Costa Rica’s church is big on outreach but small on discipleship, and that has led to a “backdoor phenomenon” with as many as half of new believers deserting evangelism. A quarter of Costa Rican evangelicals believe they aren’t called to share Christ because that’s the leader’s job.
Contextual biblical witness in the Hindu world has not received adequate attention in today’s witnessing community.
A new and exciting trend is developing in missions today. Many Christians, in retirement, are fanning out across the world as short-term missionaries.
The Czech Republic is considered one of the most secular nations on earth. Most Czechs view God as pragmatically and psychologically irrelevant, while taking pride in the fact that they are unencumbered by any ideology, religious or otherwise.
As a young pastor, I spent an afternoon with an elder of our local church who meant to encourage me after a particularly difficult season of ministry. “The Lord wants us to be faithful,” he said, “not successful.”
You’ve been in church planting for twenty-one years and you’re still alive (and smiling) to talk about it?” I chuckled inside. “This is one informed mission’s chairman,” I thought. “I not only survived, I’m living my missionary dream come true.”
If you were to ask pastors and informed lay persons of most churches if they have a missions program, most would answer in the affirmative.
With the missions rush into the former Soviet Union a decade ago, followed by the focus on the 10/40 Window, Latin America seems to have been overlooked in recent missions excitement. It’s almost as though missions have a “been there, done that” attitude.
In this survey Armour describes the spread of Islam, the first Christian response from criticism to martyrdom and the largely—though not exclusively—“deformed image” of Islam in the medieval West.
Alister McGrath woke me from my globalized stupor in Starbucks in Singapore with the question “Will the twenty-first century be better for Christians than the disastrous twentieth century was?” In less than 175 pages the author explores this question with surprising clarity and astonishing breadth.
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