Archive for the 'Missions' Category

The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) encourages us to multiply what has been entrusted to us – - rather than playing it safe.  To multiply talents requires hard work, risk, and creativity. 

Examples like the one below (of how the Allies helped POW’s escape in WWII), remind me that human beings faced with desperate circumstances and a clear goal can be amazingly creative.  Read the below example and consider the challenge to multiply what has been entrusted to you with this sort of resourcefulness. 

The board game Monopoly served allied prisoners as a real-life tool to get out of jail during World War II, says Brian McMahon in Mental Floss, a magazine devoted to intellectual esoterica.

In 1941, the British Secret Service asked the game’s British licensee John Waddington Ltd. to add secret extras to some sets, which had become standard elements of the aid packages that the Red Cross delivered to allied prisoners of war. Along with the usual dog, top hat and and thimble, the sets had a metal file, compass, and silk maps of safe houses (silk, because it folds into small spaces and unfolds silently). Even better, real French, German and Italian currency was hidden underneath the game’s fake money. Departing allied soldiers and pilots were told that if they were captured they should look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space.

The rest here.

HT: Challies

Mark Noll, in his important book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith:

For American churches to participate in the universal body of Christ in ways that reflect the deepest realities of that body, it will be necessary to discard two false notions – - both Western paternal benevolence in which the instinct is to think that unless Americans do it, it will not get done, and also Western hegemonic imperialism whereby all the evils of the world are laid at the feet of American dominated-multinationals or mission agencies.  Once those delusions are set aside, practices of partnership drawing on genuine Christian realities may flourish.

Russell Moore on Patrick:

To our shame, most evangelical Protestants tend to think of Saint Patrick as a leprechaun. As we watch the annual drunken parades and pop-culture consumerism of the March holiday, no one could seem more removed from biblical Christianity than Patrick. And yet, Patrick’s life was closer to a revival meeting than to a shamrock-decorated drinking party named in his honor.

In his volume, St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, lays out a compelling portrait of Patrick, the theologian-evangelist. In accomplishing this, Freeman attempts to reconstruct Patrick’s cultural milieu-that of a world that had “ended” with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. This collapse of Roman power had unleashed savagery in the British Isles, as thieves and slave-traders were unhinged from the restraining power of Caesar’s sword. Patrick’s ministry was shaped by this new world, not least of which by Patrick’s capture and escape from slavery.

Freeman helpfully retells Patrick’s conversion story, one of a mocking young hedonist to a repentant evangelist. The story sounds remarkably similar to that of Augustine-and, in the most significant of ways, both mirror the first-century conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Freeman helpfully reconstructs the context of local religion as a “business relationship” in which sacrifice to pagan gods was seen as a transaction for the material prosperity of the worshippers. Against this, Patrick’s conversion to Christianity was noticed quickly, when his prayers of devotion-then almost always articulated out loud-were overheard by his neighbors.

Read the whole thing here.

*Reposted from 3/17/2009.

Another amazing collection.

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