In the last post, I was asking in part how ‘participation‘ is evangelistic. But after a friend gave me another angle, I now want to ask how participation is spiritually formative. In university ministry I guess we’re all agreed on the need to equip Christian students. Here’s a key phrase […]
I recently wrote something for Ethos about university ministry. Part of what was driving the article was my interest in improving our evangelism. ‘Participation’ isn’t just a good witness in its own right, it also promotes evangelism. The four articles by Tim Keller and Michael Keller (starting here) were dealing […]
I. In some American circles there’s a hubbub about Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, and some Australians are interested. Stephen McAlpine, a pastor in Perth, seems to see the Benedict Option as the standout example of faithful communitarian vision, or maybe as an umbrella term for such. To my mind, the […]
A friend of ours once likened South Sudan to Tanzania. He had visited South Sudan for a construction project, and looming large in his experience was the constant presence of armed men. As he spoke, he seemed to be describing a potential failed state, a hive of barely contained conflict, […]
On arriving in Tanzania in 2013, we were greeted with a new communications reality: mobile internet. Tanzania had started out with mobile internet rather than waiting for wired infrastructure. Unlike Australia, mobile data bundles quickly became cheap and plentiful. By the time of our first home assignment, advanced smartphones were […]
Last time I gave a bit of a description of old paradigm mission. I don’t believe that this old paradigm should be completely done away with. Even if some new paradigm came sweeping in, there would no doubt still be a place for pioneer missionaries from the West, as well […]
I’ve previously talked about a divide I’ve seen in Australia between local mission and global mission, with the result that global mission either gets left off the agenda, or makes an attempted revival in traditional terms. That’s the reason why I was critical of Tim Chester’s new introduction to world […]
