Baptists Committed to World Evangelism

The following material that is being quoted is taken from here! At the Our Generation Training Center we have all of our students spend 6 months living and studying overseas. I think that there is much to be gleaned from the following article! The American bubble that is mentioned is a great danger. The spending so much on time communicating back to the states and home is also a great danger. I am afraid that this modern technology can make it harder to adapt to the new culture and your new home

Some years ago an African-American pastor’s wife from Atlanta visited us in Chile.  Her husband pastored a church just miles from my old elementary school.  During the 90s, my family and most of our friends left the area opting for a less “urban” environment in the suburbs. As we discussed my own history in the south-Atlanta area, the pastor’s wife laughed and said, “We call that white-flight!”  Puzzled at the new term, I asked her to explain.  She said all blacks know that whites start getting nervous when blacks began to move into a neighborhood, and eventually the whites move… all of them move. I, on the other hand, have been on the other side of those conversations and heard the anxious remarks about the increasing minority population.  I knew what she was saying was right. I’m not going to get into the whole socioeconomic discussion, but I do want to talk about racism! Here are some random thoughts about God, the Bible, and racism: All men and women are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).  How can we belittle an image bearer of God?  The fact that they are bearing His image means they have infinite worth.

Another major problem that missionaries have is trying to take the United States to the foreign country. It causes them to have severe issues on the foreign field. The national gets very tired of being compared to “back home”. His country doesn’t measure up.

Below is a lesson in culture that we would do well to heed. Go to the source and read the entire article. Good stuff. Source For Americans, personal space is no joking matter.

All of the material that you have been seeing on this blog is written in preparation for a book to help train missionaries. It intentionally has the dirty side of what is going on and I hope will present the other side as well. All names and stories have been altered to not be applicable to anyone you might know personally! I love missionaries and nationals. I just want to help us be able to learn and be prepared to do a good work on the field. I was riding down the road one day in that same city with a man who was in charge of a Bible college.

One night, I was invited over to the home of a missionary that worked in the area where the national pastor I mentioned in the previous post lived. This missionary had a very bad reputation among the nationals. (his bad reputation had to do with how he treated the nationals) This missionary had a reputation that he didn’t want to preach, and he’d come down there as a mechanic but yet he’d like to take pictures of their churches. And I am in his home and he told me that he didn’t understand how I can fellowship with this guy and how I can preach in his church after what he had done

The following will not be agreeable to many of you! I do not want to be hurtful but I do think that we need these experiences, however rare they are, to be able to avoid making some mistakes. I love missionaries. I believe in missionaries.

The New Year arrives about 13 hours earlier for us this year. For the past several years at this time of year we have been at the Our Generation summit in Gatlinburg, TN (which you can watch this year’s event live at www.bcwe.org ) being motivated and trying to motived others for missions. This year we are on the mission field. And come to think of it, we have the summit for this reason. To move people from excited to action.

Today was one of those days.  You may have had them.  You did not get anything major done but your whole day was spent doing alot of little things.  That is what happened to me today.  Below is a look back at how my day went: 7:30 AM – Started the day.