June 2008

June 29, 2008

The missional path

The term “missional” has become widely used especially by bloggers having to do with the emergent church. Recently (June 23rd) a number of bloggers participated in a “synchroblog” on the topic of missional. Without necessarily having read every single one of the more than 50 blog entries that participated, it seems that an online publication focused on missions and unreached peoples really ought to have something to say about it. What does missional mean? Words have meaning based both on the words that they derive from and the way in which they are used. Some words are created when one [...]

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June 23, 2008

How to unearth trends in France

As promised, here is the analysis of France. This European nation is significantly different from Afghanistan, and holds many opportunities for the Gospel despite our common perception of France as a Godless nation. Here is the first bit of history, from 1900 to 1970: Religion Name Adh 1900 N C T R% R Adh 1970 Atheists 30,000 102 21,240 21,342 5.77 1.06 1,524,000 Buddhists – - 385 385 15.69 1.16 27,000 Christians 40,731,100 138,684 (112,593) 26,091 0.06 1.00 42,557,500 Affiliated Christians 40,731,100 138,684 (112,593) 26,091 0.06 1.00 42,557,500 doubly-affiliated (397,000) (1,352) (6,624) (7,976) 1.26 1.01 (955,300) Anglicans 500 2 205 [...]

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June 15, 2008

How to uncover trends in numbers

You can use a few pieces of data and a few math formulas to uncover some amazing trends. I will illustrate this with several posts on global trends. I will show you to do the same thing for any part of the world: a region, nation, people group or country. Start with the population at two points in time (for example, 1990 and 2000). Get the population of a smaller part of the population. For example, find the Christian population in 1990 and 2000. Use these to figure out the non-Christian population: Total Populatino minus Christian population. Here is the [...]

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June 3, 2008

The Amazon Kindle: a missionary resource

In 1998 I wrote about the future of books, and speculated about the implications of the electronic availability of books. That day is now here: the Amazon Kindle with a 2GB SD card can carry nearly 2,000 books; and an 8GB SD card is easily available. While over 120,000 books in Kindle format are available from Amazon, this does not include the additional thousands of e-books available in other formats (e.g. Mobipocket), as well as the fact that a Kindle can easily use standard HTML, Word, and PDF formats—which means you could feasibly carry every issue of Mission Frontiers, IJFM, [...]

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