Replace the nutrients and taste with preservatives and slick packaging, and you can get the general public to eat just about anything. Something about the convenience of it all made frozen and dehydrated “prepared meals” commonplace in Western homes. After a couple generations raised on ready-made meals, obesity has become a first-world epidemic, and cooking actual food is something of [...]

In my last post regarding the Anthropological approach to mission, I proposed that the church should replace its task-oriented view of mission with an identity-based one. One thing I failed to do there was explain what, exactly, an identity-based missiology would look like. Mission is not something we do, it’s something we are. The concept of mission is rooted in [...]

I’ve been watching an interesting, if asymmetric, discussion on Ed Stetzer’s blog about MissionShift, the book he co-edited with David Hesselgrave. Participants were given copies of the book and asked to post their thoughts on their own blogs and discuss them in the comments section of Ed’s post. We started by reading the first section of the book, written by [...]

This is my 9th post in a series on developing a new missiology. Previously: Access Isn’t Everything The truth is, our missiology comes down to our understanding of who God is and how active He is in the spread of the gospel. What is the goal of missions? For some, it’s a crusade against other world religions; the Christianization of [...]

This is my 8th post in a series on developing a new missiology. Previously: A Global Wave Many have taken to using “access” to the gospel as the criteria for missionary engagement. From their perspective, people groups who do not have access to the scriptures, need more of our attention and resources than those who do. Starting with concerns about [...]

This is my 7th post in a series on developing a new missiology. Previously: Yeah, But… In the Old Testament, we read about Noah and his sons. Through a violent global flood, God reset humanity by destroying all but this one faithful family. Then, through this same family, God repopulated the Earth and kept His promise to prosper the Hebrew [...]

This is post #6 in a series on developing a new missiology. Some of you, upon reading my last post, Callsourcing the Mission, might have disagreed with my proposal that we use a crowdsourced report of God’s calling, rather than people group taxonomies, as a foundation for our missiology. You may have seen some shortcomings of my theory, some holes [...]

This is post #5 in a series on developing a new missiology. Human-sized hamster ball. Dunkin’ Donuts locations. Double Rainbow.  At any given point in time, web analytics can show us what topics are “trending” in social media. An uptick in Google searches might indicate breaking news or a YouTube video going viral. Twitter trends give a real-time glimpse into [...]

This is post #4 in a series on developing a new missiology. In my last post, I summarized the origins of the current popular understanding of missions. People group thinking, as I call it, hasn’t been all bad. But neither has it been all good. This, I suspect, is due in large part to the fact that is isn’t entirely [...]

This is post #3 in a series on developing a new missiology. My previous post was about “what missions can learn from the missional movement.” In this post, I’d like to tackle the vocabulary of missions. What are we saying? It used to be the number salvations. Fifty years ago, missions was all about the harvest. Who could argue the [...]