December 6, 2024

The SEND U Blog

Reflections and Resources for Lifelong Learning for Missionaries

Category: Books

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
Books, Resources

Free Books for the Kindle

As I travel and talk to missionaries, I see and hear that more and more of them have purchased the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, or are planning to do so in the near future.  With the significant reduction in price to under $140 for the Wi-Fi only version, the cost is no longer prohibitive.   Given the difficulty and expense of first of all shipping the books they own to their assigned field and then purchasing additional resource books in English while overseas, I am not surprised by this interest in the Kindle on the part of so many missionaries. See my blog post a few months ago. But this is only half the story!  Did you know that many books for the Amazon Kindle (electronic book reader) are available for free?  Publishers, including a number of Christian publishing houses, frequently allow e-books to be “purchased” at no cost for a … Read the whole post
Ken Guenther2 mins read
Books, Resources

Obtaining Good English Books on the Mission Field

Maybe you are wondering how a missionary obtains access to all these great books that SEND U is recommending at www.senduwiki.org. Most countries in which we work have very limited opportunities to purchase books in English, and basically nothing is available on topics related to professional development of missionaries. So we can order from Amazon, but then we have to pay shipping and wait several weeks or months. But the problem is bigger than just obtaining a new book on church planting or team leadership. One frequent question I get asked by new missionaries is how I recommend they send their entire libraries to the mission field. My answer to that question these days – leave the paper books at home, and take as much of your library as you can in digital form.… Read the whole post
Ken Guenther1 min read
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