College friends wore our fundraiser T-shirts around campus. Team parents praised us for flying across the world to spread the gospel. In Japan, we were guests of honor. Local pastors advertised the visiting American athletes to draw people to church. Groups of teen girls wanted to pose with us for selfies. We were celebrities.
We live in a rapidly changing world in which massive amounts of people move from one place to the next. Many people who have come from other places live on the margins of society as socially excluded international refugees or immigrants.
While I was preparing with a team to go on a missions trip to Israel’s Jewish absorption centers, I met a young lady named Rosebud who was taking a break in the fast food restaurant where she worked.
Over the past thirty years I have noticed that many of us have a tendency to inadvertently promote half-truths that we think advance the cause of world missions. By half-truths, I mean concepts that are partially true or seemly true on the surface, but in fact are myths.
The vocabulary that dominates the theology of mission today features a hierarchy of status describing its very essence. All the terms are derived from the Latin word missio (roughly translated “sent”) and used to convey the concept rooted in the biblical Greek term apostello. At the top is Missio Dei. This is followed by mission and missional in the middle. At the bottom, still championed by ‘unsophisticated slaves to the past,’ is missions.
by Warren R. Beattie, ed. —Reviewed by Ryan Klejment-Lavin, director, Footstool Missions Center, Seoul, South Korea
The primary reason for this article is that it seems to me that something very important about the contextualization of prayer has been lost in the larger debate about appropriateness of certain kinds of contextualization in the Muslim world.
by Sadiri Joy Tira and Tetsunao Yamamori, eds. —Reviewed by Rajkumar Boaz Johnson, Ph.D., professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, North Park University; visiting professor, SHIATS University, Allahabad, India
Just as Gutenberg changed the world forever when the printed word challenged the spoken word, so globalization and the Zuckerberg generation are doing the same in this millennium. One of those changes has been in business as mission (BAM).
by Harley Talman and John Jay Travis, eds. —Reviewed by Daniel Shinjong Baeq, senior pastor, Bethel Presbyterian Church, Ellicott City, Maryland
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