(Background to this paragraph: My missionary sending agency is in the throes of a major reorganization — I hope we get out of throes soon.) One of the problems of the current reorganization and, to a slightly lesser extent (maybe), the last reorganization (1997) is the loss of natural avenues of reporting and learning. The burden falls to a given individual to take the initiative to share (and ask for) information.
Frankly, the blogs of individuals may be the single best source for best practice kinds of information. The problem is that you have to find those blogs and then read them (RSS feeds really help one to keep up with all that).
** The term "#missions" on Twitter has no usage restrictions. Therefore, there are some who use that tag for things other than Christian missions. In other words, caveat emptor — there are inappropriate comments included in this Twitter feed. It's possible that the IMB filters out the objectionable content before allowing it to show in this particular feed. However, if you do your own filter for "#missions" on Twitter, the less than appropriate material will show up.
Here are some sources -- many of these are stories and prayer request type resources. Most of them I periodically review to see what's going on around the world:
- Africa Stories
- Brigada Today
- The Camel Method — Book written by field personnel, specifically on reaching Muslims
- Church Planting Movements — Best practices.
- Commission Stories — Mission stories from around the world
- CompassionNet (Facebook) — Prayer requests and answers from around the world
- Developing a Church Planting Movement in India — a Ph.D. dissertation by Dane Fowlkes
- East Asian Peoples
- Ed Stetzer, VP for Research, Lifeway — Not specifically missions but a lot of stuff that relates to missions.
- Evangelical Missions Quarterly — Subscription
- IMB Connecting (Twitter)
- IMB Prayer Director (Twitter)
- IMB Prayer Director (Ed Cox blog -- not updated since Jun-10)
- International Bulletin of Missionary Research — Subscription, but I think it's free
- Missionary Prayer Digest (IMB)
- MissionFrontiers — You have to register but the subscription is free.
- MissionsCatalyst
- **Missions Post Office (graphical feed of Twitter posts, filtering for #missions -- IMB, but not restricted to IMB personnel)**
- mReport (IMB sponsored but open to GCC partners' reports)
- sbcImpact — this is as much (or more) about the Southern Baptist Convention in the US, but there is a lot of talk about missions. Good source for links to missions-related blogs or web sites. The commenters have a tendency to argue — OK, it's lively discussion — but there are some really, really sharp people who participate.
- South Asian Peoples (Facebook)
- South Asian Peoples (web site)
- Sub-Saharan African Peoples
- Strategic Missional Thinking for Africa -- I don't really intend this as self-promotion, but I do have some links to both blogs (to the left) and other missions web sites (at the bottom) that might be useful. The template is broken so the list of web sites at the bottom is truncated.
I hope this is a little bit helpful.
- What resources have you found helpful?
For the Kingdom,
Bob A
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