Missionaries

One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year "Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn’t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New York Times Book Review “A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the ‘rational insanity’ of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.” —The Wall Street Journal The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives. For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America's long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans' presence and navigating a viper's nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable. Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.

This work explores the interaction of American Protestant missionaries with Iranians during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the missionary activities of four American Protestant groups: Presbyterians, Assemblies of God, International Missions, and Southern Baptists. It argues that American missionaries’ predisposition toward their own culture confused their message of the gospel and added to the negative perception of Christianity among Iranians. This bias was seen primarily in the American missionaries’ desire to modernize Iran through education and healthcare, and between the missionaries’ relationship with Iranian Christians. Iranian attitudes towards missionary involvement in these areas are investigated, as is the changing American missionary strategy from a traditional method where missionaries had the final say on most matters related to American and Iranian Christian interaction, to the beginnings of an indigenous system where a partnership developed between the missionary and the Iranian Christian.

Contains 11 papers presented at the 1986 SIL Seminar on Anthropology, discussing moral roots of conflict, worldviews, attitutes toward religion, ethics of evangelism, ethics of Christian mission, what to learn from critics and missiology.

Whether you're the parent of a missionary recruit or a parent of an experienced missionary, this resource will help you thrive and stay connected with your children and grandchildren serving cross-culturally. Combining a counselor's professional insight and a parent's personal journey, the authors help you understand missionary life, grandparent long-distance and say good-bye well.

Throughout its history, the Soviet Union was one of the most closed places in the world to missionary work. As perestroika came in the late 1980s and the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a spiritual vacuum formed as massive numbers of people became interested in Christianity. An unprecedented freedom allowed evangelicals to engage in missionary work. Much has been written about foreign evangelical missionary work during this period, but virtually nothing has been written about nationals doing ministry. This book examines the remarkable surge in Ukrainian evangelical missionary work from 1989 to 1999. Both Baptists and Pentecostals engaged in a wave of missions, flowing from Ukraine to the end of the earth: Siberia. What were these pioneering missionaries like? What motivated them? What enabled them to do what had been forbidden for so long? What legacy did they leave for us today? What can we learn from their example for future missions? This book also looks at how a surge in missions takes place, analyzing the factors behind the Ukrainian evangelical missionary surge by looking at different models for change. Here we consider: what steps can we take to help bring about new missionary surges?

No. 3 of each volume contains the annual report and minutes of the annual meeting.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.