I’ve often written about the importance of good communication from the mission field. You’d be surprised, though, how many missionaries I meet that don’t even know what a blog is. Many of those who do have blogs are forced, fake and over-spiritualized. I won’t name any names here, but I could. Let me point you to Steve and Jamie Wright, [...]

Growing up in church, kids always got special treatment. At my church, for example, there was some unwritten rule giving all adults in church “special” permission to “discipline” us as though we were their own kids. Doyle Braden was an arm-grabber, as I recall. Mr. Lettow would flick the backs of our heads. Sean’s dad pinched ears. Hard. I digress. [...]

Oftentimes, our modern need to be right can lead us to put the gospel in the box of our apologetic. The problem with doing this is that we can miss the implications of the gospel. We ignore what it can mean for what we’re sure it must mean. A good example of this is our use of John 14:6 to [...]

No, I’m not referring to that guy you’ve known since Jr. High that only calls when he needs something (though, come to think of it, watch that guy). “False Friend” is a philological term that refers to a word in the language being learned that sounds similar to a word in the student’s own language. A word that sounds familiar [...]

The biggest obstacle to a church truly becoming missional is a mistaken sense of citizenship. Missionaries to foreign lands understand quite well (and quickly!) that ministry among a different people requires them to change the way they see things- they learn language in order to communicate, they study culture in order to relate, they build relationships in order to love. [...]

Most of the time, when people make decisions, they’re not really choosing from among all the options. Call the filters, call them limitations; but things like popularity, availability, accessibility, cost, visibility, availability, and ignorance all come into play- narrowing the field of choices to (usually) just a few. Many of us who would like to see things change find ourselves [...]

More often than not, the conversation isn’t just between you and me. Because it takes place over blogs, Twitter, conferences, and books the pubic nature of our dialog means that others are listening in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. What better way for the nonbelievers around us to learn about Jesus than to witness the interaction between His [...]

When I was a kid, the use of certain words would get my mouth washed out with soap. A mouthful of soap (usually a bar, the liquid kind in a pinch, and laundry detergent once) is a pretty effective deterrent, so I had to find creative news ways to express the same sentiments. My parents subscribed to the “dynamic equivalence” [...]

Contextualization is the active work of translating the gospel into a culture that doesn’t have an indigenous expression of Christianity. The problem is that we all seem to be “contextualizing” for a culture that we don’t live in. We all look alike because we were all mentored by the same six guys (John, Rick, Mark, Brian, Tim, and Andy). We [...]

Syncretism is a key missiological concept that refers to the all-too common practice of overlaying one set of beliefs with another, disparate one. People often go to great lengths to reconcile different, even opposing, belief systems in order to make sense of the world around them. When African tribes were (forcibly) “converted” to Christianity by imperialist missionaries in the 18th [...]