From the category archives:

How-To

July 9, 2010

Step by Step to Crossing Cultures

Most people don’t just leap directly into going overseas to live the rest of their lives in a foreign culture. They start with little stepping stones. You can take these steps intentionally, or you can help someone else do it, much like you would help a little child put their toe into the water, and [...]

June 16, 2010

How2: Swarmishly transform a country

I have written of the need for 50,000 teams by 2050. This is based on the idea that each team (1 to 3 cross cultural pioneer workers) would raise up 100 local ministries, each of which would seek to evangelize 1,000 people. Thus, one cross-cultural team would lead to 100,000 being reached, and 50,000 teams [...]

March 24, 2010

Photography cheat sheets

Bunches of sheets on composition, lighting placement, much more will help you bring the best photos back from your trips abroad. In Lifehacker.com.

March 23, 2010

Building strategic thinking skills

Strategic Thinking vs. Strategic Planning is a useful little post that suggests 7 dimensions to strategic thinking and steps to building strategic thinking skills.

March 22, 2010

There is a difference between being missional and cross-cultural

There is a lot of conversation that occurs, both on blogs and in the offline world, about being “missional.” Not everyone agrees with everyone else about what being “missional” means. But, essentially, it usually means being more intentional about reaching out to the world around us. Unfortunately, since “missional” and “missionary” both share all but [...]

March 12, 2010

How To: evaluate your non-profit events

Here’s a new book, “Analyze This: a Nonprofit’s Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics.” Reviewed in Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog.

March 7, 2010

3 steps to finding great articles on blogs

Here’s my 3 step process to finding loads of great articles. 1. Add bunches of subscriptions to Google Reader. a) Create folders on various topics of interest to you b) Spend time finding the 10 best blogs you can find on each topic. c) subscribe those blogs’ RSS feeds and categorize them by folder. d) [...]

March 6, 2010

How to hold a 22 minute meeting

No one likes meetings. But what if you took out all the waste and left only the useful parts? Scott Berkun summarizes Nicole Steinbok’s 22 minute meeting concept.

December 20, 2009

1 simple, quick way to head toward a vision for your life

We wrote before about 7 key ways to find a vision for your life. Here’s a simple way to get some forward motion. First, figure out your SHAPE. I first heard the SHAPE acronym from Rick Warren’s ubiquitous Purpose Driven Life. It stands for: S)piritual giftings, H)eart/passion, A)bilities, P)ersonality, and E)xperiences. Grab a piece of [...]

November 16, 2009

The missionary advocate as digital curator

We all know about the explosion of information and its effect on us. More and more is being created on a daily basis: new articles, new books, new headlines, new videos, new music. We also know that more and more that is being created is either untrue, mindless drivel, evilly addictive, or simply not intended [...]

November 3, 2009

Learning from parallel visions

Most people who are reading this blog know that I tweet. A lot. In fact, I tweet even more now, because I have discovered a plugin for WordPress, which powers my blog, that links my Tweets to the blog. So where I used to tweet sporadically and post a lot of “links elsewhere,” now I spend all of [...]

July 8, 2009

How a promise can cut through global clutter

Our world is an incredibly noisy place. Over 6 billion people live life and make noise: talking and writing and sharing about their lives, their needs, the desires, their dreams, their visions, their passions. Some make more noise(even when dead), and some make less. Marketing is the art of getting your message heard in the midst of [...]

June 8, 2009

A five-minute guide to building a swarm

What does it take to build a swarm? This isn’t “rocket science.” It’s being done every day. Here’s a short “five-minute” guide to doing it. Phase 1: 1. Establish an initial personal plausible promise. Do this first, for yourself, not in connection to anyone else. This is your personal goal: what you feel called to do. [...]

June 7, 2009

How to present your plausible promise

Garr Reynolds (<em>Presentation Zen</em>) <a href=”http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2009/06/text-images.html”>has a great post up highlighting a new Youtube presentation</a> on “The New Urbanism.” <div id=”scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:71ad3ce7-e5ea-4027-b491-dea0aec2b9e1″ style=”display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; width: 425px; margin-right: auto; padding: 0px;”> <div><object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”425″ height=”355″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/VGJt_YXI&hl=en” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”355″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/VGJt_YXI&hl=en”> </embed></object></div> </div> The presentation itself has to do with how [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

September 30, 2007

How to hold a mission night

In the late 1990s, my wife and I helped a group of people to organize a regular meeting focused on unreached peoples and frontier missions. The purpose of this meeting was both to help maintain the vision of people who were interested in frontier missions, and to get new people interested. It’s not that difficult [...]

January 1, 2007

How to be effective on the field

by Norm P. Recently, an article in the e-zine Brigada Today caught my eye: “Rebekah is 22 years old. Next year, she’ll move to India to begin work as a missionary there… She’s eager to know: what’s your top-ten list of tips, thoughts, ideas, and principles that can help her become super-effective on the mission [...]

September 1, 2006

How to find missionary candidates

Larger agencies have strong recruitment arms, but many smaller ones agencies I’ve talked to tend to take whoever they can get. I’m not sure this is a wise course of action, but some agencies I have met don’t understand how to properly recruit or screen for candidates. This is a short glimpse into a process [...]