Overcoming unhealthy dependency in the Christian Movement. Glenn J. Schwartz. This is one of the books that I reckon should be read by everyone who has an involvement in cross-cultural mission work. The book is composed of a series of video scripts and some other articles and at times it would be improved by some […]
Imagine for a moment that you have only ever heard God’s word in a language other than the one you speak with your family and friends. Suppose the only time you have heard the Bible read to you it has been in French or Spanish. You probably wouldn’t understand very much and you certainly wouldn’t […]
One of the hardest choices facing Bible translators is knowing which terms to use for familiar biblical concepts. It is easy to see why, transgression or justification might be difficult to translate, but even seemingly obvious terms such as God can actually be quite difficult. Sometimes the local term for a God might communicate something […]
This history of Christian missions over the last two hundred years or so has been fairly straightforward; missionaries from Europe and North America (and other places too) have gone to Africa and Asia to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. However, over the past few years the situation has become more complex. Very often the […]
Great news on the missional blogging front – Andrew Hamilton has restarted posting on his Backyard Missionary blog. The last few days have seen a positive blizzard of posts. You can learn more than you want about coffee houses in West Australia, and read a good deal of stuff about what church can look like […]
I flew into Abidjan yesterday for my second visit in six months. The city has changed a great deal since we left it in 2000, the civil war means that there are far fewer expatriots around – the SIL centre which used to be such a hive of activity is now depressingly quiet – my […]
One of the presentations here at ICCM was on the mission mapping project based at www.worldmap.org . Hidden a little more deeply in the site is an interactve map which can have various layers switched on and zoomed in and out like Google Earth. For example start here, tick the box for the Bible Translation […]
As readers of this blog (both of you) will know, there are two areas of Christian ministry which really fascinate me. The first is my day job, as it were, Bible Translation in Africa. The other is the whole area of what it means to be a missional church in the post-modern world. I was […]
There is a fascinating interview with the sociologist Rodney Stark on Al Hirsch’s blog, Forgotten Ways. Stark wrote one of the best books I’ve read in last few years, The Rise of Christianity, which gives fascinating insights into the way the early church grew and developed. You get a good flavour of the book by […]
Over the last few days there has been a lot in the media about the Turkish elections and the possibility of Turkey’s secular status coming under threat from the rise of Islam. There has been much less said about the two Turkish Christians and their German missionary colleague who were violently martyred by Islamists on […]