Sources: Various
I thought you might appreciate the following articles I came across in recent weeks. Each is a bit of a cautionary tale, but interesting and helpful.
Short-Term Missions That Avoid Long-Term Harm
As short-term trips ramp up again, it’s important to remember some best practices to protect and encourage the missionaries and local ministries short-term teams want to support. The Chalmers Center has applied “Helping Without Hurting” principles to short-term missions in a book and video series. But how about a few short articles to get a taste, first?
See Short-Term Missions That Avoid Long Term Harm, Part 1 and Part 2.Expect and Train for Persecution
How do you train disciples to expect, endure, and grow through persecution? In a recent article for Mission Frontiers, movement catalyst C. Anderson includes some practical and transferable tips, including a discovery Bible study plan.
We need to set expectations early on, she says: “On a visit to Africa this past year I trained a group of disciple-makers to share their three-minute testimony. In their first attempts, it often went like this. ‘Before Jesus my life was hard. After Jesus my life is easy.’ This is not the gospel. It is not even true!” (Had to smile at that.)
Read Expect and Train for Persecution.The Pandemic’s Impact on the World’s Poor
From 1990 until 2015 we saw a consistent downward trend of global poverty rates, from nearly 36% to just 10% of people at the extreme poverty level living on just $1.90 a day. COVID-19 changed everything, and today 97 million more people were pushed into poverty as a result of COVID-19. Globally, three to four years of progress toward ending extreme poverty are estimated to have been lost.
A March 2022 report lays out the devastating effects and how we can respond with compassionate, thoughtful action.
Read Pandemic & Poverty: COVID-19’s Impact on the World’s Poor.Mobilizer Training Report
In November 2021, Missio Nexus and the Center for Missionary Mobilization and Retention launched a research project to look at how mission agencies train their staff to mobilize missionaries. The results are in.
One notable finding: organizations that intentionally train their mobilizers also meet their mobilization goals most of the time, while organizations that don’t provide such training rarely meet their goals. Yet appropriate and robust training resources are a bit elusive. What would you recommend?
Read the report; skip to the end if you just want to get the key points.