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One of the virtually unquestioned axioms of missionary orientation through the years has been that an effective missionary must constantly strive to “identify with the nationals.”

The Community of Latin American Evangelical Ministries (CLAMS) was born of the deep awareness that if the Latin America Mission was to truly realize its goal of becoming an arm of the Latin American church, radical structural change was in order.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to change jobs at age 56, but I had no choice.

Every missionary is called to invest his life in the lives of others. Teaching and training are the fulfillment of this calling.

The Bible gives us evidence about the basis on which those who have never heard of Christ will be judged. We have sufficient light on the matter– not to stop us from going but to show us what our responsibility is.

Every foreign missionary has some custom-free mental and emotional baggage that accompanies him in every contact with national Christians and non-Christians. Decisions and actions are often based on his culturally acquired sense of rightness. The effective missionary recognizes this “cultural overhang” and gets beyond it.

From a safe distance of 1700 years Christians enjoy identifying with the Christian martyrs of the first three centuries. Sunday school teachers shock their children with hair-raising accounts of how Christians were fed to the lions in the Colosseum.

One of the greatest challenges today in world evangelism is the fact that Christianity is still considered “the white man’s religion” by hundreds of millions of people. To accept Christ as their Savior, non-whites around the world may think they would have to be disloyal to their people and to their own culture.

If you had been there, you would have seen three missionary families gathered together around a campfire singing joyously the hymns that they’d sung so often before. Listening in, you would have heard the mellow whining of a harmonica and the accompaniment of an accordion.

Writing for adult unskilled readers, like writing for children, is a highly demanding skill.