Make Your Choice: Learning from the Chinese Church
Over the last couple decades the underground church in China has served as an inspirational story to many in the West. Despite pervasive persecution, the Chinese church has grown exponentially, in numbers and proportions that are difficult to quantify. So what are some of the catalysts for the rampant underground church? First, not to nitpick, […]
Why Is Disciple Making the Core Mission of the Church?
This is Question #3 discussed in Disciple Making: The Core Mission of the Church, by Bobby Harrington & Scott Sager.
My Favorite Paragraph of Disciple Making: The Core Mission of the Church
Buried deep within my house is a treasure chest. By “deep,” I mean it’s in my office in the basement. By “treasure chest,” I mean exactly what it sounds like: it’s an antique, wooden treasure chest, maybe 10 inches long and 8 inches high. And what’s inside is a literal treasure. I feel safe putting […]
What’s the Difference between Mission and Missions?
There is a lot of confusion about what is “mission” and what is “missions.” The terms can be ambiguous and unclear for the local church when not clearly defined, leading to such a broad application that the adage becomes reality: “If everything is missions, nothing is missions.”[1] When the word missions is used broadly, it […]
Disciple Making Shift #5 – From Competing Goals to One End Goal
This article on shifting to a singular end goal is Part 5 in a 5-Part series on Jesus-style disciple making. Here’s the Intro, Shift #1, #2, #3, and #4. In our final article, we arrive at question 3: What is Our End Goal? Once again, here’s the passage we’ve been going through: “All authority in heaven and […]
Lessons from the Church in Germany: Tsunami
Q: Remind me of how influential German thinkers have been. Germany has always been on the cutting edge of various kinds of progress. For example, in the early 1900s, Germany was the most technologically advanced country in the world. Their engineering was way ahead of America’s and Britain’s. When I think of influential theologians, Germany […]
Lessons from the Church in Germany: Post-Christianity
*Editor’s Note: As a missionary in Germany for a decade, Brett Seybold has been a student of the trends of post-Christian Europe and how these trends affect the church in North America. Although Brett loves Germany, his sober assessment of the German relationship with biblical Christianity is realistic and contains many lessons for the North […]
In Defense of Christian Missions
I have seen a handful of social media posts online recently from mostly non-Christians calling out mission work as being akin to imperialism and colonialism: We are told that white Westerners go into a predominantly non-Christian culture with the mindset, not only of converting them to Christianity, but of assimilating them into forms of Christianity […]
