"After a significant pastoral ministry in an urban setting in the United States, a former student of mine returned to his home country of India to minister. When visiting him, I asked, 'What is the most significant obstacle you face?' He paused and then said, 'The biggest I've seen recently has been working to overcome …
Category: Encounters in Mission
Consideration of four (4) encounters in missions. Truth, Allegiance, Love, and Power.
7 Rules of Dialoguing
How does one do interfaith dialoguing? From the John Hick camp comes the idea that both must relativize their own beliefs. That is difficult to do in practice, and hardly seems appropriate for many--- suggesting a sort of virtue in weak convictions. A better, in my mind, view comes from an article (written in Afrikaans, …
Fear and Power in Ministry, and Five Encounters
I just recently did a short talk on Folk Islam. Not the center of my expertise, but our regular speaker was not able to make it. So I tried to position the talk from an area of greater strength for me... anthropological reflection. So I showed the classic cultural triangle. "Western" Cultures are more interested …
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Strangers in the Land
<NOTE: The image here for vulnerability, I am using as synonymous with weakness. Some don't feel that way. For them, vulnerability is a virtue while weakness is a well... weakness. I would suggest that both, properly understood, are virtues, and... well... strengths.> Two passages with regard to the life of Abraham are especially meaningful to …
Is There Such a Thing as Littering?
Despite living in the Philippines for 10 years, my Tagalog is still pretty poor. Living in Baguio City, a very English-friendly city, does not help. Having a quadra-lingual wife also has allowed me to be slack in my language. However, a couple of phrases I learned quickly here: BAWAL UMIHI DITO BAWAL MAGTAPON DITO The …
Newbigin Quote– The Supreme Parable
Quote of Lesslie Newbigin. "The Open Secret," chapter 4: The supreme parable, the supreme deed by which the reign of God is revealed and hidden, is the cross. When Israel rejected Jesus' call to repent and believe the good news of the reign of God, there were two roads which (humanly speaking) he might have …
Giving the Devil his due… sort of.
A couple of things have come up here that bring up issues regarding demon possession. One was some discussions on-line that point out that a large percentage of Evangelicals in US do not believe in "mental illnesses" but believe that such phenomena are demon possession or demon oppression or such. The other was a training …
What to do with Idols
I come from an area where idols (as a physical representation of a god, or a material focus of worship) are rare at best, but we find them more here in the Philippines in different forms. As Christians, what do we do with them? Some suggest they should be destroyed, noting I Corinthians 10:20 (and …
“The Customs of Heaven” Quote of James Martineau
"The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God in …
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Dale Carnegie and the Gospel
My dad used to like to say "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." This bit of wisdom is something lost on Christians often. It seems to me that many of us have been seduced by the false promises of argument. My son, Joel, was on the debate team at …