Uber, iPhones, Airbnb, Netflix, and Amazon. The list goes on. Disruptive innovations are taking over traditional North American industries. The missions realm also needs consistent creative effective new ways for how we activate, recruit, and onboard new workers. The environment is ripe for unprecedented breakthroughs in mobilization collaborations in the North American missions’ enterprise.
Ultimately it is the church on the ground, the local community of believers, that is the critical expression of Christ’s love and power in the world. Made up of individuals who have personally placed their faith in Him, this bride of Christ must be the final basis for evaluating our efforts in evangelism. Scripture, early church history, examples of explosive growth of the church elsewhere, and often neglected media case histories all point to the fact that it is the local body of believers—living, working, and testifying together—that has been critical to the growth and multiplication of the Church.
Most people who know something about the late missiologist Ralph Winter, know about his Lausanne 1974 plenary address on unreached peoples (Winter 1975). Some know him from his reinvigorating the discussion about church and mission structures—which he called Sodalities and Modalities (Winter 1974). Still others know him because of his foundational work on Theological Education by Extension (TEE) in the 1960s (Winter 1969).
Some time ago I read in the pages of a mission magazine that came to my desk an amazing statement. The writer was emphasizing his “conviction that the church, not the mission board, is the sending agency.” He added that according to the book of Acts, “the church at Antioch accepted responsibility for the Apostle Paul.” Then he went on to say that “in the 11th chapter of Acts Barnabas heard of Paul, sought him out, brought him to Antioch and helped him serve an internship in that church of not less than one year.”
By Amit A. Bhatia. Reviewed by Fred Farrokh, Global Initiative: Reaching Muslim Peoples.
By David A Hollinger. Reviewed by Richard Cook, Associate Professor of Church History and Missions at Logos Evangelical Seminary in El Monte, California. He served as a missionary in Taiwan for over ten years and has a PhD in Modern Chinese History from the University of Iowa.
By Paul Woods. Reviewed by John Doss, senior pastor, Discovery Christian Community, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Partnership is something we long for but often have a difficult time defining. North American churches and organizations are seeking to partner with the global community in ever increasing degrees, yet partnership is often a broad elusive term that can be defined very differently depending on the context.
John Amalraj, Geoffrey W. Hahn, and William D. Taylor, eds. Reviewed by Tabor Laughlin, Intercultural Studies PhD student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), missionary in China ten years, leader of a small mission agency in NW China, and author of Becoming Native to Win the Natives.
This edition of EMQ is devoted to the critical topic of mission mobilization, and for good reason. It is said that if one generation of believers fails to wholeheartedly engage in missions, the link to the next will be broken, and eventually the entire movement could collapse. However, the reality is more pressing than a missed generation. With the accelerated speed of changing interest in our information-laden world, if we miss just two to three years of rallying new workers, we could lose not just a generation, but the entire future of engagement in God’s global mission.
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