Encounters from the Life of a Foreign Missionary Would I take a bullet for Christ? Was I willing to lay my life down for my beliefs? Those were questions to be answered by living most of those years in the politically unstable country of Colombia, which has a history of great violence. That was fifty years ago when I surrendered to be a missionary to Latin America in 1967. Since then, there have been many excerpts and encounters experienced. Throughout this book, I share many valuable lessons learned. I have discovered Gods delightful Providence as he continually guides my life. His protection has repeatedly kept me out of harms way. I have experienced his divine intervention while lying on a cold operating table. A doctors hand miraculously saved my life by hand-pumping my heart. I felt Gods protection as he took me out of harms way in Ecuador. I followed the leading of the Holy Spirit as he providentially directed me to a small orphaned group of baptized believers in Bolivia. He has provided ample provisions, protections, and promises. All of these have been excellent lessons learned. Thus, I build the bridge and write these pages for those who will follow.

This new volume in the award-winning Encountering Mission series is for current and future missionaries. It provides practical guidance regarding getting ready for the mission field and the realities of life on the field. The authors are well qualified to write such a manual, each having served as a missionary for more than twenty years and each having taught missions in seminary. The authors begin by examining the contemporary context for missions, including the recognition that the world's mission fields are in constant and often rapid change. They then discuss aspects of preparing oneself for the mission field, beginning with home-front preparations and moving to on-the-field preparations. The final section deals with practical issues and challenges of missionary life.

What is the Great Commission? With all power given Him, Jesus tells us to go make disciples of all nations, gloriously changing them forever in character and reality by God's grace and power. How does adventure fit in? Service to God is always a life of adventure, but no service is more adventurous than foreign missions. Adventure results from the efforts any missionary makes in a hellish land, in the messy occupation of Christian missions. Friday calls herself "an Unlikely Missionary." Perhaps everyone surrendered to God's will in the furtherance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has sometimes felt "unlikely." We all, saved by grace, are unlikely candidates for contributing to God's awesome drama of redemption. We must come away from times of dedicated service to God with a keen awareness of our powerlessness and God's limitless power. We're left marveling at Him. He gets all the glory. We are weak so He can be strong.Friday demonstrates through this unfolding of her missionary life how God shows up to use the unlikely to fulfill His purposes, so that He receives His rightful glory. Friday becomes the unlikely translator, the unlikely comforter, the unlikely serenader, administrator, driver, life-saving prayer warrior, and more. Most importantly, we learn with her how love changes lives.Friday's messy real-life encounters in the mission field reach deep into our hearts and touch us with their poignancy. But more than that, they teach us what the Great Commission really means and how the Church can do better at fulfilling this commission. With every chapter, Friday draws us into contemplation of the broader issues raised by her experiences. She generously honors those who taught her. Through their lives of sacrifice and surrender to God and willingness to touch the uncomfortable reality of poverty and corruption, they became the hands of Jesus to the most needy. Qualifying her role as missionary with the word unlikely, Rebecca Friday can count herself among those rare servants of God.

Professor Zacharias Tanee Fomum, through this book, communicates his burden of bringing the people of God back to the missionary purposes of God. The heart of the missionary and the life of the missionary find their origin, basis, and model in the Heart of God. He is a missionary God. The heart of the missionary and the life of the missionary is to be judged, seen, and appreciated by the way God judges, sees, and appreciates them. God wants to produce people who see the world as He sees it, people who continually live under the constraint of God's missionary needs, people who dream of God's mission fields every night and work there every day to make sure that the missionary purposes of God are fulfilled. The Purpose of this Book is for many to go out as missionaries with correct hearts and correct lives, equipped for permanent and productive work. This book is highly recommended to all believers.

In "Encountering Empire", Elisabeth Engel traces how black American missionaries - men and women grappling with their African heritage - established connections in Africa during the heyday of European colonialism. Reconstructing the black American 'colonial encounter,' Engel analyzes the images, transatlantic relationships, and possibilities of representation African American missionaries developed for themselves while negotiating colonial regimes. Between 1900 and 1939, these missionaries paved the way for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest independent black American institution, to establish a presence in Britain's sub-Saharan colonies. Illuminating a neglected chapter of Atlantic history, Engel demonstrates that African Americans used imperial structures for their own self-determination. "Encountering Empire" thus challenges the notion that pan-Africanism was the only viable strategy for black emancipation.

The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.