NEWS FOR END OF MARCH 2007

Dear friends,

There are three new articles on my webpage.

Race, Language and Traps in African Development (Looking at policies like positive discrimination and their impact on Africa.)

Difficult Questions of Giving - A Response (Response to a book that suggests that the task of the West is to give more and more money to the Third World church.)

Frontier Missions and Pragmatics (A critique of dynamic equivalence translation methodology (including of the Bible) when applied to cross-cultural context.)

The following article (at the same webpage) was presented at the EMS (Evangelical Missiological Society) conference for the South West USA at Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, on the 16th March 2007:

The Effectivness of Short Term Missionaries to Africa

My moving between Mission Agency headquarters and Theological Seminaries continues to be productive and challenging. I am also finding myself having to carefully consider American word usages. A Brit saying 'that is huge' would mean, well, that the thing referred to is 'huge'. To translate an American usage of 'that is huge' into British English it may be more appropriate to say 'that is interesting'!

The powerful ways in which the church in the West is using the Third World church for its own pleasure and adventures is becoming more and more evident. The American church is so strongly behind short term (often two weeks or less) mission trips, as for one church of 14,000 members to announce to the whole congregation regarding proposed international summer mission trips that: 'that is who we are'. The determination and economic weight carried by prospective short-term travellers is such as to defeat most efforts at educating them regarding the complexities of the communities and situations that they seek to influence.

I was able to attend a research conference on short-term missions. Brief Report

I remain with visits to the World Mission Associates in Pennsylvania and then SIM (Serving in Mission) in North Carolina before returning to the UK on 13th April.

Best wishes,

Jim