Today I was supposed to be hanging with Fred Ater and friends at the Baptist General Convention of Texas. They are discussing the future of missions overseas and it would have been be fun to think into the future with them. Fred helps to take care of our family while we are traveling and overseas. He is giving us good advice about what to do with our kid's schooling. Fred Rocks. May his tribe increase.
I sent my thoughts to the Baptists about how I see the future of missions. Here are some of them:
Modern Missions got off to a bad start - it was influenced by the explorers who were seeking new worlds to conquer, trading companies who were trying to make a profit from other countries, the infatuation of technology and progress that was marking the
emerging industrial revolution, and the new "societies" of elite people.
Today, mission structures often borrow from military terminology, corporate culture and global commercialism. But we are living in a post-imperial, post-colonial, post-modern, post-western world in which people dont trust corporate culture and are terrified by terms such as “reaching” and “targeting”. We need a new way of doing missions AND a new way to talk about it.
