Category: Books
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
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 very limited time (a few days), so as to boost their rankings in the Amazon store. FYI, in the span of the last 6 weeks, I have downloaded 43 free Kindle books! Realistically, I doubt that I will read even a quarter of them. Nineteen of those were non-fiction books by Christian authors, including ones by John MacArthur, Max Lucado, Mark Buchanan, and Bill Hybels. As a result of these finds, I have recently read The Power of a Whisper Participant’s Guide: Hearing God, Having the Guts to Respond by Bill Hybels and am currently reading Leading at a Higher Level by Ken Blanchard (and others). Great books, and ones that I was wanting to read anyway, but I found them for free!
How do I find out about free books that are being offered for a limited time only? I regularly check blogs about the Kindle and the iReaderReview blog is one of the best in keeping me updated on the latest free books being released on Kindle.
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.