January 01, 2012 by Rick Wood

Learning from the Mission Field How to Plant Churches

Short-term missions are legendary for their pitfalls and problems. We have spoken numerous times in MF about our concerns and the damage that many short-term mission efforts have done. Poorly prepared teams of people going on poorly-planned and -coordinated expeditions at exorbitant cost to sensitive mission fields have often been the norm rather than the exception. But many thoughtful leaders have sought to overcome these problems and have developed the Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Missions. Every church or mission group should study these guidelines and learn from them before sending out their next short-term mission team. Go to http://www.soe.org for more information. Another helpful part of the preparation for short-term team members is to have them go through the Perspectives course before they leave? Go to http://www.perspectives.org for more information. Online study is also available.

Tags: short-term mission

January 01, 2012 by William Y. Smith

Can Short-Term Teams Foster Long-Term Church-Planting Movements?

The Greatest Blessing Is to Train Others to Start Churches

As the overcrowded and under–maintained bus slowed to pick up a passenger on the rural Asian road, an older woman stepped out of the bushes. The bus struck her and knocked her 20 feet, killing her instantly. A small boy and girl, probably her grandchildren, fell on her body weeping. Curtis Sergeant, a strategy coordinator for the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, witnessed this from the back of the bus. He was with a national friend and they were about five hours into their ten-hour journey across the province that was to be his new mission field. Sergeant was pained, but having spent years in less developed countries, had seen such accidents before. But what happened in the next few minutes shook him and caused him to grieve in his heart. It wasn’t even that the bus driver spit on the body and cursed the grandmother for denting his bus. Sergeant, too far back to be able to exit to offer assistance, said to his companion, “You have to tell the bus driver to stop.” “Why?” the friend puzzled. “Because those children there are all alone, and someone needs to do something to help them.” Then his companion spoke the truth about the people in this mission field that caused even this veteran missionary to question God’s wisdom in sending him there. “Everyone on this bus has enough troubles of their own.” So the bus rumbled down the road.

Tags: mission, short-term mission

January 01, 2012 by Doug Bender and Steve Sims

Short-Term Trips, Bible Storying and Church-Planting

I (Doug) had trekked to a handful of countries on short-term mission trips in the past. These trips focused on various hu-manitarian efforts or maybe the occasional Vacation Bible School, but never had I thought about using short-term mission trips to do church-planting. Church-planting was for really gifted people, for the Rick Warrens and the Andy Stanleys of the world. Keenly aware of my own lack of talent and charisma compared to these men, I became convinced that church-planting was never going to be my calling. I reasoned that if church-planting in one’s native country, using native tools and the mother tongue, was only for the truly gifted, then doing it among strange or even hostile peoples was surely for even greater giants, the saints and the martyrs. This was my conviction until I met a nine-year-old shoeless boy in Ethiopia.

Tags: mission, short-term mission

January 01, 2012 by Dave Datema

“In Praise of Short-term Missions”

Well, I’m pretty sure the title for this column has never before appeared in the pages of MF. While troubles remain in the theory and practice of short-term missions (STMs), this issue shows that there is much to be thankful for in this incredible movement. It is always easier to criticize than encourage, to fear the problems than believe in the potential, or to control rather than unleash. So here are aspects of short-term missions for which we can truly be thankful. Please accept my apologies for speaking only of the American experience. We have much to learn about STMs in other contexts. First, short-term missions are invaluable in mobilizing every-day believers. A tagline for the broader STM movement could easily be “just one look, that’s all it took.” There is undoubtedly no other single tool that has done more to introduce average believers to other cultures and contexts. Each year, more than 1.5 million U.S. believers travel abroad on short-term trips. We can rejoice that so many believers are being exposed to a world their parents and grandparents never saw. Surely many of these people feel God calling them to long-term mission involvement while on a short-term jaunt. Not only do STMs open their eyes to the needs of the world in general, they also give them a first-hand experience of some aspect of mission work, not to mention the personal discipleship that may occur. This parallels the growth in mission involvement that occurred in the early twentieth century when those returning from the World Wars founded structures to meet the needs they had seen while away from home.

Tags: discipleship, mission, short-term mission

January 01, 2012 by Darrell Dorr

Are you Ready for The Future of the Global Church?

Jesus told us, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more” (Luke 12:48 ESV). By this standard, 21st-century evangelicals (especially in the West) can expect rigorous accountability when our Master returns. In the past two years our stewardship has been enormously increased by the appearance of three remarkable books that inspire and inform new expressions of wise obedience to Jesus’ commission to make disciples of all nations. In early 2010 we first were entrusted with the Atlas of Global Christianity, edited by a team led by Todd Johnson and Kenneth Ross, extensively documenting the shifts in global Christianity over the past century. Then in October 2010 we received the latest (seventh) edition of Operation World, in which Jason Mandryk and his team have given us country-by-country narratives to help us to pray and act. Now, as we turn the corner into 2012, we have before us The Future of the Global Church, Patrick Johnstone’s delightful new book that beautifully complements the Atlas and Operation World and that pushes us to renewed zeal and creativity.

