I feel like I should dust off one of my Missiology books before writing this one… but I won’t. The thing is that Christian Missions as it is commonly identified today (at least the Evangelical Protestant flavor that predominates) sees Christian missions driven by Eschatology. Estchatology is the study of future or last things. In …
Continue reading Eschatology and Christian Missions. Is it a Healthy Relationship? Part 1
I have been reading "Environmental Missions: Planting Churches AND Trees" by Lowell Bliss. I have finished 5 chapters. I have 8 more to go, not including Epilogue and Appendices. Still I have some thoughts. Onethat is very obvious is that Lowell Bliss knows his audience. He is writing to Evangelical Christians, and with perhaps an …
Continue reading Environmental Missions— Some Initial Thoughts
At church a few weeks ago our pastor was speaking about God's command to love one another. He then brought it around to politics. He spoke of the two major parties in the US (I am in the US right now, but will be soon going back to the Philippines). He said something like: "And …
Justinian Von Welz, a Protestant missiologist before all but a few Protestants even thought much about Christian Missions, wrote a treatise in 1664. The English translation of the title is "Christian and Sincere Admonition to All Orthodox Christians of the Augsburg Confession Concerning a Special Society through which with the Help of God Our Evangelical …
Continue reading Guidelines for Protestant Missionaries, from 1664
My wife and I oversee a pastoral counseling center that trains ministers in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). I also teach some mission courses at a couple of seminaries here in the Philippines. A saying (one I coined as far as I know) is "Nobody Becomes a Pastoral Because They Like to Listen." Similar thoughts could …
Continue reading Nobody Becomes a Missionary Because They Like to Listen (Part 1)
I teach Cultural Anthropology, Inter-religious Dialogue, and Contemporary Issues in Missions. Note that none of these are standard theology courses. So you would be right to think that I am not the most meticulous and studied Christian theologian out there. That being said, those three courses keep bringing up certain questions... and these questions are …
The above question may sound strange and can be open to a few interpretations. One Interpretation (Minor Question): Historically, it might sound like the question, "Should missionaries be married... or single?" Paul made it clear that many of the apostles not only had wives, but they traveled with their husband's in their missionary ventures. Paul …
Background. I serve in a missionary (cross-cultural minister) capacity in the Philippines. I got my Master of Divinity degree taking all the mission courses that were in the schedule... and a couple that were not. In my early years, my wife and I were active in doing medical missions events, children's group outreach, and some …
Continue reading How Might Missiology Speak to Pastoral Counseling and Chaplaincy?
The title above is not some sort of passive-aggressive complaint about the number of "clicks" on my website. Actually, it is very much the opposite. Although my views here are teeny compared to what so many get on Youtube, X, Tiktok, or whatever, I have been pretty excited by my dozens of views per day …
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)