March 3, 2012

The characters you meet in a social community

“The 20 Characters You’ll Meet on Every Neighborhood Email List,” Atlantic Science & Technology. Here’s a fun little article that talks about the standard “characters” you meet in certain settings. Are some of these characters in church committees (like mission committees)? Are different characters found in church committees? Is there a danger in generalizing? or [...]

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March 3, 2012

Local is defined by how far we are willing to travel for commerce

“The United States of Craigslist,” Richard Florida, The Atlantic. In this article, the author looks at different ways to define geographic regions other than states and metropolitan areas. What if we used, for example, Craiglist? The graphic map shows a higher degree of natural, social, economic, transactional “local” than legal boundaries: this is what is [...]

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March 2, 2012

Japan: what is required to find and reach the invisible poor

“Poverty in Japan: Shadowy figures,” Economist. Interesting analysis for those interested in Japan. We often think of Japan as a difficult place to work because of the high cost of living. Finding the very poor—the homeless, the destitute, the hungry—is a challenge. Perhaps Christian workers, who are mostly poor (relative to many Japanese, due to [...]

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March 2, 2012

The decline of security and the death of trust in Afghanistan

“Afghanistan’s crisis of trust: Too dangerous to help,” Economist. Not only are soldiers being withdrawn, but also civilian advisers, after two American officers were shot and killed in retaliation for the Koran burning. “Trust is at its lowest ebb,” the article comments. This is an illustration of the previous conversation about trust arising from security. [...]

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March 2, 2012

Billy Graham Association shifts focus to online evangelism

“Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Lays Off 50 Employees,” Adelle M. Banks, Christianity Today. 10% of the staff are being laid off: it is not, they say, a reflection of finances, but a redeployment of resources to focus on the “areas of great impact”—shifting toward online evangelism. This is a pretty big reflection on changing trends.

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March 2, 2012

Love in China: where women have the (demographic) upper hand

“What China’s Talking About Today: Single Women Look for Love,” The Atlantic. (Please forgive the image at the top—it’s not too bad, but…!) Very good analysis of the cultural trend happening now, directly resulting from the gender imbalance resulting from the One Child Policy. Parents might want boy children, but boys will (eventually, mostly) want [...]

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March 2, 2012

LinkJournal: Uighur unrest in China

The Uighurs are an unreached cluster (and a priority for MUP and others). Just as I’ve begun compiling the Uighur assessment, there has been an outburst of renewed unrest (no, not a causal link!). Some related links: In China, reporting on Tibetan and Uighur unrest is nearly impossible Uighur Groups Protest Unrest in China Top [...]

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March 2, 2012

Missionaries vs Corruption

“The warlord and the basketball star, a story of Congo’s corrupt gold trade,” Armin Rosen, The Atlantic. Patrick stood against slavery in Ireland. William Carey stood against widow burning in India. Other missionaries stood against the slave trade in the Americas. Missionaries have throughout time been very influential in standing against corrupt, wicked evil. It [...]

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March 2, 2012

Childless by Choice: the impact long-term on nations and the church

“Childless by Choice,” YaleGlobal.com. This article looks at the trend of choosing childlessness especially in a context of smaller families. In older times and in some societies where the average family had a lot of children (for example, say 6 to 10), the occasional loss of a child or a family that was completely childless [...]

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March 2, 2012

We take risks governments won’t

“Syria and the world’s troubling inconsistency on intervention,” Joshua Foust, The Atlantic. In this post Foust highlights the difficulties that governments have in deciding if and when to intervene in terrible situations. Over 7,500 have been killed in the last year in Syria, and 100 more casualties are being added, on average, daily. It is [...]

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February 29, 2012

Wikileaks and Christian missions

I wonder when Wikileaks (or something similar) will go after a mission agency? Something like Wycliffe, or World Vision? These are huge multinational organizations with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income. Moreover, some of these have great influence at the political level. What damage would be done? Are you actively working on protecting [...]

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February 24, 2012

Replacement Computer funded: thank you!

It is finished. The last $200, the mile reached, the sprint ended. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all who helped us put a new tool to work advocating for those who have no good news at all. If there are any additional donations that happen to be coming by way of [...]

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February 22, 2012

Uighur: an early bibliography

If you have items to contribute, please email justinlong@gmail.com. _____. “China’s Uighur Bogeyman: fighting the extremist Islamic terrorists of Beijing’s imagination,” Wall Street Journal, 6 Jan 2012, http://on.wsj.com/wgorpw ___. Backgrounder on Uighurs. Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/china/uighurs-chinas-xinjiang-region/p16870. Atabaki, Touraj and Sanjyot Mehendale. Central Asia and the Caucasus: transnationalism and diaspora. Beller-Hann, Ildiko. “Temperamental neighbors: Uighur-Han [...]

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February 21, 2012

The Stateless Border Brides of Central Asia

“The Stateless Border Brides of Central Asia,” The Atlantic. A growing number of Uzbekistani women who marry men from across the border in Kyrgyzstan are ending up citizens of neither, meaning they have officially ceased to exist. There are several thousand of them.

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February 21, 2012

Reaching 2% of Somalis

The world’s biggest refugee camp is now 20 years old. Could you imagine having grown up in this camp? Or having a 20-year-old ministry in it? Here you can bless something like 2% of all Somalis (is that a tipping point?).

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February 20, 2012

Bringing the planet up to code

I’ve been really struck by a few things recently, including a couple today, that I am pondering. In church today, Pastor Brent Gentzel was talking about the Christian as a worker. One of the things he mentioned was the need to be excellent. Somehow my brain went from this went to the idea of we [...]

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February 15, 2012

Organizational transformation through personnel development

At MUP, we generally theorize that church planting movements arise not out of better tactics and tools (e.g. resources, DVDs, tracts, Bibles, etc). Those are all useful but they are not the keys. The real key is a disciple who reproduces him or herself in another disciple, who reproduces him or herself in another disciple. [...]

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February 15, 2012

Skills to teach children

“Skills for kids,” Zenhabits.com. This is an excellent list of skills which would be useful to everyone. Good to teach them to kids when they are young. (For my audience, just ignore the whole “zen” thing in the title.) The one item on this list that we have to balance on is tolerance. It’s a [...]

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February 15, 2012

Multilingual diversity of countries

Here is an interesting chart from Economist exploring the multilingual diversity of most countries.

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February 14, 2012

Asia: aging population in need of a blessing

“Asia: isolation, poverty loom for an aging popualtion,” IRIN News. An admittedly gloomy article. Asia has 60% of the world’s population and the largest concentration of aging persons. 25% of Asia will be over the age of 60 in 2050, up from 10% today. 65% of the elderly will be women (because they outlive men). [...]

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