and then Windows, I’ve been giving Linux a try (though this is not a post about Linux). Because I’ve been trying to do a few non-standard things, I’ve spent a [...]

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Authentic Christianity

by Eddie 07.02.2010

This weekend, Sue and I visited the wonderful Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire. The weather was cool and foggy, which gave an amazing atmosphere to the ruins. Which I hope comes across in these photographs. It must have been a hard life being a monk here through the hard winter months, and even the summers [...]

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A Couple of Excellent Blog Posts

by Eddie 04.02.2010

Today has been full of meetings and travel and I suspect that I won’t have the energy or inspiration to write anything myself. In the absence of that, I’d like to point you to two excellent posts, which are sort of related to each other. The first is by Mark who writes on The Greater [...]

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The Missionary Heritage and African Theology

by Eddie 18.01.2010

One of the reasons that televangelists and prosperity gospellers are so incredibly popular in sub-Saharan Africa is that they are engaging Africans at their point of need. That being the case, I am not advocating changing ‘the gospel’ to make it pleasing to people (which is what these people do on a regular basis). Rather [...]

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Miracles, Individuals, Communities and the Gospel

by Eddie 05.07.2009

One of the features of modern western society is that we are highly orientated towards the individual.  We tend to consider the effect things will have on the individual before we think of them in corporate terms. This means that we miss out on some important things when we read the Scriptures. This was drawn [...]

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Mission: Pragmatic or Bible Based?

by Eddie 03.07.2009

Thanks to Ben, I’ve just come across the 9 Marks magazine which has a mission focus in the current edition. One of the articles is by Andy Johnson and is called Pragmatism, Pragmatism Everywhere. This touches on an issue that is very dear to my heart; the dilema which sometimes faces missionaries of whether to [...]

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Britain Doesn’t Want to Understand the Bible

by Eddie 01.07.2009

The Independent reports an interesting survey which was carried out on behalf of the Centre for Biblical Literacy at St. John’s Durham. The public is widely ignorant of the stories and people who provide the basis of Christianity, a survey has found, despite 75 per cent of respondents owning a copy of the Bible. The [...]

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Reading the Bible in Greek and Hebrew

by Eddie 26.06.2009

Brian makes the case for reading Greek and Hebrew superbly in this post: The Scriptures exist as the story in which we are to find ourselves as individuals and as community. In the missional reality of our day, there is no room for superficial engagement with the Bible. I fully understand that it is unrealistic [...]

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