I facilitated a lecture on Social Ministry. The students' readings were: Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishing, 2009). Jerry Ballard, “Missions and Holistic Ministry” in World Missions: The Asian Challenge: A Compendium of the Asia Missions Congres, '90 (Asia …
Month: February 2020
Backpedalling in Samaria
I am working on a book, "Missions in Samaria." It is based on an article I wrote before. It started with the birth of the Samaritan identity up through the book of Acts. Then I jumped to how one can think about Missions in terms of OUR Samarias today. In other words, what places are …
A Theology of Celebration (Part I)
There has been a move within the "Cell Church" movement to describe Sunday morning gathering as "Celebration." I never really cared for the terminology, although I grant at least the somewhat clever alliteration of church involving Cell Groups (another term I don't care for) and Celebration. It seems to me that "celebration" is a sub-biblical …
3 H’s of Persuasive Dialogue
I have been going over different Asian religions in my Dialogue in Asian Religions course. I started with Judaism in Western Asia and worked my way across to Shinto in the East. Now I am looking at Atheism. Atheism has deep roots in Asia. Some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism could be described as Atheistic, …
Snapshots of Faith
Years ago, my wife and I wrote an article for a symposium on disaster response held at University of the Philippines (Baguio branch). We started writing it and then when more details came out it was clear that the topics they were covering were FAR different than our focus. We finished the article anyway (at …