November 01, 2021 by Rick Wood

God’s Mission Is a Battle for Hearts and Minds

They are all around us, as pervasive as the air we breathe. They bombard us relentlessly day and night from every direction seeking to take us captive. The unaware are helpless to avoid their grasp. They are the lies, evil philosophies and poisonous worldviews that seek to tear our hearts and minds away from the God who loves us and sent His Son to die for us. These lies of Satan seek to corrupt a true and biblical understanding of God and how we are to relate to Him.

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November 01, 2021 by Debbie Wood

Reconstructing a “House of Knowledge”

In Proverbs 9:1, The writer describes Lady Wisdom building a house. In a similar way, each person builds an inner house of everything believed to be true. This House of Knowledge (HOK) is a helpful (but admittedly imperfect) way of picturing the structure of your mind, everything you believe, understand, or judge about everything you have encountered—your own “wisdom.” The blocks that make up your HOK are organized by topics of all sorts, from geography, the names and appearance of your family and friends, ways of appropriate behavior in your culture, to beliefs about yourself and your worth.

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November 01, 2021 by Jeff Myers

How Do Our Worldviews Develop and Why Should We Care What People Believe?

What we understand about God and the world affects what we believe about everything else, including what kinds of arguments we find persuasive and how we justify our intended actions. That’s why the apostle Paul said in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” To understand what God wants from us, we must identify the world’s patterns, refuse to conform to them, and be transformed to embrace a God-pleasing pattern of living.

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November 01, 2021 by Jeff Myers

The Five False Worldviews That Ensnare Your Church

In professional tennis matches, the ball moves so quickly that players have to swing at it before their conscious minds have time to process what’s happening. I asked a friend who played against many world champions how winning tennis players mastered this skill. He explained that through thousands of hours of practice they learn to recognize subtle signs given off by their opponents and then fine-tune their reflexes to respond. The same is true in today’s battle of ideas. Culture rapidly fires fake worldviews at us that are contrary to God’s Word. If we don’t know how to recognize these worldviews or respond quickly enough, we risk being taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophies (Col. 2:8)

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November 01, 2021 by Jeff Myers

How to Stop the Bad Ideas That Plague Us

We live in a time of war. There are no soldiers in this battle. There are no landing craft, no bombers flying in formation, no artillery emplacements. Yet attacks occur every minute of every day. The battle we’re in is a battle of ideas. To be spiritually and mentally strong, we need a healthy worldview that inoculates us against the bad ideas we pick up from the culture around us. In my new book, The Secret Battle of Ideas About God,, I show how we can win against bad ideas by thinking of them as viruses and by paying attention to the steps doctors take to stop deadly diseases.

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November 01, 2021 by Jeff Myers

Thoughtlessness: Far More Dangerous Than We Realize

One of my friends calls them “pastorisms”: catchy statements that leave everyone saying, “Ooh, that’s profound.” Soon such pronouncements become memes that are widely shared and treated as self-evidently true. I contend that fascination with clichés makes us thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is dangerous—as illustrated by a disturbing example from history.

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November 01, 2021 by Ben Keiser

Can you imagine?

John Lennon’s song, Imagine, is one of the enduring classics from the 1970s. Lennon was a member of the Beatles and an avid political activist. Imagine is an anthem of secularism and remains extremely popular to this day. In fact, it practically sums up the secular worldview in three minutes.

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November 01, 2021 by William J. Dubois

Launching Movements among Muslims: Case Studies of Best Practices—Antioch Family of Churches

24:14 Goal: Movement engagements in every unreached people and place by 2025 (50 months)

Edited from a presentation for Global Assembly of Pastors for Finishing the Task. I’m the co-leader of the Antioch Family of Churches, a global alliance of indigenous Church Planting Movements. For the last 30 years, we have focused on building the leadership capacity of first-generation Christians who live in closed countries and helping them learn to multiply house churches. In this article I will focus on launching movements among Muslim peoples. For the first 20 years of our work, many of our efforts were filled with missteps, mistakes and failures. However, it was through a personal crisis in my own life that we learned to make adjustments that would lead to breakthroughs. In 2004, I was helping underground house church leaders from Iran learn and understand 2 Timothy. After this training was completed, I was poisoned by an Al-Qaeda operative and nearly died. A lot of people were praying for me, and after two and a half months of doctors and hospital visits trying to determine what had happened, I was miraculously healed. I’m very grateful for that!

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November 01, 2021 by Kevin Higgins

Pondering the Question

“Do you have a biblical worldview?” That is the question posed and discussed in this edition of Mission Frontiers. My purpose here is to reflect a bit about the question itself, and then to suggest its connection to the frontiers of mission.

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November 01, 2021 by J. D. Payne

Apostolic Imagination: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Mission

David J. Bosch noted the “Christian mission—at least as it has traditionally been interpreted and performed—is under attack not only from without but also from within its own ranks.” The present “crisis” was just one of many throughout Church history that created a need for a new paradigm of mission.1 Three decades following the publication of Bosch’s magnum opus, evangelicals remain in a state of transition and confusion when it comes to the Church’s global task. A new paradigm has not fully arrived. Recent books reveal questions that remind us of the continuation of this liminal state.

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November 01, 2021 by Greg Parsons

What Shapes our Views

As we seek to extend God’s fame among the nations, we must seriously consider (1) what has shaped us, (2) how that informs how we interpret the Scriptures and (3) how we share truth with others. I was raised in a family defined as “traditional” in the sense that my mother and father were both in the home, along with two brothers and one sister. We all shaped each other. We grew up going to church—I don’t remember a time that I didn’t. That shaped my views of everything (almost). Growing up in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, there were many of my friends who almost never darkened the doors of a church, and probably thought I was strange.

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November 01, 2021 by UOTD Team

Unreached of the Day November-December 2021 (Formerly known as the Global Prayer Digest)

Click on the attached .pdf icon within this article to read the Unreached of the Day

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