discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University
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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 141<br />
mission boards want missionary candidates who fully understand core Christian<br />
beliefs and who know how to communicate Christian faith to unbelievers.<br />
A basic grasp of various world religions is considered helpful. Missionaries<br />
need to know how to enter another culture as well as how to constructively critique<br />
their own. Missionaries need to know how to absorb culture shock and<br />
most need to know how to learn another language. Missionaries need to be<br />
aware of how paternalism, ethnocentrism, and racism can be cancerous to the<br />
health of the Church.<br />
In addition to classroom studies, future missionaries will find that mission<br />
boards like for them to have had some cross-cultural ministry experience before<br />
deployment. Of course, even when missionaries have received specialized mission<br />
training, they should view that as only the beginning of their missiological<br />
education. People heading to a missionary assignment should be encouraged to<br />
subscribe to journals like Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Mission Frontiers, and<br />
International Bulletin of Missionary Research as one avenue of continuing their<br />
education. To be sure, even the best missiological training is no guarantee that<br />
missionary life will be problem-free and that there will be no unsettling days.<br />
Good training can, however, cushion the impact of discouraging problems and<br />
enable the missionary to confront them effectively.<br />
If God calls you to be a missionary, don’t stoop to be a king. 10<br />
What Do Missionaries Do?<br />
Developing Tomorrow’s Missionaries 141<br />
—Jordan Grooms<br />
For a time, it was common to categorize all missionary work as being of<br />
three types: preaching, teaching, and medical work. Of course, to see how that<br />
was an oversimplification, one has only to look at the huge variety of things<br />
that missionaries like William Carey did. 11 Missionary assignments do not just<br />
come in the three categories of teaching, preaching, and medical work. What<br />
missionaries do is evangelize, supervise disaster relief, recruit and develop<br />
church leadership, facilitate economic development projects, and run broadcast<br />
and print media programming. Missionaries are anthropologists and linguists<br />
who translate the Bible and other books. They train village health-care workers.<br />
They coordinate incoming short-term mission teams. They start Bible colleges<br />
and Theological Education by Extension programs. They develop programs<br />
for youth and children. They pilot airplanes and boats and do computer<br />
systems support. They account for finances and wrestle with the red tape of