April 11, 2026

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Figuring Out Which Needs are My Responsibility

In the past few days, I finished reading a book, entitled Who is My Neighbor?  Being a Good Samaritan in a Connected World. Steve Moore, the president of The Mission Exchange, authored the book and has created a couple of excellent websites that significantly increase the learning value of the book. I read the book on my Kindle, but the book is also available for free, one chapter at a time, in PDF format from  http://www.whoismyneighborbook.com.The book explores the meaning of the question  “Who is my neighbor?” in a world where we are constantly bombarded by needs from around the globe.  Missionary newsletters, mission websites, and  mission e-mail blasts present us with a multitude of needs from every corner of the earth, to say nothing of what we see on CNN and read on Google News.  For us as missionaries, because many of us live in countries where we encounter… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Book Reviews, Learning Attitude

Learning and Servanthood

This past month, I read Duane Elmer’s book, Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility.  Elmer, a former faculty member at Missionary Internship (now MTI) has written a number of helpful books about the process of transitioning into another culture and working effectively as a cross-cultural missionary.   Cross-cultural Servanthood addresses the question of what we need to do so that we are actually perceived as servants by the cultures to which we have come.   As he points out, servanthood is culturally defined, so our efforts to serve others may actually be perceived as superiority and condescension by the host culture and national church. Elmer has heard many host culture people say, “Missionaries could more effectively minister the gospel of Christ if they did not think they were so superior to us.” How do we unconsciously communicate superiority, and how can we avoid this and demonstrate Christlike servanthood? One of… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Spiritual Formation, Book Reviews, Prayer

A Praying Life: Book Review

Equipping missionaries for greater effectiveness must begin with the foundation – a rich and growing relationship with our Lord. A few months ago, I highlighted a book that enriched my personal devotions by showing me a simple method to journal – The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit at the Feet of the Savior by Wayne Cordeiro. Recently I finished reading another book that has re-energized my prayer life – A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller. Child-like dependency The author helped me to understand more clearly how essential a child-like attitude of dependency is. We need to learn helplessness when we come to God in prayer. Miller says, ‘When Jesus tells us to become like little children, he isn’t telling us to do anything he isn’t already doing.  Jesus is, without question, the most dependent human being who ever lived.  Because… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
Book Reviews

Creating Margin in Your Life

Many missionaries and particularly mission leaders complain about overload.   Too many emails!   The technological conveniences of email, Skype and Facebook have kept us much more closely connected to our supporting constituencies and loved ones back home than the missionaries of the past.   But they also have greatly added to the onslaught of information that floods our lives and puts pressure on the time available for ministry in our host cultures.   Often time set aside for personal development and training is the first to be sacrificed. Missionary life was much different in our first term of service.  No, I didn’t arrive on the mission field on a boat.  But my career as a missionary (I was single back then) began before the era of the Internet, or at least the Internet as we know it today.  Back in the early 90’s, we had no telephone in our home in the Philippines,… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Disciple-making, Spiritual Formation, Book Reviews, Self-Feeding

Feeding Yourself and Discipling Others

A book I want to highlight this week is The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit as the Feet of the Saviour by Wayne Cordeiro. One of our senior missionaries who is well-known for his commitment to discipling young men recommended it to me. He said that he hands it out frequently to those whom he is discipling.   About the same time, I received the book as a Christmas gift. Over the Christmas holidays, I finished it.  It is a very easy read, with lots of illustrations from Cordeiros’ pastoral ministry. Essentially the book talks about the importance of and a method for a regular devotional study of Scripture.  Pretty basic stuff for a missionary, right?  Well, this missionary found that the simple journalling method (S.O.A.P) taught in the book was what I needed to move from journalling once in a while to recording on a daily basis… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
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