Christian missionaries are witnesses, warriors, and ambassadors in exile. It is common to view missions in terms of tasks such as proclaiming the gospel or, with modern trends, incarnating it. (1) There are problems we encounter when we limit ourselves to these words. Proclamation is something we send out, but with global work not all […]
Sunday, 01 November, 2020 by Basil Grafas
This is a major new work and an important aid to Christians, particularly those who minister in Muslim contexts. It is structured as a reference book, a translation of the Quran, along with a useful introduction that is geared for general readers, not only scholars, footnotes that follow the flow of the Quran, a concise […]
Thursday, 15 October, 2020 by Basil Grafas
In Evangelism in the Early Church, Michael Green highlights three Greek words used with the expansion of Christianity: martureo (and related words meaning “witness”), euaggelizomai (“telling good news”), and kerusso (“proclamation”).1 Of the three words, Green spends the least amount of time and attention on “witness.” This is understandable since the other words are used […]
Tuesday, 01 September, 2020 by Basil Grafas
If you have been fed a steady diet of missions literature and conferences, describing missionary identities as martyr/witnesses, warriors, and ambassadors might seem jarring. Yet, they supply the critical ingredients necessary to promoting global missions by the visible church of Jesus Christ. My bold claim is that embracing them will help erase the barriers that […]
Thursday, 20 August, 2020 by Basil Grafas
Forgive the pretentious title. It encapsulates thoughts that are broad, but they may or may not be deep. You decide. Perhaps I am scattered, but I hope to share a wide range of thoughts I think must go together. I am a missionary, but there are men and women who have been missionaries longer. Twenty-something […]
Wednesday, 01 July, 2020 by Basil Grafas
I think about missions a lot. I am a pastor and a missionary, and I serve on a missions committee for a church I do not pastor. I think about it every day. I have been a Christian a lot longer: forty-six years. When I started reading the Bible back in 1973, something began to […]
Friday, 01 May, 2020 by Basil Grafas
For the Word of God is quick, and mighty in operation, and sharper than any two-edged sword: and entereth through, even unto the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, and of the joints and the mary [marrow]: and judgeth the thoughts and the intents of the heart: neither is there any creature invisible […]
Sunday, 01 March, 2020 by Basil Grafas
Marco Polo describes a hidden city, Berenice, to his host and captor Kublai Khan.1 It is really two cities, one above and another hidden from view, “behind the shops and under the stairs.” Evangelical Protestant missions is like that. There is a world you can easily see of structures, conferences, how-to manuals, and endless debates. […]
Wednesday, 01 January, 2020 by Basil Grafas
In my article “Learning How to Live and Thrive with Post-Postcolonial Missions” in the last issue of Modern Reformation (September/October 2019), we started a new topic that I would like to finish off now. I proposed that evangelical missions works according to one of two paradigms, colonial missions and postcolonial missions, with a third paradigm […]
Friday, 01 November, 2019 by Basil Grafas
Most people I know who are engaged in missions (overseas or at home) seem to reflect one of two orientations: either they are old-school colonial-era missionaries and the nationals who work with them, or they are postcolonial missionaries and nationals. I suggest that both options are a dead end. My conviction is that the only […]
Sunday, 01 September, 2019 by Basil Grafas
Protestant theology and missiology have been experiencing a flood, and it seems to be surging right now. It started trickling back in the 1970s and has been building ever since. It is a flood of books all framed by a single umbrella issue. Let me frame it as a question: “Who are you?” It is […]
Monday, 01 July, 2019 by Basil Grafas
When it comes to Western Protestantism, there are usually a lot of plates spinning. If Zygmunt Bauman is correct (and I think he is), we are living in a “liquid-modern” rather than “postmodern” age. Rapid change is Western society’s only real constant. Despite postmodernist boasts to the contrary, we are still in the grip of […]
Wednesday, 01 May, 2019 by Basil Grafas