Elijah’s burnout: Lessons to learn for ourselves Let’s look at the life of one of the most beloved and frequently cited figures from the Old Testament: The prophet Elijah. If we follow the events that occurred in his life, 1 Kings, 18:4 to 19:18, we could summarize the highlights as follows: First, he faced the […]
Ponderings on Discipleship Mat 4:19 And he said unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. The Message Bible puts it this way: Jesus said to them, “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I’ll show you how to catch men and women instead of […]
Seasonal Migrants: Temporary Contract Workers Sadiri Joy Tira (D.Min., D.Miss.) Today I went to a quiet park (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) to observe and take pictures of migratory birds. This park is a nesting and breeding ground for birds coming from south of the Canadian border, as far away as Central America. They fly thousands […]
Global Increases in Expatriates Challenge International Churches in Ministry By Kenneth D. MacHarg Exactly how many expatriates are there? Of course, nobody knows for sure, but some good, educated guesses abound. Whatever the true numbers are, a new report says certain sectors of the globe are expecting more in the coming years with challenging implications […]
“Back to the Basics” the coach would exclaim! The whole team knew what he meant! Let me tell you a story of my childhood. I played little league baseball when I was a kid. I loved playing baseball, still do as a grown up. We wore our sponsor uniforms: “Mac’s Milk” blue and white baseball […]
Transformational Education Dr. Stan DeKoven Founder and Director, International Training and Education Network and President, Vision International University I ran across this definition of transformational education, and thought it was helpful. Transformational Education is defined as an educational program, which maintains academic excellence while emphasizing strong practical activation of the Word to Kingdom life and […]
The Missional International Church Network (MICN, http://micn.org) defines an “international church” as a church that “primarily serve[s] people of various nationalities (expatriates) and church backgrounds living outside their passport (home) countries”, and a “missional” church as one that is “shaped by and oriented around the mission to which Christ has commissioned His followers”. During the […]
Once Upon a Time… The last verse of an old love song ponders the discontinuous nature of all human experience. “Once upon a time The world was sweeter than we knew Everything was ours How happy we were then But somehow once upon a time Never comes again” With nostalgia we look back to good […]
In Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today, author Craig Bartholomew is concerned with the recovery of the Christian view of place and practice of placemaking. In part 1, the author expounds extensively on biblical research, following the traces of place from Creation to Revelation. In the second part, place is traced […]
In his book, Culture Makers, Andy Crouch raises the question, “What does it mean to be not just culturally aware … [or] culture consumers or even just culture critics, but culture makers?” (Crouch, 2008). Drawing from the field of sociology, Crouch first explores the meaning of culture. He then ingeniously retells the story of Scripture […]