Re-Imagining Short-Term Missions


Book Description

This book is for those who suspect that current practices of short-term missions are in need of serious reform. It is a book for those who recognize that, in this decade of global upheaval--and in light of the cultural, political, and demographic shifts affecting churches everywhere--now is the time for change. The essays here are intended to equip and inspire any who want to advocate for change but may not yet know what change looks like. This book offers honest perspectives from people who care about the purposes of short-term missions (STM) yet know that we must figure out better ways of achieving them. Nearly all contributors are actively engaged in STM--and many write from the perspective of those who host STM teams in places all over the world. This book is a platform for visionaries who are calling for better ways for the church to engage the needs of the world. In sharing their experiences, they hope to promote critical rethinking and creative reimagination about the ways that the global church might learn to collaborate on a new basis of coequality and mutual respect--for the good of the world and the glory of God.




Reciprocal Missions


Book Description

Can we go on short-term missions that don't do damage and in fact serves everyone? Too often the only people who receive the benefit of a short-term missions trip are the trip participants. Many books and critics have expressed their opinion about the damage done by many short-term missions groups on local communities. Reciprocal Missions provides a healthy path forward. A path that will guide us into short-term missions that will be mutually beneficial for everyone involved, both ministry host and mission trip goer. Reciprocal Missions covers cultural sensitivity, building on the ground relationships with hosting organizations, and the nuts and bolts of both facilitating and hosting short-term mission teams. If we want to do short-term missions with excellence, then we must be willing to do the hard work of relationships. With a combined 45 years of experience, DJ Schuetze, who hosts hundreds of short-term mission groups a year and Phil Steiner who leads hundreds of people on short-term mission trips a year have collaborated to bring their experiences and expertise to this book, Reciprocal Missions: Short-Term Missions that Serve Everyone.




Decolonizing Evangelicalism


Book Description

The increasing interest in postcolonial theologies has initiated a vital conversation within and outside the academy in recent decades, turning many “standard theologies” on their head. This book introduces seminary students, ministry leaders, and others to key aspects, prevailing mentalities, and some major figures to consider when coming to understand postcolonial theologies. Woodley and Sanders provide a unique combination of indigenous theology and other academic theory to point readers toward the way of Jesus. Decolonizing Evangelicalism is a starting point for those who hope to change the conversation and see that the world could be lived in a different way.




Unsustainable


Book Description

Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, edited by Jessica Restaino and Laurie Cella, explores short-lived university/community writing projects in an effort to rethink the long-held "gold standard" of long-term sustainability in community writing work. Contributors examine their own efforts in order to provide alternate models for understanding, assessing, and enacting university/community writing projects that, for a range of reasons, fall outside of traditional practice. This collection considers what has become an increasingly unified call for praxis, where scholar-practitioners explore a specific project that fell short of theorized "best practice" sustainability in order to determine not only the nature of what remains--how and why we might find value in a community-based writing project that lacks long-term sustainability, for example--but also how or why we might rethink, redefine, and reevaluate best practice ideals in the first place. In so doing, the contributors are at once responding to what has been an increasing acknowledgment in the field that, for a variety of reasons, many community-based writing projects do not go as initially planned, and also applying--in praxis--a framework for thinking about and studying such projects. Unsustainable represents the kind of scholarly work that some of the most recognizable names in the field have been calling for over the past five years. This book affirms that unpredictability is an indispensable factor in the field, and argues that such unpredictability presents--in fact, demands--a theoretical approach that takes these practical experiences as its base.




Serving Well


Book Description

Are you dreaming of working abroad? Imagining serving God in another land? Or are you already on the field, unsure about what to do next or how to manage the stresses of cross-cultural life? Or perhaps you've been on the field a while now, and you're weary, maybe so weary that you wonder how much longer you can keep going. If any of these situations describes you, there is hope inside this book. You’ll find steps you can take to prepare for the field, as well as ways to find strength and renewal if you’re already there. From the beginning to the end of the cross-cultural journey, Serving Well has something for you.







Blindsight


Book Description

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Deconstructionists Playbook


Book Description

The Deconstructionists Playbook is a compilation of authors speaking to a wide and diverse audience all cresting the same wave: Evangelicalism. Call us backsliders, Exvies, or spiritual misfits, but we've exited more traditional church spaces and rhetoric and are anxious to reconstruct our ideas on God, the Bible, and religion. With the chorus of some 60 authors, journey through an anthology of devotional days that celebrate this epic churning of faith. In three sections, these authors invite you to deconstruct religion and systems of oppression, reconstruct faith principles around the elements of social justice, and step happily into liberation theology as an act of resistance against white supremacy and patriarchy. By taking part in this emulsion of ideas, you will find yourself in a movement of acceptance, self love, and finding God in mysterious places. We invite you in. This is not your typical devotional. The Deconstructionists Playbook comprises selections from devotionals that have been published by Our Bible App in the last few years. In 2017, Crystal Cheatham set out to create a mobile Bible app where users could read devotionals concerned about topics outside the norm for traditional Christian publishing. These devotionals are explicitly queer-affirming, anti-racist, pro-feminism, and encouraging of interfaith inclusion. Today, the app has published hundreds of devotionals while bringing together a once fragmented community of spiritual wanderers. This devotional anthology is meant to guide you through a journey of faith deconstruction, reconstruction, and liberation. Our authors are concerned with naming and dismantling oppressive systems and beliefs-especially when it comes from within the Church. With the chorus of some 60+ authors, journey through this anthology of devotions. Come celebrate this epic churning of faith through the deconstruction of our religion, the reconstruction of faith elements centered on justice and solidarity, and the application of liberation theology to dismantle white supremacy and patriarchy. By taking part in this uniting of ideas, you will find yourself in a movement of radical inclusion and love, while finding God in mysterious places.







The Moral Imagination


Book Description

"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.