Receptor-Oriented Communication for Hui Muslims in China


Book Description

There are many books that highlight the need and importance of mission toward unreached people. Unfortunately, few of them deal with the importance of understanding the real life of unreached people and how to analyze them. This book identifies conceptual issues for the development of receptor-oriented communication strategies among young, educated, urban Hui (YEU-Hui) Muslims in China's northwestern cities in order to achieve culturally relevant churches in those areas. It is written to help not only those who are interested in the unreached, but also those who are interested in Muslim evangelism, urban sociology, biblical exegesis, contextual church planting, communication, and mission strategy. Enoch Jinsik Kim utilizes a new approach--virtual community mission for planting offline churches--that integrates the use of local church-driven Internet community, traditional media, and offline task teams from a multi-ethnic local church. While the research focuses on the Chinese Muslim context, the identification of the young, urban, and educated as a strategic group for mission can be applied in other Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. This research is useful to cross-cultural communicators, church planters, and all those interested in interpersonal relationships.




Margins of Islam


Book Description

“A global journey revealing multiple expressions of the Islamic faith... We no longer have any excuse to train others to reach all Muslims in the same way.”—J. D. Payne What do you do when “Islam” does not adequately describe the Muslims you know? Margins of Islam brings together a stellar collection of experienced missionary scholar-practitioners who explain their own approaches to a diversity of Muslims across the world. Each chapter grapples with a context that is significantly different from the way Islam is traditionally presented in mission texts. These crucial differences may be theological, socio-political, ethnic, or a specific variation of Islam in a context— but they all shape the way we do mission. This book will help you discover Islam as a lived experience in various settings and equip you to engage Muslims in any context, including your own.




Longing for Community


Book Description

Understanding the strength and unity of the ummah— the worldwide Muslim community—and its role in an individual’s identity is essential in comprehending the struggles that Muslims undergo as they turn to faith in Jesus Christ. It has been a place of security, acceptance, protection, and identity; turning away from it entails great sacrifice. Where, then, will Muslims who choose to follow Jesus find their longing for community fulfilled: ummah, church, or somewhere in between?




Mission Strategy in the City


Book Description

This book was written to suggest an appropriate mission strategy by identifying key issues that impact urban ethnicities through an urban socioanthropological lens. This book is based on the author’s sixteen years of living in China, where he conducted missionary work in urban areas. The book discusses the author’s interactions with enclaves of ethnic minorities who had recently arrived in the city after migrating from rural areas. The minorities’ struggles to balance cultural assimilation and tradition preservation are highlighted throughout. The book explains that similar phenomena occur within Korean American communities in Los Angeles as well. Based on these observations, the author states that immigrants in many cities face similar social issues and find similar resolutions to them. Though there are many negative aspects to urban areas, readers will see some positive features of cities that can contribute to effective evangelism. The book highlights three main points: (1) Ethnic urban dwellers evolve into many more diverse ways than commonly thought. (2) Ethnic groups are actively choosing the future of their community types. (3) Modern cities create many new communication channels interethnically and also across social strata within ethnicities.




The Life and Impact of Phil Parshall


Book Description

Missions Begins with Love Being a witness for Jesus in Muslim contexts is often difficult, complicated, and even discouraging. Over the past forty years, Phil Parshall, a leading authority on Muslim outreach, has demonstrated that making friends with Muslims—whether in the West or abroad—is where our witness usually begins. "Brother Phil" and his wife, Julie, were missionaries in Bangladesh for more than twenty years and later worked among Muslims in the Philippines. During his tenure as a missionary leader, Parshall authored a dozen books that helped shape current missiological perspectives about Muslim outreach. In this volume, the only edited work dedicated to exploring Phil Parshall’s legacy, seven respected missiologists interact with those ideas. While all the contributors to this book have been inspired by Parshall's life and work, some of them believe that Parshall’s methods of contextualization could have been taken even further. They ponder: How can we further remove obstacles to following Jesus? How do we navigate the fine lines between Muslim cultures and Muslim religious ideas? What cultural and social aspects of Muslim life could cross-cultural workers adopt when living among Muslims? Here they share some of their victories and challenges, encouraging Christian workers to press ahead on paths of outreach to Muslims that are fitting for the twenty-first century context.




