By and large, the religion of Islam has been presented to Western readers in its theologically orthodox aspect. Anyone who has read a fair amount of material on Islam is familiar with the confession, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet.”
Perhaps the greatest danger evangelicals face is the high potential for the disintegration of the home.
Numbers games on big city streets around the world rob people of money that could go for food and clothing. The missionary enterprise is also plagued by numbers games.
The church in Antioch became the vehicle for two areas, first the vision and second the strategy.
A great deal of heat—to say nothing of light—has been generated by the insistence in some circles that the church should concentrate on the responsive elements of society.
Since there are probably more opinions about politics than there are people to hold them, any discussion of politics is bound to be controversial. But the Bible peels away the cultural veneer missionaries sometimes mistake for Christianity and forces them to seek God’s kingdom and his righteousness, rather than some transient political ideal.
The 1971 Green Lake Conference convened to identify points of tension in church-mission relations and to develop guidelines to assist the mission boards in charting future paths.
Two articles in this issue are about church-planting and church growth. Ron Fisher makes a strong appeal for better training and more experience in the U. S. David Pickard says one problem encountered in moving into responsive areas is that the missionaries don’t know how to win souls.
“Crossing an ocean doesn’t make one a missionary” has become an axiom in missionary circles. I’d like to add a corollary that I think is just as self-evident: “Crossing an ocean doesn’t make one a church-planter.”
In choosing “The Christian Home” as the theme for their third General Assembly (1977), leaders of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar perceived the determining practical issue in the church today.
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