Look at Christian mission work through the centuries
One of the great Christian missions books in the last couple of hundred years is Roland Allen's work, "Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? A Study of the Church in the Four Provinces." It is a wonderful commentary on colonial-style missions, and contrasting it with missions carried out by St. Paul in the book of …
Continue reading 52AD 1st Millennium Missions History. Paul’s Mission Trips to Asia Minor
<The following is an extended quote from Missions in Samaria by Robert H. MunsonMM-Musings 2020. https://www.amazon.com/Missions-Samaria-Robert-Munson/dp/B087CRN2TG> According to Acts chapter 8, Saul (aka Paul) went around Jerusalem house to house seeking out Christians and dragging them off to jail. So Christians began to scatter and tell others about Christ as they scattered. Persecution is NOT …
Continue reading 36AD 1st Millennium Missions History. Samarian Campaign
"Translation of the message started from the very beginning of the church. The Pentecost event more than simply demonstrated the movement of the Holy Spirit, and the inauguration of the church. The sign occurred in Jerusalem on a day when the relatively monocultural city would be the most diverse. The sign itself was a gift …
Continue reading 33AD 1st Millennium Missions History. Pentecost
When we speak of the Biblical basis for Christian Missions, a lot of time is placed on the Great Commissions. Shortly before the ascension of Jesus, He spoke to His disciples. Actually, the different Gospel accounts not only give different versions of such a "commissioning" but there seems to be a difference in the setting …
Continue reading 33AD 1st Millennium Missions History. Reflections on the Great Commissions
"While I have heard the argument made that Jesus considered himself to be a Jewish prophet called to reform Judaism and never saw himself as having any cross-cultural or international purpose, it seems clear that Jesus was internationalizing the movement from the start. He saw himself as inaugurating the Kingdom of God—a movement not tied …
We just passed Christmas 2024 and I felt like trying something new. I decided I want to work through Christian Missions History and share my thoughts. I have shared CMH thoughts before. But this time I thought I would try to do it in historical order. Some will be quotes of what I have written …
Continue reading CMH (Christian Missions History) Musings in Order
WordPress likes to keep bloggers... blogging. They do this in part by asking a new question every day. Almost never do I answer the question. Part of that is because I think they are primarily focusing on people who use their website like a diary, log, or scrapbook. Nevertheless, occasionally there is a question that …
Continue reading Who From History Would I Like to Talk To… if that was even remotely possible?
I was recently reading "Paradigms in Conflict, 2nd ed.: 15 Key Questions in Christian Missions Today" by David Hesselgrave. On page 259, a section was include on a list of missions slogans compiled by Todd Johnson of the World Evangelism Research Center. Here they are: 1900-- "The evangelization of the world in this generation." 1910-- …
This is unsurprisingly a continuation of PART ONE. And much like Part One, it is tied to an article I recently wrote that can be seen by CLICKING ON THE ARTICLE. Relating to this topic, here is a quote from that article: Jesus of Nazareth established the church completely embedded in Judeanculture—Judean in membership, language, …
Continue reading Jesus Christ as Internationalizer of the Faith (Part 2)
I recently wrote an article, Muddy Footprints, where I suggest that Jesus was not so much a contextualizer of the faith, but an internationalizer of the faith. You are welcome, even encouraged to read that article, but I want to explore this a bit further. Contextualization as a term has been around since the 1970s …
Continue reading Jesus Christ as Internationalizer of the Faith (Part 1)