There is some of the missionary in every Christian. As the Lord extends to us the ability to trust in him and as he begins that work of transforming us from the inside out, he gives us the desire to share our faith with others and to extend his love to them. Since the church’s earliest day this desire has motivated Christians to leave behind all they know and to travel to the earth’s farthest reaches. A relative newcomer on the scene is the short-term missions trip and other similar means through which Christians can participate on a part-time basis as “vacationaries.” Such ministry is the subject of Robert Lupton’s Toxic Charity.

Toxic Charity is a book about doing missions right. The subtitle pretty much lays it out: “How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It).” Lupton honors the mindset that compels Christians toward foreign short-term missions and inner-city projects at home, but believes that the church has failed to ask simple questions like these: Who is really benefiting? Who are we really seeking to serve? Is it the poor and those in need, or are we primarily serving ourselves? He contends that “what Americans avoid facing is that while we are very generous in charitable giving, much of that money is either wasted or actually harms the people it is targeted to help. …The compassion industry is almost universally accepted as a virtuous and constructive enterprise. But what is so surprising is that its outcomes are almost entirely unexamined.”

It is not the Christian’s motivation he questions as much as the unintended consequences of rightly motivated efforts. “For all our efforts to eliminate poverty--our entitlements, our programs, our charities--we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work. And our poor continue to become poorer. … Giving to those in need what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy people.” In Toxic Charity he offers “basic operating principles that distinguish wise and prudent charitable efforts from the destructive do-gooder practices currently dominating the compassion industry. After describing the problem and hearing stories of people who are modeling solutions, my goal is to provide for caring people a checklist of criteria they can use to determine which actions they should undertake when they want to help others.” The simple fact is that we like to give—to give money, to give food, to give help, to give whatever most immediately meets a need—and then to walk away. But this kind of giving is harming rather than helping.

Drawing upon four decades of urban ministry, primarily in poverty-stricken areas of Atlanta, Lupton offers a better way forward, and does so in the form of an “Oath for Compassionate Service,” a missions equivalent to the doctor’s Hippocratic Oath.

• Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.
• Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
• Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
• Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served. Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said--unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
• Above all, do no harm.

These are good guidelines, but something crucial is missing, which brings me to my one significant critique of the book

If books dealing with death are to be a regular part of my reading diet, so too are books on missions. I don’t mean missional living or the mere theory of mission work, but books describing real work on the real mission field. In Reckless Abandon, David Sitton of To Every Tribe Ministries has given us a good one as he recounts a lifetime of experiences among the most difficult to reach peoples.

While Reckless Abandon is certainly not less than a book of stories from the field, it offers significantly more than that. As Sitton recounts his experiences in Papua New Guinea, he weaves into it his own philosophy of missions, one that calls for (you guessed it), reckless abandon. He defines the term like this: “To give oneself unrestrainedly to the cause of Jesus and the promotion of His kingdom without concern for danger and the consequences of that action.” His life models just that.

That kind of recklessness and abandon begins with an understanding of the beauty and power of the gospel. He says it well: “The gospel is so valuable that no risk is unreasonable. Life is gained by laying it down for the gospel. If I live, I win and get to keep on preaching Christ. If I die, I win bigger by going directly to be with Christ and I get to take a few tribes with me.”

His life story exemplifies that level of commitment. Converted as a young man, he very quickly determined that he was being called to foreign missions, and not only that, but was being called to go where no one had gone before. He wanted to be like Paul, not building on another man’s foundation but laying the foundation himself. He soon found himself in Papua New Guinea, trekking through the jungle, approaching tribes that had never even seen even a single caucasian man before. Wherever he went he proclaimed the gospel. Needless to say, his life has not been one of ease, but the Lord has used him powerfully to save the lost and to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.

I didn’t mean to read A Meal with Jesus. I receive enough books to review that I cannot possibly read them all. Last week I decided I would grab a selection of them and spend half an hour with each—not enough to read them through, but enough to get a bit of a feel for each. It didn’t work too well. A Meal with Jesus was the first book I picked up and once I began reading it I couldn’t stop. It turns out that this is a really good book.

According to its subtitle, A Meal With Jesus is a book about “discovering grace, community and mission around the table.” Tim Chester seeks to show God’s purposes in the sublimely ordinary act of sharing a meal. He shows that this most ordinary of ordinary events offers unique opportunities for grace, community and mission. Can a book about something so ordinary really be compelling and worth the read? Absolutely. And this is particularly true when the book comes from the capable hands of an excellent author.

