I’ve been following, with a little bemusement, Eddie’s recent series of posts reflecting on Onesimus’ post about dependence and toxicity in mission. Read more about Making friends, teaching English, and post-colonialism

1. You make yourself unavailable to the pastoral needs of your church members.
2. You lose the opportunity for fellowship with other missionaries and church leaders.
3. You can’t evangelise yet; you need to put more time into building the relationship.
4. Sermons don’t write themselves, Bible studies don’t prepare themselves.
5. It’s more important to train other people to do the work instead of doing it yourself.
6. There’s an important meeting about proposed changes to the denominational organisational structure that you should be at instead.

I’ve thought on a few occasions that there’s a big crossover between what I used to do in Open Source and what I now do in Church work. As a really good example, I’m currently taking a course in “building transformational communities”; meanwhile, Skud is writing a series of blog posts on the craft of community and putting together a community management wiki. Read more about Advocacy and Evangelism

“Ruth” writes:

We all should be, me included, sharing about Jesus in the places where we live and work everyday. … If you can’t do it here, what makes you think you can do it overseas?

I’ve heard this line of argument before. Let’s see… Read more about Well, several reasons, actually...

Someone back at the mission headquarters asked for my views on Internet evangelism. I wrote back a long response which was less than favourable, so pretty much killed the conversation, but here it is for posterity… Read more about Internet Evangelism

The wonderful David Bosch says in "Transforming Mission" that we need to realise that different religions are "worlds unto themselves". What he means is that it is impossible to enter into dialogue with someone with a different religious commitment to you and assume that your viewpoints are going to be the same; different religions either come from or give rise to different worldviews, which are incommensurable. When a Christian talks about God incarnating himself amongst his creation, he's saying something good; but someone with a Buddhist background is hearing something bad, and someone with an Islamic background is hearing something impossible. I remember Dave Burnett taking apart John 3:16 and showing how it meant to a Buddhist listener the opposite of what it means to a Christian listener. God loving the world? What an unGodlike thing to do! Eternal life? That's what I'm trying to get away from!