Volume 34 – Issue 1

When I went to the emergency room of the Vanga Evangelical Hospital in the Congo one morning in 1996, I saw a strange looking man lying on one of the beds. The head nurse told me, “This is Mr. A. He is Egyptian, and he is very sick.”

Not long ago at a city park in Central America, Patrick McDonald spotted a group of 30 street children. Then he saw workers with a Christian ministry show up and begin working with them. Then another group of workers arrived, then another, all within half an hour, all targeting the same children.

I thought I had prepared myself adequately for my first term on the mission field. I was willing to humble myself to the level of a child to learn a new language.

I once heard an American telling a Romanian congregation that things are so bad in Cuba that each Cuban has a ration of only two pounds of beans per month. The translator, not knowing what pounds were, translated this as “two beans.”

This article is a response to the article “Using an Interpreter: Less than Idea, but Not All Bad,” by Roger Chapman in the January, 1998 issue of EMQ.

I was a church planter in Russia for four and a half years. I hold a graduate degree in missions, and I have intently studied the culture that I have been immersed in. Only one problem–I never really learned the language. Everywhere I went to minister, I took my interpreter.

Much focus in the last two decades has been on the AD2000 and Beyond Movement. The question we must ask now is, “What kind of mission and what kind of missionaries are needed for the 21st century?”

Many have questioned the method that I and others are using in England to evangelize Muslims. They say it is wrong, perhaps even dangerous.