Chester structures the book around the meals of Jesus as described in the gospel of Luke. It was Luke who quoted Jesus as saying, “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” Jesus was into eating and drinking and he was into it enough that people accused him of doing it to excess. Meals are a constant theme in this gospel. According to another author, “In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.” Chester says that to Jesus meals “represent a new world, a new kingdom, a new outlook. But they give that new reality substance. Jesus’ meals are not just symbols; they’re also application. They’re not just pictures; they’re the real thing in miniature. Food is stuff. It’s not ideas. It’s not theories.” Without simplistically reducing all of church and mission to meals, Chester manages to show that meals can and should be an integral part of our shared life.

Dear God, if you should give us a son, grant that he may work for you in China.” That was the prayer of James and Amelia Taylor as they consecrated their first child to the Lord, months before he was even born. That child entered the world on May 21, 1832. His parents named him James Hudson Taylor, but called him by his middle name. Hudson Taylor would, indeed, grow up to work for the Lord in China. Not only that, but he would be used mightily by God and he would transform the way missionaries worked among the people they ministered to. In his own way he would change the world.

Taylor became a Christian as a teen and was immediately drawn to China, deciding that the Lord was calling him to serve as a missionary. He spent several years studying medicine and the Mandarin language before departing on the long and perilous journey to the Far East. Very quickly he made the radical decision to adopt Chinese dress and hairstyles, understanding that such things could increase his credibility in the eyes of those he loved (even if they would make him a laughing stock among his fellow missionaries). He went on to found China Inland Mission, an organization that continues to exist today (though under a new name). The story of his life deserves a lot more attention than I could give it in just a few short paragraphs, so I will hold off and point you to Christianity Today’s brief biographical sketch.

Hudson Taylor is the subject of Vance Christie’s biography Hudson Taylor: Gospel Pioneer to China. I love missionary biographies, so I suppose I was predisposed to enjoy this book. Sure enough, I enjoyed it a lot. Christie is a talented biographer and in this book he works with a fascinating subject. In place of sharing the details of Taylor’s life, let me tell you a few of my takeaways from this biography, a few of the things I’ve had to ponder as I’ve been given just a glimpse into the life of a great man.

In the summer of 1805 a young man set sail on the long, perilous journey to India. He left friends, family and prospects behind in order to serve as a missionary in a foreign land. Already suffering the tuberculosis, the disease that had claimed the life of his mother and would soon also claim his two sisters, he forsook the prospects of a comfortable life as a minister or scholar and traveled to the far side of the world. He did so for the love of India, for the love of the gospel and ultimately for the love of God.

Henry Martyn was a brilliant scholar who studied at Cambridge and won the coveted title of Senior Wrangler which was bestowed upon the student who won the Cambridge University annual mathematics problem-solving competition, and was thus recognized as the University’s best undergraduate mathematician. While he was a brilliant mathematician, he also had a natural proclivity for languages. After his conversion as a young man his mentor Charles Simeon encouraged him to abandon his intention of becoming a lawyer and to dedicate his life to serving God as a missionary. Martyn was subsequently ordained in the Church of England and traveled to India as a chaplain of the East India Company. He was to live only six years after arriving in India, but in that time he produced an incredible body of work. He translated the New Testament, the Anglican Prayer Book and the Anglican Marriage Service into Hindustani; he translated the parables for use in his schools; he also ensured that the Persian translation of the New Testament was the finest possible, translated the Psalms in Persian and oversaw the translation of the Arabic New Testament. This translations were ultimately printed and distributed in the tens of thousands.

While he is remembered primarily as a translator, Martyn was also a pastor and preached on a weekly basis. He desperately desired to see lives changed, yet in his ministry witnessed not a single conversion. While this often left him discouraged, he took refuge in knowing that he had preached the gospel and left the listener without excuse. After his death it was discovered that several people were converted through his ministry and we can only wait until eternity to discover how many were saved by the reading of the Scriptures he translated.

Throughout his ministry Martyn suffered from poor health and often terrible loneliness. He desperately loved a woman he had left behind in England and often wished that he had been able to marry her and enjoy her companionship. Yet he labored on, finding his joy and strength in the Lord.

Thomas Babbington Macaulay memorialized Martyn as follows:

The Trellis and the Vine was 2009’s surprise hit (read my review). Written by Collin Marshall and Tony Payne, the book described a ministry mind-shift that the authors assured the reader could change everything—everything related to ministry, that is. The book stood upon its simple metaphor of a trellis, an apparatus used to support something, and of a vine, the object that is supported by that trellis. The trellis referred to the administrative work within a church, those tasks that, though important, are not actually directly related to discipling people. Vine work, on the other hand, is those tasks of working with the vine, drawing people into the kingdom through evangelism and then training them to grow in their knowledge of God and their obedience to him. Though the book may not have been groundbreaking, it somehow managed to pull together a lot of ideas and collect them all within this simple metaphor. It was a powerful and effective combination and it sold very well. Even better, it impacted pastors and those engaged in gospel work, helping them better understand the task the Lord has given them.