Tags: mission

January 01, 2012 by Steve Smith

Kingdom Come!

The Ina People Catch the Vision for a Church-Planting Movement

"I’ve finished my CPM plan. What do I do next?" At the dawn of the 21st century, God began to unfold an amazing story of kingdom advance in a densely populated corner of Asia. Ying and Grace Kai were laboring in an urban sprawl of crowded factories packed with 10,000 to 100,000 workers, a mad mix of highly educated college grads and barely literate villagers who had migrated into the factories. Within weeks of arriving, Ying began to see results we could scarcely have imagined. God was orchestrating an incredibly explosive movement in the Kais’ part of the country. For years our organization has trained missionaries and church leaders how to cooperate with God to experience church‐planting movements (CPMs)—the Spirit-empowered rapid multiplication of disciples and churches generation by generation. At the end of the training each participant develops a CPM Plan. Their plans begin with God’s vision for a movement, but majors on the practical ministry steps they will need to take to move toward that lofty vision.

Tags: mission, movement

January 01, 2012 by Paul McKaughan

A Few Thoughts and Proposals Regarding Insider Movements

The Existential Reality: Our evangelical community across the world is debating, as we should, the limits and connections between cultural identity and faith in Christ. This is especially intense in those cultures where religion plays a dominant role in framing one’s identity. In almost every mission focused on unreached people I have found a healthy and intense dialogue going on concerning what it means to be a follower of Jesus within these cultures, where the Holy Spirit is drawing people to Himself in historically unprecedented numbers. New communities of those who follow Christ and honor God’s Word are adopting many new forms. And many of us seem to feel compelled to define what obedience looks like for others who accept the Lordship of Jesus. As evangelical missionaries, we once insisted that following Christ required a complete break with one’s culture because it was steeped in an un-redeemable “heathen” religious system. In some places followers of Jesus were even required to take new westernized Biblical names, while we seemed unaware of the degree to which our own Biblical understanding was compromised by extra-Biblical and cultural accretions.

Tags: mission, movement, unreached people group

January 01, 2012 by Andrea and Leith Gray Rick Brown

Translation of Familial Language in the Bible

An Overview of the Issue

A well-educated non-Christian woman was reading the Gospel of Luke for the first time. She came to Luke 2:48, where Mary says to Jesus, “Son,…Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you” (ESV). The woman said, “I can’t accept this! We know that Jesus was born from a virgin and did not have a human father!” She protested strongly that Joseph could not have been Jesus’ biological father, and she cited this statement in Luke as “proof that the Bible has been corrupted and is unreliable,” meaning the translation was corrupt. What could have been the cause of her misunderstanding? The Difference between Biological and Social Familial Terms The problem for this woman was that the word used for father in the Bible translation that she was reading is biological in meaning. It is not normally used for non-biological fathers, such as stepfathers and adoptive fathers. Thus it implied that Joseph had sired Jesus by having sex with Mary. The word was equivalent in meaning to the English words biological father, genitor, and procreator, rather than to social father, pater, or paterfamilias. The biological father is the one who begets the children. The social father is the one who raises the children as their father, looks after them, and has authority over them.

Tags: language, translation

January 01, 2012 by Glenn Schwartz

Tithes and Offerings vs Profit and Loss

The problem I am about to describe thankfully does not apply to all mission-established churches. But it is signifi-cant enough that I feel it deserves attention because of the negative effects it can have on the work the Church is called to do. The Church is called to be a place of worship, fellowship, service and discipleship. It is not called to run in-come-generating businesses which are often created to compensate for low tithes and offerings. Sometimes church-run businesses, including development projects, become an alternative source of income to tithes and offerings. While churches are to run on tithes and offerings, businesses run on profit and loss. In various parts of Africa, weddings have become big business opportunities where family and friends pay a considerable amount of money to a wedding organizer. Services include rental of the wedding clothes, arranging the location, transportation and reception. The details for the entire wedding are subcontracted to the wedding coordinator. One church I know about in East Africa looked upon this as an opportunity to earn money for their congregation. I learned about them when they asked for overseas funding to help launch their church-run business.

Tags: business, giving

January 01, 2012 by Greg Parsons

Western Christianized Identity

When we talk about identity, it is usually in reference to those from other cultures we are trying to reach with the gospel. How will new believers understand and live out their faith in a situation where there is little or no biblical back-ground? And, how will friends, family and neighbors view that newfound faith? We know that anyone who repents and comes to God through Christ is a new creation. They are different. But how that transformation plays out in different cultures is not what we might expect. What they need to do or avoid within their cultural or religious setting is something we must consider carefully. Donald McGavran used to say that when the gospel is first penetrating a culture, how others within that culture view the new believers is key to future growth. If they feel like “those people” (meaning new believers) are now different or “other,” the gospel will not spread. If, however, they are seen as a valid expression within the culture, the gospel will spread.

Tags: donald mcgavran, identity, western christianity