Review of The Missionary Family: Witness, Concerns, Care, Dwight P. Baker and Robert J. Priest, eds.
No. 22 of the Evangelical Missiological Society Series was published by the William Carey Library in the fall of 2014. It “points to a feature – the missionary family – often considered to be a distinctive of the Protestant missionary movement” (xi). The book is divided into three main sections:
I have just finished reading a great book on cultural differences as it applies to working with multicultural teams. The book: The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business is filled with fascinating real-life stories of how cultural differences impact relationships between people working together. The author, Erin Meyer, is an American living in Paris and a professor at INSEAD, the “Business School for the World”. She trains leaders from many different cultures of the world. No, the book is not written specifically for missionaries, but is nevertheless a very valuable resource for anyone working in a cross-cultural environment, and particularly those who serve on multicultural teams.
Based on extensive research and experience, Meyer has come to realize that you cannot simply categorize cultures into two camps on a particular issue. For example, cultures are not simply time-oriented or event-oriented. The English see the French as not punctual and disorganized, but Indians see the French as too rigid in terms of time! Both are right – from their vantage point. And from yet another place on the spectrum, the Germans see the English as being “disorganized, chaotic and always late” (p. 22). See the diagram below that compares Israeli (red) and Russia (yellow) cultural maps. So we see that cultures are scattered across a spectrum, and what matters is not a culture’s absolute position on the spectrum, but rather its relative position in comparison to the culture it is interfacing with.
The latest book in Baker’s Encountering Missions series, Effective Intercultural Communication: A Christian Perspective by A. Scott Moreau, Evvy Hay Campbell and Susan Greener, became available at the end of 2014. The authors state their “task is to walk you through the critical elements that comprise an introduction to intercultural communications for Christian workers of all types” (p3). The book is divided into four major parts.
Part one is an introduction to intercultural communications providing “an overview of the historical development (both secular and Christian) of intercultural communication and deal with implications that are important for people who cross cultures to communicate Christ.” (p3) Chapter 1 defines terminology of culture and communication theory briefly. Chapter 2 touches on secular and Christian development of the discipline. Chapter 3 notes theoretical and methodological approaches to intercultural communications along with a discussion of the purpose of communication from a Christian perspective.
As we think about goals and priorities for the new year, we are frequently reminded of how often we have failed to reach our goals of previous years. Apparently only 8% of people who make New Year’s resolutions successfully accomplish their resolutions.
In our mission organization, we are asking all of our members to put together an Individual Growth Plan for 2015. Being intentional about and planning our learning is important. People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions. But planning is only the first step. Unless we carry out the plan, we are no further ahead at the end of next year.
How do we make sure that we get the most important things done? How do we prevent our lives being crowded out by the tyranny of the urgent, leaving our good intentions and learning plans just gathering dust in our file cabinets?
To deal with this very real problem, I recommend a relatively new book (published March 2014) by Matt Perman on personal productivity – What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done. In contrast to many other books that seek to help you organize your life, Perman recognizes that God must determine our priorities and the purpose of our lives is not to make our lives comfortable and wealthy, but rather to bring glory to God and serve others in love. As Matt’s blog says,
“Unique to any other book about maximizing personal productivity, What’s Best Next is a God-centered, gospel-oriented perspective that addresses the proper motivation to drive your productivity — serving others, to the glory of God.”
In the book itself, Matt says, “This is a book about getting things done and making ideas happen, with less friction and frustration, from a biblical perspective.”
But I think John Piper says it even better:
In my last post we looked at Sills’ book Reaching and Teaching: A Call to Great Commission Obedience. This book is clearly a follow up to this work. It is in essence an application in practice of the principles in the earlier book. “This book explores how the Lord led missionaries to minister effectively among a specific people whom he called to himself: the Highland Quichua people of Andean Ecuador.”(pp. 2, 3).The book highlights the challenges of reaching and teaching an oral people group with a long history of syncretism:
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