By Barbara Helen Burns Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Conclusions It is clear that the Scriptures offer clear help in our contextualizing task. If the Bible is a mere “case-book” or example of what God could do in other cultures outside Israel and the Greek world,...

By Barbara Helen Burns Read Part 1 and Part 2 here. III. Attempting a Definition: What is Biblical Contextualization? I will try to capture what for me is the essence of Biblical contextualization in a simple and concrete way. To me it is a three-step process that...

By Barbara Helen Burns Read Part 1 here. II. The Need for Consensus A. About the Nature of the Scriptures The first essential foundational issue concerns the nature of the Bible. Is it a case-book of mere examples, a collection of testimonies about religious...

by Barbara Helen Burns In its relatively short life, the term “contextualization” has become a vast subject of discussion. One reason for this is that it has no agreed meaning. With no dictionary definition, we are free to assign meaning pretty much as we choose,...

“Everything about Bible is good and very interesting, but it is not for me, as I am a Muslim!” I kept saying for many years.  My name is Isana and I am from Tajikistan, Central Asia. I was born during the Soviet times and grew up in a strong atheist family in...

David Brainerd, a close associate of Jonathan Edwards, devoted his life to missions among the the North American Indian tribes before his early death at the age of 29. Edward's compilation of Brainerd's diary has served as the impetus behind some of the most...

By Georges Houssney Practical Principles for Successful Short-Term Mission Trips In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I discusses the burgeoning short-term missions movement and some of the pros and cons that go along with it. Short-term mission trips are the wave of the...

By Georges Houssney The Pros and Cons of Short-Term Missions Are short-term trips worth it? In Part 1 of this article, I discussed the growing phenomena of “missions trips.” Church members are often ill-prepared and told to not necessarily expect spiritual results,...

By Georges Houssney Whether long-term or short-term, missions is all about obeying the Great Commission. Jesus did not specify a period of time during which we need to engage in missions. I believe his call is for a life-long commitment to be light to the nations and...

Sitting at the Bangor airport in Maine beside a US soldier in uniform, I enquired how he felt leaving his family and the familiar to go to war. I asked him how he felt, as he put it, about the possibility of being “brought back in a box,” dead!” Then I asked: “Why are...

Editor’s note: This article is also available on Amazon Kindle. The Selection of Missionaries If biblical eldership requirements are excluded from the formation of a global mission strategy, then often the result is the perception that everyone qualifies. The sending...

Editor's note: This article is also available in full on Amazon Kindle. How are the biblical qualifications of a pastor-elder (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9) related to our divine responsibility to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20)? This question is...

Co-morbidity. In this year of the coronavirus pandemic, we have been continually confronted with this term “comorbidity.” (Apparently, the hyphen is not needed.) These “comorbidities” are pre-existing conditions which compromise the ability of the body’s immune system...

Our token missionary (or a model, not the model, but an excellent model) Let’s pause and take a moment to consider the church’s token missionary for all time, namely Paul, an apostle of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. He killed many of the first Christians and wrote...