The work of ministry on any significant scale requires resources. This is especially true of the work of missions. Nearly every country that admits missionaries… Read More »How to Have a Missions-Minded Church, Part 3: More on Finances
Jeff Straub Last week, I began to offer some advice to help churches become more missions-minded. My first counsel was that the pastor must himself… Read More »How to Have a Missions-Minded Church: Financial Support
Jeff Straub Seminary professors who come to the classroom with missionary and pastoral experience can offer immense practical value to men preparing for ministry. I… Read More »How to Have a Missions-Minded Church: The Pastor
Short-term mission trips are now part of the warp and woof of evangelical Christianity. Like so many other things, short-term trips have their pros and… Read More »Reflections on Summer Teaching, Part Four: Challenges of Short-Term Missions
Travel through any international airport in the world today, especially during the summer, and you will see them: in numbers large and small, youth, college,… Read More »Reflections on Summer Teaching, Part Three: The Short-Term Missionary
Last week, I shared some observations gained from a busy summer of teaching internationally. I received a number of replies, both supportive and questioning, that… Read More »Reflections on Summer Teaching, Part Two: Church Planting, Theological Education, and the Great Commission
In May and July, the Lord gave me the opportunity to travel overseas to teach church history in three different countries. Two of the countries… Read More »Reflections on Summer Teaching
Conversations about missions and music often revolve around an insistence that in order to reach unbelievers in a target culture, we need to contextualize the message… Read More »Does contextualization heighten the likelihood of a positive response to the gospel?
The purpose of culture is not to reach the lost or give authentic expression for Christians; it is to express and cultivate right worship. In… Read More »The Purpose of Music in Missions
Last week, I spoke at the Preserving the Truth Conference in Troy, MI. Of the three points that I made in my presentation (notes, audio),… Read More »Missions and the antithesis
Here’s the reality: those of us blogging here fully realize that our positions are not popular. Not popular, I suppose, greatly underestimates the matter: for… Read More »Finding common ground in the missions debate
A missionary cannot properly evaluate the differences among cultural expressions until he has understood their universals. At the root of the most thoughtful defenses of… Read More »Differences and Universals in Music Across Cultures
In my handful of posts this month, I want to give some anecdotes from church history to inform us as to how missionaries, attempting to… Read More »A Humble Request and Prolegomena
One of missionaries most challenging issues is what kind of music to use as they plant indigenous churches. Two extremes exist: on the one hand… Read More »Missions and Music
On Saturdays we repost articles from the archives that apply to current issues. The following article deals with what music should be used for indigenous… Read More »Should western music be transplanted to missions church plants?
On Saturdays we repost articles from the archives that apply to current issues. The following article discusses whether a missionary should simply adopt a culture’s… Read More »Should a missionary simply adopt a culture’s music when church planting?
In Titus 1:5, Paul explains that the reason he sent Titus to Crete was to “straighten out” the churches. The churches themselves had already been… Read More »The Importance of Music Ministry in Missions
I mentioned in my report on our Brazil trip that I had the opportunity to sit down with a man who grew up in a… Read More »A Brazilian tribesman talks about culture, worship, and the gospel
It seems as if several themes have been reoccurring on this site, Paleoevangelical, and a few other places over the last few weeks. These themes… Read More »What music should be used when planting indigenous churches in . . . the United States of America?