Disqus - Latest Comments for justinlong

Re: Mission degrees and debt

Justin Long — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 19:42:23 -0000

Bethany's a great college. There are some other similar colleges around. Also, I wonder about undergraduate schools like local community colleges... where grants and the like can be had fairly easily.

Re: Mission degrees and debt

Justin Long — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 19:41:33 -0000

I've heard that Wheaton College has a similar program/grant process for Wheaton alumni.

Re: Are Muslim birth rates faster than Christian birth rates

Justin Long — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:47:46 -0000

The data differentiates birth rates amongst the two religious groups, but like Hans I doubt religion is the primary cause. Education and income level certainly correlate but I don't know that those are the primary causes either. I'd have to leave this question to sociologists etc - I need to watch the Rosling talk - but I suspect it has a lot to do with the differences between agricultural and non-agricultural societies. As education goes up and agricultural/subsistence farming goes down, people tend to have fewer children. Also intertwined is cultural expectations for support of children: if it's more expensive to raise children then people will have fewer of them.

Re: What Experts Will Never Tell You About Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type

Justin Long — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:27:30 -0000

Sources?

Re: Frontier Ventures

Justin Long — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 15:49:45 -0000

It took a long time for me to fully comprehend this. I have argued at times for the amateurization of mission, but I finally realized we were talking about two vastly different things. It is one thing to be a disciple-maker: and I fully believe THAT must be "amateurized" out so that ANYONE can make disciples, because *everyone* is commanded to. But it is fully another thing to be a cross-cultural missionary. The two do not equate, and I do not believe the common trope that "everyone is a missionary." It takes a lot of skill, patience, and training to bring the Gospel across a linguistic, geographic, cultural, political, economic boundary. Training, and long-term support, encouragement and care are required.

Re: Why Villages Matter

Justin Long — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:09:31 -0000

While I have argued for the necessity of rural missions elsewhere, we ought to consider the complexity of this situation. Why is it that the church didn't have much of an impact in the remote areas? I am struck by your statement, "The Latin-speaking Christians..." and would suggest there is a deeper issue here. Patrick Johnstone likewise discussed the impact of the lack of translation work among the Berbers of tha time in http://www.wycliffe.net/res.... Patrick's argued several times that where the Bible is not translated into the local languages, Christianity doesn't last. I'm not sure of the translation situation in Egypt; I know translations into Greek were done there but I don't know how widespread Greek was among Egyptians? Just because churches are launched in rural areas doesn't necessarily mean they will *last* - important though that is! This deserves wider study--and I suspect it has been, though I don't immediately have any article links on it.

Re: The complexities of nationalism and the Kingdom

Justin Long — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 17:13:30 -0000

Great thoughts here, Steve! Not sure what article was written on Missionexus or which Pat wrote it - can you add a link?

Re: The questions to ask

Justin Long — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:46:41 -0000

I see the point. But part of the answer can be found in ruthless personal evaluation coupled with your action being the mobilization of skills you are not personally proficient in.

Re: The (surprising?) distribution of the global mission force

Justin Long — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 14:47:32 -0000

Could be. There are other MK schools as well - Malaysia, Singapore and I think Indonesia have them. Would have to build a list of them all to see if there was a strong correlation. That said, it would make sense, and I have heard anecdotally that the presence of an MK school is a draw. On the other hand, MK schools are built where there are a lot of missionaries, so it might be a chicken-and-the-egg question. Or, an MK school could simply be an amplifier of an existing cycle.

Re: People Group Clusters, Places, and Concentrations

Justin Long — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 22:29:16 -0000

That's a very good question. My thought is, no, but the whole "cluster" idea - while a useful tool for abstracting thousands of peoples into a few hundred clusters for strategy purposes - is a little too "rough draft" still to have a well defined response. One example in the DFW area are 3rd generation Latinos, born in the USA, who no longer speak Spanish. (Same could be said of others.) This is one of those "grey areas" where we need an approach that takes on the whole of an area, and seeks to see every individual reached regardless of ethnicity or language. We like nice, clean lists and mass strategies that engage population segments, but people don't like to stay in neat boxes.

Re: People Group Clusters, Places, and Concentrations

Justin Long — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:49:01 -0000

Well, that's why "when we engage a place, we have to work hard to make sure that we have reached every people group [and every individual] within it." If they use a CPM strategy, then one would think this would happen (eventually). For a 7-minute video describing how CPMs work see https://vimeo.com/84442681.

Re: The blessing and curse of Internet evangelism mixed with social media

Justin Long — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 17:47:49 -0000

Hushmail, for one thing. OpenPGP or zixmail. Google just announced they are launching some kind of new end-to-end email encryption technology. If everyone's on Gmail, that's pretty secure (within Gmail itself).

Re: Indonesian version of Operation World now available

Justin Long — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:33:50 -0000

I checked with the Operation World team and they said the best thing to do was to email the publisher (email address above). Not sure that print copies will be easily available in the USA, but maybe they have an avenue.

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Thu, 29 May 2014 09:08:56 -0000

Brief note as I am at a conference, but how an agency relates to a church (and ideas about balance, power, etc) have to do with the perspective in an agency. Is it a church to partner with or a support agency to hire? This of course is rather broad and perhaps a little crude.

Paul and team as a church, no. But I don't like making an argument from silence. I'm not sure Paul ever thought about it in terms of modality and sodality. And then there is the passage, "where two or more agree together..."

