Missions

A missionary from Asia writes that just prior to the Chinese new year he and his family were walking the beach on a sunny day. They started a conversation with a fisherman who told them "he used a drone to fly 500 meters of fishing line with bait and hooks out into the ocean surf." If the pic to the right is to be believed, Doug Wilson is already immersed in the hobby. With fish.

Got me thinking about fishers of men. Should we use drones here to take great preachers overseas or drones overseas to bring nationals to our great preachers? One thing's for sure: like video venues, drones are going to revolutionize modern-day evangelism. Who's ready to fly the drone that plucks John Piper from the bedraggled Twin Cities and puts him down where he can really do something among one billion souls in China? It's simply a question of stewardship.

Excellent post from Desiring God. Read it, especially if you are a pastor or missionary, or you give to missions.

For over a decade I've disciplined myself not to look at the New York Times. The men there are so entrenched in their godlessness and so cock-sure it is progress and will be victorious that they're a sort of Goebbels for the Reich of American Decadence. It would be one thing if they were able to keep their propaganda down at the thirtieth or sixtieth column inch, but it often appears at the very top, in the headlines. Yet they can't see it.

About once a month, though, one of my family members forwards a Times piece that reminds me why I have to discipline myself not to read it, and here's one of them: their obituary for Elisabeth Elliot Gren. Just keep in mind two of Elisabeth's hardest and most defining works aren't mentioned by the Times: Elisabeth was the first Evangelical who opposed their Zionism which has reigned victorious across Evangelicalism for several generations, now; also, Elisabeth spent the last third of her life worn out from the nasty work of opposing feminism. Other than that...

There was a time when missions meant preaching the Gospel to all the world and being a missionary meant being sent to all the world to preach the Gospel. The Auca martyrs went to the Aucas to preach the Gospel. They went from love of their fellow men to tell them about sin and righteousness and judgment, then the hope of forgiveness and eternal life through the cross of the Only Lord Jesus Christ.

They did not go as a publicity stunt to "raise awareness" about the "marginalized."

Today, though, we have a different kind of missions and a different kind of missionary. Christian missions has evolved and has little to do with preaching the Gospel. And yet every Christian missionary and Christian mission non-profit organization claims to be...

Missionaries are not known for being self-critical so here is a brief attempt at such. Perhaps it will help pastors and churches and missionary agencies give better care to them. It might also help missionaries look at themselves in the mirror.

1. Lots of missionaries work with minimal supervision either from their missionary group or home church. That means the missionary is often not used to dealing with an authority structure and being brought to account. When someone confronts him, about his work or his marriage or his personal life, he is genuinely...

About World Vision, I'm sorry for what I wrote before. This matter deserved something more than snarkiness, and for that I apologize. I've pulled the former content off this post. So now, here's something I hope is more helpful:

I have never given any money to World Vision and I'd recommend against any of our readers giving them money. They are a hugely wealthy business and that's how you should think about them. Their marketing is as sophisticated as Apple's, although their product is slightly different. Instead of "Think Differently," it's "Feel Globally Compassionate."

But compassion should never be global. Normally, it should be personal, but not pseudo-personal through a marketing machine. Personal-personal. Like in adoption. I could go on about this, but time and priorities cause me to leave it with that. It's a trajectory of thought that many of you would do well to follow, though.

Beyond  the issue of the nature of Christian compassion and service, I would never give money to World Vision because it's hugely rich; it's richly huge and it's my conviction what's rich and huge in America is never ever godly. It may be Evangelical. It may have IRS non-profit status. But it's not at all godly. Which is to say Godliness—true Godliness—doesn't sell in America, let alone selling as supremely well as World Vision has sold for several generations, now.

Beyond the issues of the nature of Christian compassion and service and World Vision's all-American Evangelical success, there's the issue of exporting America's sins. For instance, ask yourself whether you believe in empowering women?

Of course you do. You're a Christian and Christians have always been leading the rest of the world in that uniquely Christian revolution of the empowerment of women...

Vice President Joe Biden and our new ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, have been tag-teaming Tokyo, hectoring the Japanese over their national failure to push mothers out of their homes and into office cubicles and factories. Joltin Joe and his pretty sidekick say Japanese women need to stop caring for elderly family members and children and begin to do something constructive that will show up in Japan's gross domestic product. Something like programming a robot instead of teaching a child. Something like feeding hundreds of adults in a cafeteria instead of their children in their own kitchen.

This is what our tax dollars pay for: American women who despise femininity and motherhood moving to foreign countries where they work to pollute those nations with our most contagious disease...

[TB: This is a guest post by our faithful Edinburgh correspondent, Ross Clark. Good idea.]

Once upon a time I was part of an Anglican church. The church had a lot of faults but it got one thing right: it had a heart for evangelism and the Gospel. One of the most effective ways this was expressed was a mothers-of-preschoolers group designed to appeal to mothers in the suburban community in which the church was based. During the years I was a part of this church, most of the adult women who came to faith did so through this ministry. Many churches offer similar parenting courses in order to build bridges with the community as well as minister to their own flock. Here is one such example from Singapore. (And check this out.)

So, after years of following Baylyblog, I've had this idea...

Over under another post explaining the love that leads Christians to continue to use the word 'sodomy' with both unbelievers and believers caught in the practice of same-sex intimacy, one reader commented:

Recently I found myself using the following construction: "The behavior formerly known as sodomy." Kind of like "The artist formerly known as Prince." Is that cowardly? It seems like it gets the point across, without constantly derailing the conversation into "Don't you know that word is offensive? Then why do you keep using it?!"

To which I respond:

That seems even more of a witness than simply to say "sodomy." It calls attention to the PC police who lead the cowards' revolution of thought and word control.

Other options might be, "the sin that now demands the protection of the Academy's thought-control gestapo," "the perversion that preens itself as 'gay,'" "the crime still prohibited by thirteen states called 'sodomy,'" or "the sin whose proponents' death-wish San Francisco Chronicle's gay journalist Randy Shilts chronicled so well and tragically in his classic And the Band Played On completed shortly before he himself died of AIDS." That last one is wonderful because it's an extremely verbose circumlocution and academics just adore verbose circumlocutions.

More seriously, though, when speaking to unbelievers I wouldn't recommend one word consistently used. I'd pepper my conversation with all of the above as well as "queers" and "dikes" and "gays" and "butch" and "clergy" (you know, "there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen") and "men and women tempted by same-sex intimacy" and so on. But I'd always use the word 'sodomy' at least once to keep the living consciences present on high (or God) alert. The more pressure there were to not use such Divine language, the more I would fear God for not using it. But once or twice will do.

Always keep it firmly in mind that...