A review of M. David Sills, Reaching and Teaching: a Call to Great Commission Obedience, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010.
This book has sought to bring awareness to those who have been lulled into thinking that God wants us to simply reach them. He doesn’t. He wants us to reach and teach – reaching them with the saving gospel message and teaching them to observe everything that He has commanded. (220).
So ends Sills’ book.
As a SEND missionary, do you ever feel lagging in spiritual power or genuine transformation? How about those you have the privilege of leading to Christ or discipling – do you observe them experiencing consistent growth into Christ-likeness? If you’re feeling discouraged in either of these areas, I encourage you to read John Ortberg’s book The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People. It provides a fresh, practical, and biblical challenge towards growing in Christ-likeness through the practice of spiritual disciplines.
A sad commentary on the state of today’s church is that “by and large we do not expect people to experience ongoing transformation.” Ortberg however believes that genuine transformation — being changed into Christ-likeness — should be the norm for Christian life. A problem often occurs, though, in that believers who desire transformation try harder and harder until they are exhausted but still not experiencing the transformation they desire. Ortberg proposes that it’s not about trying harder (like an out-of-shape person trying to run a marathon), but training consistently. His purpose in writing the book is to help the reader learn how to train by using every moment, every activity of life, for transformation purposes. The practice of these consistent training activities (spiritual disciplines) will help a person gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it – “The Life You’ve Always Wanted.”
Just a few years ago, we could find very little that had been written about multicultural mission teams. The subject has been of great interest in our mission organization, since our membership is becoming increasingly international, and many, if not the majority of our teams, already include members from countries other than the USA or Canada. But very few resources for guiding the team leaders of such teams were readily available.
A few would know of Lianne Roembke’s work, Building Credible Multicultural Teams.. Unfortunately, Roembke’s book has still not been released in digital form, and I cannot seem to find anyone who has written a review of it. Then in 2011, Sheryl Silzer of SIL published her book, Biblical Multicultural Teams: Applying Biblical Truth to Cultural Differences. Silzer’s work focused on the formative nature of one’s childhood home and how that experience has impacted one’s view of what is right and wrong.
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Harry S. Truman.
Reading has always been a hobby of mine. One of my most memorable Christmases as a child was the one where my brother and I each were given 12 books by our parents. I believe all of them were used books, but that made no difference at all to me. The anticipation of being able to read as much as I wanted to read throughout the Christmas holidays overshadowed any other gifts that year. For not only did I have 12 books to read; I had 24 for my brother’s books were fair game as well, once he had read them.
This summer I read The Messenger, The Message and the Community: Three Critical Issues for the Cross-cultural Church Planter by Roland Muller. It was a read that was long overdue. You see, the author is a friend of mine, and I have followed his ministry closely for about 25 years. About 14 years ago, as the first edition of some parts of this book was being written, Roland Muller asked me to read it and give some feedback. To my regret, and with some degree of embarrassment now, I admit that I did not finish reading the manuscript, although I did give some thoughts on the part of the book that I did read. As a result, the author used some of my graduate study research to support one of his arguments and somewhat undeservedly, included my name in the acknowledgments.
About seven years later, Roland combined three books he had written into this current book. The three sections of The Messenger, the Message and the Community are taken from these three prior works: Tools for Muslim Evangelism (published in 2000), Honor and Shame, Unlocking the Door (2000) and Creating Christian Community (2005). A couple of years ago, Roland Muller published a second edition, seeking to broaden the audience to include those who do not serve primarily among Muslim peoples.
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