Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Made for the Journey by Elizabeth Elliot is an account of her first year as a missionary to Ecuador.  I've read it before as it was previously published as These Strange Ashes.  Elliot started her missionary full of excitement and triumphal expectation.   She was heading out the jungle to attempt to learn the Colorado Indian language in order to reduce it to writing and translate the Bible into that language. There is a note of underlying criticism throughout of the 'traditional' missionary way of doing things. Having started her work, she fights to have success in even figuring out the language.   She combats laziness in herself, but does start making some progress with the language.   Then everything falls apart.   People die, in tragic ways, including her main language informant.   She has difficulty continuing the study, but does have a good amount of language information to leave with those who would stay while she moved on to differen...

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church by Roland Allen is a rather short but very thought provoking book.  In it, he somewhat implicitly asks the question, Who builds the Church? Leading to that thought, he critiques our method of Evangelization, are we doing it right? Do we need to organize the expansion of the church?  Do we need to establish mission stations, do we need missionaries who depend upon appeals for money for their support.  Will the Gospel spread if we don't purposefully come up with a plan to spread it? Allen warns that what we are trying to do in our methods is to organize the work of God, to dictate where people will get saved and a time period in which their salvation must happen.   But as Allen points out, " For spiritual work spiritual organization is necessary; but can we create a spiritual organization of spiritual forces?   Only a divine intelligence can do that.   But we attempt to do the work of that divine intelligence;...

God's Smuggler by Brother Andrew with John and Elizabeth Sherrill: Young Reader's Edition is quite an interesting read. It gives you an overview of the life of 'Brother Andrew, as he later became known, he was a Bible smuggler. Andrew, like everyone, did not start out life as a Christian, he was struggling with life-purpose into his early adulthood.  He became a Christian and had a growing desire for knowledge of the Word of God and an eagerness to put into practice what he learned and to share the Gospel with others. After becoming a Christian, Andrew became aware of, and concerned with the peril of churches in countries that were under communist rule.  He found that the Bible, in many of those countries, was scarce and hard to obtain, despite the idea being touted by the communists that they promoted freedom of religion.  In some countries there were no Bibles being printed, in others there were plenty of Bibles available but hardly anyone was interested in...