Volume 52 – Issue 2

AS A TEACHER, privileged to work among indigenous people for almost forty years, I am uneasy with a recent trend in teaching curriculum for tribal people. I refer to the issue of orality, which welcomed in a fresh view for biblical training among traditional groups. 

IDEAS ABOUT AND METHODS FOR mobilizing missionaries abound, but Western culture is changing rapidly, and these ideas and methods need to be re-evaluated and modified periodically. Paula Harris, acting director for the Urbana Missions Conference in the early 2000s, wrote, “United States culture is changing fast, and we need new missionary recruitment methods” (2002, 44). 

ARE THERE REPRODUCING churches in Japan? You must be talking about churches in the U.S.” This and other comments revealed skepticism after reporting my field research that uncovered the existence of dozens of Japanese reproducing churches in Japan. 

COMPARTMENTALIZING, categorization, and silo making. You may not realize it, but if you are a North American or a church in North America, you are good at these.

YEARS AGO, I MET A MISSIONARY who had just moved to town. “What brought you here?” I asked, trying to make conversation. “God brought me here,” he said without hesitation or further comment.

WITH PROPHETIC IMAGINATION, Andrew Walls (2002, 202) claimed that the great new fact of our time is that mission is now in reverse: from the non-Western (or Majority World) to the Western world (see Catto 2012, 91-105).