Lausanne Global Analysis 13, 2 (March 2024)

The latest issue of Lausanne Global Analysis, from The Lausanne Movement, is available online from here, including pdfs of individual articles (this time devoted to member care) as below:

The summaries are taken from the Issue Overview by Loun Ling Lee.

Sarah Hay

Self-care: An Essential Tool for Member Care or a Passing Fad?

Sarah Hay begins by looking at ‘what member care and self-care are, some of the resistance to self-care, and how member care can seek to promote better self-care practices amongst missionaries.’ She highlights the seemingly misunderstood theology of self-care as opposed to self-sacrifice by reflecting on Jesus’s attitude towards rest in the gospel. This misunderstanding often leads to burnout in missionary service. In conclusion, she stresses how important it is ‘to recognize that meaningful self-care is not a selfish practice, but an essential part of a missionary’s tool kit and one which the member care practitioner should encourage.’

Billy Drum

Burnout Among Missionaries: Systemic Issues Leading to Burnout

‘Burnout among mission workers and sending organizations is on the rise,’ writes Billy Drum… These systemic issues in organizations could be identified in the six main causes of burnout as explained by the author with reference to Maslach and Leiter’s The Truth about Burnout. He challenges organization leadership ‘to take a closer look at the practices and policies in place for care of mission workers in cross-cultural settings,’ and ‘affect change proactively, working toward prevention and creating a healthier and more resilient missionary workforce.’ Mission-sending organizations would do better in member care by considering the preventive measures recommended by the author.

Anisa Moosa

Burnout in Zambian Women in Ministry and Humanitarian Work: How Culture Influences the Burnout Experience and Implications for Member Care

How does culture influence the experience of burnout? Anisa Mooza… highlights four aspects where Zambian culture influences burnout particularly in women: hierarchical challenges, extended family and community support, the spiritual dimension in burnout, and keeping up appearances. ‘Christian ministries and humanitarian organizations could benefit from taking into consideration cultural influences on burnout in their staff and employees to create culturally appropriate burnout interventions,’ she concludes.

Faith Stephens

Shame in the Lives of Missionaries: Women Serving in Central Asia

For missionaries in another culture, the experience of shame is more prominent than burnout. Faith Stephens… shows the negative aspects of shame that could harm missionaries, ‘hindering connection with God and others, which ultimately impacts ministry.’ Her personal experience of shame as a missionary enables her to offer ‘tools to equip missionaries to effectively deal with shame.’ She suggests some helpful ways to engage with shame – ‘to recognize shame,’ ‘to reach out to God and others when they experience shame,’ and ‘to recognize and cope with shame messages within each culture that they participate in.’

Themelios 43, 2 (August 2018)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the below articles.

Editorial

D.A. Carson

When Revival Comes

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

The Rolling Stones Will Stop

Thomas R. Schreiner

Paul and Gender: A Review Article

Cynthia Westfall has written a wide-ranging book on Paul and gender, examining key texts in their literary, cultural, and theological context. Her discussion is fresh and stimulating, and many of her insights are to be warmly welcomed. She recognizes that Paul’s view of gender must be distinguished from common conceptions in the Greco-Roman world. Nevertheless, the perspective advocated as a whole fails to convince, especially in the exegesis of key texts like 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 and 1 Timothy 2:8–15.

Robert S. Smith

Songs of the Seer: The Purpose of Revelation’s Hymns

What are the purposes of the songs of the Apocalypse? What effect are they intended to produce? After a brief discussion of the question of sources, the function played by Revelation’s hymns is explored with particular attention being paid to their connection to the cosmic conflict theme, the way they model celebration in the face of tribulation, the comfort they offer believers and the warning they present to unbelievers. The article then turns to some of the key theological emphases the songs – in particular Christological and salvific themes. While Revelation’s hymns are transparently doxological, they are also richly pedagogical and pointedly pastoral. For this reason, they pose a much-needed challenge to many contemporary praise practices.

Jackson Wu

Have Theologians No Sense of Shame? How the Bible Reconciles Objective and Subjective Shame

Everyone agrees shame is a pervasive problem; yet, in book and articles, we find writers often talk past one another. Missionaries and anthropologists speak of “honor-shame” cultures. Psychologists describe shame as an individual, emotional experience. Strangely, theologians typically say little about the topic. Christian scholars tend to treat guilt as “objective” and shame merely a “subjective.” This misunderstanding undermines our ability to develop a practical theology of honor and shame. Therefore, this article demonstrates how the Bible helps us have an integrated understanding of shame in its theological, psychological, and social dimensions.

Michael McClymond

Apocalypse Now: The Neo-Bultmannian Universalism of David Congdon’s The God Who Saves

In The God Who Saves (2016), David Congdon seeks an elusive synthesis of Karl Barth’s dogmatics and Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutics: he integrates Bultmann’s insistence on the concrete historicity of individual human experience with Barth’s stress on the universal salvific significance of Christ. Despite his “demetaphysicizing” rejection of a substantive God and a Chalcedonian Christ, Congdon propounds universal salvation based on a universal “cocrucifixion” with Christ that may occur in nonreligious experience (e.g., in viewing artwork, watching a baby’s birth, etc.). His intricate argument shows little theological coherence and a lack of grounding in scriptural exegesis or empirical observation.

James D. Clark

The Kuyperian Impulse of the Benedict Option

Evangelicals have criticized Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option and the idea of strategic withdrawal, with some citing Abraham Kuyper as a model of how Christians should engage the world today. This article argues that the Benedict Option and the Kuyperian tradition harmonize with (rather than contradict) each other in significant ways, including their promotion of cultural engagement in general, their recognition of the need to withdraw from the world in some sense in order to enable the Christian formation that makes robust engagement with the world possible, and their openness to a cultural transformation that is distantly future rather than imminent.

Adriani Milli Rodrigues

The Rule of Faith and Biblical Interpretation in Evangelical Theological Interpretation of Scripture

One of the features of the Theological Interpretation of Scripture movement is the use of the rule of faith in biblical interpretation. However, a comparison of evangelical scholars in this movement shows that there are significant disagreements on the concept of the rule and its hermeneutical role. The present study attempts to clarify these disagreements and briefly analyze them. This article suggests that an engagement with Cullman’s notion of apostolic and post-apostolic traditions and with aspects of Irenaeus’s concept of rule of faith might be helpful for the understanding of the concept and role of the rule of faith.

Book Reviews

Mission Frontiers 37, 1 (January-February 2015)

The January-February 2015 issue of Mission Frontiers, published by the U.S. Center for World Mission, contains a number of articles looking at ‘The Power of Honor’.

Editor Rick Wood writes:

‘The history of mankind is one of people seeking to gain honor, power and glory for themselves and to jealously guard whatever honor or position they hold. Some, like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Caesars of Rome, have actually commanded that they be worshiped as deity. Even when people don’t go this far, there seems to be a driving desire in the hearts of people from most cultures to seek honor and to avoid shame. Everyone seems to want to make a name for themselves. Even in the West many want to be a celebrity, thinking this will bring meaning and satisfaction to their lives.

‘These are powerful cultural forces that dominate the world and its peoples. The Islamic cultures are well known to be centered around honor and shame. The Asian cultures are well known for trying to “save face.” But as we highlight in this issue, most cultures around the world are affected by the issues of honor and shame.

‘The critical question then arises, “if honor and shame is such a powerful dynamic in the thinking of people in a myriad of cultures, why does our presentation of the Gospel not reflect this cultural and biblical reality?’

Individual articles can be accessed from here, and the whole issue (23.9 MB) can be downloaded as a pdf here.