Articles

I write as a follow up to Gene Daniel’s important contribution on shahada confession, which appeared in the July 2014 issue of EMQ. The author notes that among Christian missionaries “there is disagreement about whether a believer in Christ can, with a clear conscience, say the second half, that Muhammad is his [God’s] messenger.”

I want to share three things I have had to consider when communicating with my Japanese friends.  

To help clarify, challenge, and encourage church leaders (and their churches) towards missional effectiveness, it may be helpful to consider three modes of mission as embodied by the Petrine Mission (1 Peter 2:9–12), the Johannine Mission (John 20:21), and the Pauline Mission (the life of Paul). 

While significant progress has been made in evangelical missiology on general contextualization, and much debate has swirled around the degree to which a Muslim-background believer can remain an “insider,” less attention has been placed on workers’ practices—and the connection to their view of Islam. Hence, in this article we seek to augment the overall dialogue by focusing on the worker.

There are few concepts as central to the task of missions as reaching and reconciling. The tip of the spear in mission endeavor is to see that unreached peoples are reached with the gospel so that “all the families of the earth” are blessed through Abraham, and those described in Revelation 5 and 7 do indeed represent some “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” 

Christians are charged with taking the gospel to all nations, and therefore inevitably work in cross-cultural situations. But the current prominence of English as an international language creates potential problems in our approaches to missions and to communicating the gospel. 

The C-Spectrum has been used widely in mission circles and literature over the past fifteen years to differentiate various types of Christ-centered communities (biblical ekklesiae) found in the Muslim world.

My experience in addition to stories I heard led me to reflect on the difficulties that KA missionaries face on the field. My hope is that by doing so, KA missionaries can be better equipped and the people around them can better understand KAs.

In this article, I look at the God-given role identity of New Covenant priest. I delineate what aspects of following Jesus are particularly priestly and recommend how this can be applied in our workplaces.