Freeing Congregational Mission


Book Description

North American congregations face a deepening crisis of consumer-oriented "selfie missions" and practices based on colonial-era assumptions. Seeking to free congregational mission from harmful cultural forces, this book helps churches better partner with God's work in the world, offering the latest research and practical, step-by-step tools for churches.




Who Do the Ngimurok Say That They Are?


Book Description

How do missiologists describe the cosmologies of those that Christianity encounters around the world? Our descriptions often end up filtered through our own Western religious categories. Furthermore, indigenous Christians adopt these Western religious categories. This presents the problem of local Christianities, described by Kwame Bediako as those that “have not known how to relate to their traditional culture in terms other than those of denunciation or of separateness.” Kevin Lines’s phenomenological study of local religious specialists in Turkana, Kenya, not only challenges our Western categories by revealing a more authentic complexity of the issues for local Christians and Western missionaries, but also provides a model for continued use of phenomenology as a valued research method in larger missiological studies. Additionally, this study points to the ways that local Christians and traditional religious practitioners interpret Western missionaries through local religious categories. Clearly, missionaries, missiologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars need to do a much more careful job of studying and describing the contextually specific phenomena of traditional religious specialists before relying on meta-categories that come out of our Western theology or older overly simplified ethnographies. The research from this current study of Turkana religious specialists begins that process in the Turkana context and offers a model for future studies in contexts where traditional religion and Christianity intersect.




Guiding Light


Book Description

Rev. Dr. Alan Tippett was arguably one of the leading missiologists of the twentieth century. Through his prolific pen, poignant observations, and powerful insights he significantly influenced mission research and activity in the period of the 1960s to 1980s. This was particularly facilitated through his research, writing, and teaching at the Institute of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Mission, and his inaugural editorship of the American Society of Missiology's journal, Missiology: An International Review. Yet for those who did not know Tippett's material well, the very specific nature of his research and writing limited the influence of his insights. For example, without already knowing the pertinent content, why would a missionary to Thailand think of reading Tippett's Solomon Islands Christianity? However, according to Doug Priest, editor of a number of Tippett's posthumous publications, this volume has "done what even Tippett himself did not do, and that is to capture the key features of his missiology in one volume." So Guiding Light functions as an in-depth overview of "The Essential Alan Tippett." I can attest that the nature of Tippett's material continued to inform and inspire me throughout the eleven years of the research and writing of this study.




Theologizing Place in Displacement


Book Description

Displacement of peoples around the world continues to impact governmental policies and contest national identities. At the micro level, displacement's impact on the religious lives of those affected by displacement is a growing field of study and worthy of consideration as a form of self-theologizing and religious renewal. Theologizing Place in Displacement looks at the process of theologizing about place among displaced Orthodox Christian believers in the Republic of Georgia and outlines three key areas where a local theology takes shape around key Orthodox theological themes.




Communicating Science


Book Description

Modern science communication has emerged in the twentieth century as a field of study, a body of practice and a profession—and it is a practice with deep historical roots. We have seen the birth of interactive science centres, the first university actions in teaching and conducting research, and a sharp growth in employment of science communicators. This collection charts the emergence of modern science communication across the world. This is the first volume to map investment around the globe in science centres, university courses and research, publications and conferences as well as tell the national stories of science communication. How did it all begin? How has development varied from one country to another? What motivated governments, institutions and people to see science communication as an answer to questions of the social place of science? Communicating Science describes the pathways followed by 39 different countries. All continents and many cultures are represented. For some countries, this is the first time that their science communication story has been told.