The follow-up to The Trellis and the Vine is called The Archer and the Arrow. While it comes from Matthias Media, the same publisher, it is written by different authors: Phillip Jensen and Paul Grimmond. Though the volume is co-authored, its purpose is primarily to make Jensen’s “wisdom about preaching available to a wider audience--wisdom acquired over almost four decades of faithful biblical ministry.” I do not know if the book was conceived as a follow-up to The Trellis and the Vine or not, but regardless, it works as a sequel. Where the first book focused on ministry through a wide lens, the second focuses on the essential heart of ministry—the preaching of the gospel.

The book is framed around what the authors describe as the preacher’s mission statement: “My aim is to preach the gospel by prayerfully expounding the Bible to the people God has given me to love.” They break this statement into its component parts and expound it over the course of several chapters. This takes them from the theoretical to the practical, from the purpose of preaching a sermon to the actual delivery of it.

Let me say a word about the book’s title. The metaphor speaks of the archer (the preacher) and the arrow, which is the sermon. Firing the arrow corresponds to the act of preaching. The arrow itself is formed by three parts—the head, the shaft and the feathers. “At the point of the arrowhead is the gospel, the declaration that Jesus is the Lord and Saviour. The cutting edges of the arrowhead are the implications of that reality. This can include things like ethics, philosophy, apologetics, personal godliness and kategoria.” The shaft corresponds to the exegesis of the passage around which a sermon is formed. And the feathers “correspond to issues like systematic theology, biblical theology, church history, philosophy and the like. The feathers are like the big categories of thought that tie the whole message of the Bible together.”

From his earliest days, Mosab Hasson Yousef had a view of the inner workings of Hamas. The son of one its founders, from childhood he was immersed in the shadowy world of Middle Eastern terror and politics. Arrested time and again by the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence service, he eventually made the decision to become a double agent, working for Israel instead of against her. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007, he lived like this, deeply embedded within Hamas, suspected by no one, yet passing vast amounts of information to Israel. In this way he prevented assassinations, stopped suicide attacks and provided information leading to the arrests or killings of many terrorists. He was Shin Bet’s most valuable source of information about Hamas.

In 1999 he had a chance encounter with a British visitor who invited Yousef to learn about the Christian faith. Curious and intelligent, Yousef took this opportunity and was immediately struck by the difference between Jesus Christ and Mohammed, between the Christian faith and the Islam he had inherited from his fathers. In the months that followed he made a slow conversion to Christianity and was quietly baptized.

Eventually Yousef grew tired of his double life and convinced the Israelis to release him from his position with them. With some reluctence they agreed and allowed him to move to the United States where he continues to live today. Son of Hamas is the story of his life, “A gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices,” according to the rather verbose subtitle.

In 2006 Americans spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion on short-term missions. Some 2.2 million Americans were involved in one of these trips, up from just 120,000 two decades before. Such misson work has very nearly become a rite of passage for young American Christians. Many years ago I spoke to a missionary who was often asked if teams could come and visit his work in South America so they could help build a home or rebuild a church. He told me then that such trips often do more harm than good; that he actually dreads having yet another team show up, trying to help. I did not have time to ask him much more that day, but his words have long shaped my view of short-term missions. But now, having read Steve Corbett’s and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts I understand more. Too often our well-intentioned efforts to help actually hinder the work of alleviating poverty.

The title and subtitle of this book are deliberately provocative: When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself. It is difficult for us to imagine how our efforts to help can actually harm both ourselves and the people to whom we extend a hand. And yet those who work with the poor can testify to a great deal of harm done to both.

Those of us who are Western Christians continue to hear reports that the church is migrating to the south and to the east—that as our nations increasingly turn their collective backs on God, God begins fresh work in other parts of the world. Says Mark Noll in his new book The New Shape of World Christianity, “It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways. A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. [If a Christian] Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes … and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways, under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture and politics, and raising surprising theological questions that would not have seemed possible when he fell asleep.”

“The fateful day began with deceptive normalcy at John and Betty Stam’s missionary residence in Tsingteh, China. Both the wood-burning stoves had been lit and were starting to heat up nicely, helping to lessen the chill that gripped the large old house that cold, early December morning. The Stams, along with the six Chinese who lived with them in the house, had already eaten breakfast.

“John hoped to study and get some correspondence done that morning. Betty was preparing to give their three-month old baby, Helen Priscilla, a bath, with some assistance from the amah Mei Tsong-fuh. The cook, Li Ming-chin, busied himself in the kitchen. His wife, mother, and two children similarly had begun their various daily activities.