Re: Is our church financial model partly to blame for the unreached being unreached?

Justin Long — Fri, 23 May 2014 15:44:40 -0000

I would theorize there are many people interested in this type of approach, but they will represent a small % of the West. They may grow to have an outsized participation portion of the unreached task, however.

Re: Is our church financial model partly to blame for the unreached being unreached?

Justin Long — Fri, 23 May 2014 13:53:47 -0000

Define "many" as % of the universe of under-30 pastoral "candidates." :)
Also, let's define a "building-less" model. Is it a model that is also bi-vocational? Is it a model that "starts without a building" but eventually "grows into a building" if it is successful? Is it a model that is intending to remain "building-less" from then on?

(I'm grinning.) (And I do agree that the likelihood of finding someone who is interested in a non-traditional model--at least in a Western sense--dramatically increases, the younger you get...)

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Fri, 23 May 2014 12:04:44 -0000

Although we could take this further and wonder if the individual team on the field isn't a "congregation" (or a congregational expression), which would make the agency (ahem!) a denomination? Umm...

Re: Is our church financial model partly to blame for the unreached being unreached?

Justin Long — Fri, 23 May 2014 12:02:42 -0000

Yes. But of course we DON'T pump a huge amount of funds. Or send a lot of workers. (At least, not in proportion to the whole.) (Although churches that value sending DO pump a great deal of money and people in...)

Re: Is our church financial model partly to blame for the unreached being unreached?

Justin Long — Fri, 23 May 2014 12:01:47 -0000

While I agree models (like bi-vocational) free up more funds to spend on things like the unreached, let me pose a slightly different question: how many potential pastoral candidates want to start a house church or do church bi-vocationally in order to reduce funds? In other words, people who want to start a church (in the West) are unlikely to want to start it using a model that many deem as an "unsuccessful" model...?

Re: Do You Feel Controlled or Empowered? (1:31)

Justin Long — Thu, 22 May 2014 10:50:52 -0000

Let me just tweak this a bit. ActBeyond was once Mission to Unreached Peoples. Our model, once upon a time, was to be the "back office" of the missionary - you go where God is calling you, we provide the resources (e.g. accounting, newsletter sending, etc). This kind of model was an extreme version of #2 above. But we discovered we weren't really accomplishing anything strategic - e.g. nothing that was changing the overall picture of the unevangelized.

We slowly (and painfully) changed into the team-based model that we have today. We are focused 100% on starting church planting movements among unreached peoples. We don't accept just anyone, and we are no longer just the "back office." Everyone's on a team, everyone's contributing to the goal of seeing movements started. We "may" let you work for us - but we don't take just anyone.

Now, I wouldn't say that we "manage" people to "meet our ends" - we do have strong teams and accountability structures, but our "decision matrix" places most decisions as close as possible to the field and team level. The "strategy team" is the primary place for most tactical decisions, and the "cluster" and "affinity block" levels are the priamry place for most strategic decisions. International decisions are primarily the big board-level issues (e.g. the admin %, the processes for submitting receipts, donor processing decisions etc).

So, are we #1 or #2 on your scale? I suggest we fit in between.

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Thu, 22 May 2014 10:27:58 -0000

Also note Dana's comment, applicable here: "But the fallacy of the argument is supposing that the LOCAL church is THE CHURCH that can do all that God wants done in the world. HIS BODY is the WHOLE BODY, including all our roles and relationships in society. At a simple level, described by Patrick Johnstone in The Church is Bigger than You Think, churches, agencies, and training schools are all THE CHURCH functioning in different ways... It is primarily our pride and lack of understanding of the broader Body and trustworthiess of our ONE HEAD, Jesus Christ, that makes us look down on the other parts of the body for not being what we are... in language, or in size, or in color, or in function, or in social role." (made on post http://www.justinlong.org/2....

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Thu, 22 May 2014 10:24:45 -0000

This is an interesting thought. It is one of the primary differences between modality and sodality - the one represents the whole of the community (ekklesia) while the other is selected in its membership. The individual congregation, of course, is "kind of" selective, although what happens there is the church sets up for itself characteristics which force potential members to make the selection (to self-select in or out of the church). Both, in a sense, are then responsible for this kind of selectiveness. A "hipster" church (just to use one example) sets up certain expressions in worship, in meeting location, etc., which will cause some to elect not to participate in.

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Thu, 22 May 2014 10:21:16 -0000

In this, I have often thought there is really something to the idea of a "spiritual director" that I have encountered in Anglican & Catholic circles. I have also often thought the intensive and long-term development of a candidate for a Catholic missionary society (and the seriousness of the vows taken) has something to it, too...

Re: Is the agency, the church?

Justin Long — Wed, 21 May 2014 17:48:40 -0000

That's a very good point. Although, complexity: not every church uses an elder model (are they the majority?). And, lots of agencies use a model that I think would be "similar." I'm thinking of WEC, Wycliffe, SEND, YWAM - in these cases, aren't the base leaders essentially the "elders" of the organization? They are very grassroots/autonomous models...

Re: Why do churches send workers through agencies? Your answers.

Justin Long — Fri, 02 May 2014 10:53:32 -0000

I think it works well for some and not so well for others. I know of others who lost ~80% of their support in the space of 2 weeks because they had "all their eggs in one basket", so to speak, and when the basket broke, well... While not saying it should be everyone's policy, *my* policy is for diversification of support. Also, I do find that while some churches do missionary care VERY well, other churches do not...