Short-term mission trips are commonplace in American church life. Yet their growth and practice have largely been divorced from theological education, seminary training, and mission studies. Consuming Mission takes important steps in offering a theological assessment of the practice of STM and tools for subsequent mission training. Using relevant academic studies and original focus-group interviews, Haynes offers important insights into this ubiquitous practice. While carefully examining the biblical and historical foundations for mission, Consuming Mission engages more contemporary movements like the Missio Dei, Fresh Expressions, the Emergent Church, and Third-Wave Mission movements that have helped shape mission. The unique role of United Methodist mission is illustrated through its historical roots and contemporary expression in the ubiquitous STM movement in the United States. Haynes uses original field research data to gather the implicit and explicit theologies of lay and clergy participants. Cultural influences are significantly influencing STM participants as they use their time, money, sacrifice, and service, applied in the name of mission, to purchase a personal growth experience commonly sought by pilgrims. The resulting tensions from mixing mission, pilgrimage, and tourism creates are explored. Haynes offers important steps to move the practice away from using mission for personal edification.

North American congregations face a deepening crisis of consumer-oriented "selfie missions" and practices based on colonial-era assumptions. Seeking to free congregational mission from harmful cultural forces, this book helps churches better partner with God's work in the world, offering the latest research and practical, step-by-step tools for churches.

This book brings together Methodist scholars and reflective practitioners from around the world to consider how emerging practices of mission and evangelism shape contemporary theologies of mission. Engaging contemporary issues including migration, nationalism, climate change, postcolonial contexts, and the growth of the Methodist church in the Global South, this book examines multiple forms of mission, including evangelism, education, health, and ministries of compassion. A global group of contributors discusses mission as no longer primarily a Western activity but an enterprise of the entire church throughout the world. This volume will be of interest to researchers studying missiology, evangelism, global Christianity, and Methodism and to students of Methodism and mission.

A profound and moving journey into the heart of Christianity that explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles—a book both for those of the faith and for others who seek to understand Christianity from the outside in. “Expertly researched and fascinating… Bissell is a wonderfully sure guide to these mysterious men.… This is a serious book about the origins of Christianity that is also very funny. How often can you say that?” —The Independent Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell provides rich and surprising answers to these ancient, elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but also how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. Ultimately, Bissell finds that the story of the apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world’s largest religion, Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the supposed tombs of the Twelve Apostles. He travels from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan, vividly capturing the rich diversity of Christianity’s worldwide reach. Along the way, he engages with a host of characters—priests, paupers, a Vatican archaeologist, a Palestinian taxi driver, a Russian monk—posing sharp questions that range from the religious to the philosophical to the political. Written with warmth, empathy, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep, lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, and at times hilarious book—a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.

A pilgrim-themed spirituality for Christian formation, Pilgrim Spirituality resources everyday Christianity, congregational life, social outreach, and religious travel through definitional frames of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a prominent biblical image. Yet, despite its contemporary resurgence, its capacity for Christian formation remains untapped. While our understanding of pilgrimage has been too narrow, we lack a definitional framework that fosters transformational practice. Definitions matter, thought creates possibilities, and intentionality enhances experience. Recognizing pilgrimage as a comprehensive expression of the Christian life, Pilgrim Spirituality provides tools for perceiving spiritual possibilities, engaging situational context, and interpreting lived experience. Espousing both personal and social holiness, Pilgrim Spirituality gives definitional status to the Other, attends to the self, and seeks the presence of God in the facts in which we find ourselves. Pilgrim Spirituality examines Christian concepts of time, place, and journey, while emphasizing the personal, corporate, incarnational, metaphorical, and tensional character of the pilgrim life. Exploring the motives, experiences, and practices of pilgrimage, Pilgrim Spirituality resources readers in their destinational pursuit of the Christian faith: the union of God, self, and the Other.

Many of us long to experience the fullness of God and his purpose for our lives. Not a whole lot of us ever do. The reason is that we have departed in some significant ways from the biblical view of Christian life and growth. The New Testament highlights the communal, missional, and eschatological aspects of our walk with God. We grow in our faith as individual Christians to the degree that we are (a) deeply rooted relationally in a local church community that is (b) passionately playing its part in God’s grand story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration, and (c) intently anticipating the summing of all things in Christ when Jesus returns. In recent decades, American evangelicals have traded away community, outreach, and the Bible’s teaching about eternity future for the pursuit of individual religious experience in the here-and-now. Why We Need the Church to Become More Like Jesus traces this departure from biblical Christianity through recent decades of popular evangelical trends and reminds us that faith centered on community, mission, and the story line of Scripture remains the key to the spiritual formation of the individual Christian.

This is the unclassified version of a classified report; 85% of the original classified material is presented in this report. Addresses: the use and performance of aircraft, munitions, and missiles employed during the air campaign; the validity of DoD and manufacturer claims about weapon systems' performance, particularly those systems utilizing advanced technology; the relationship between cost and performance of weapon systems; and the extent that air campaign objectives were met. Discusses: LGB accuracy, F-117 and TLAM effectiveness, IADS capabilities, target sensor technologies, combat support platforms, and more.