EMQ

This article is a response to: “Courage in Our Convictions: The Case for Debate in Islamic Outreach” by Jay Smith, January 1998 EMQ.

In missiology we talk about the “10/40 Window,” referring to the large number of unreached people groups living between the latitudes of 10 and 40 north of the equator. The “15/45 Window” refers to people with AIDS, since most cases of HIV infection and AIDS occur between the ages of 15 and 45.

Few missionaries forget the day they arrive on the field. It generally ranks right up there with The First Kiss, The Day Kennedy Was Shot or The Truth about Santa.

When I went to the emergency room of the Vanga Evangelical Hospital in the Congo one morning in 1996, I saw a strange looking man lying on one of the beds. The head nurse told me, “This is Mr. A. He is Egyptian, and he is very sick.”

Not long ago at a city park in Central America, Patrick McDonald spotted a group of 30 street children. Then he saw workers with a Christian ministry show up and begin working with them. Then another group of workers arrived, then another, all within half an hour, all targeting the same children.

I thought I had prepared myself adequately for my first term on the mission field. I was willing to humble myself to the level of a child to learn a new language.

I once heard an American telling a Romanian congregation that things are so bad in Cuba that each Cuban has a ration of only two pounds of beans per month. The translator, not knowing what pounds were, translated this as “two beans.”

This article is a response to the article “Using an Interpreter: Less than Idea, but Not All Bad,” by Roger Chapman in the January, 1998 issue of EMQ.

C. Kaushal remembered the bloody partition of India in 1947 as if it happened last week. Kaushal was 9 years old when the British withdrew from India, sparking the slaughter of half a million Muslims and Hindus. His family, which worshiped the monkey god Hanuman and four other gods, had little sympathy for the monotheistic Muslim minority.