I can’t believe that the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IMBR) is now free online. This is top flight missiology. I’ve been a subscriber for years. Several articles have had a profound impact on my missiology. I may add to that list from some of the articles in the most recent issue of IBMR on Partnership. Consider an excerpt from Jonathan Bonk’s (author of the very helpful Missions & Money) introductory editorial:
The deficiencies of the discourse of ecclesiastical partnership become apparent when applied to the organs of our own bodies. It would be bizarre to suggest that each of the thousands of parts that compose a healthy human being is in some kind of voluntary partnership with all of the others. Much more is at stake in the interconnections, interpenetrations, and interdependencies within us than the word “partnership†can be made to imply. A detached body part is dead. In the most profound and ultimate sense, as with the myriad parts of any living body, so all Christians are interconnected, utterly interdependent members of one body. As such, we dare not confine our practical thinking about how to fulfill the church’s mission to the restricted range of possibilities suggested or permitted by a contractual term, even one so potentially rich and intimate as “partnership.â€
Read the Rest of “What About Partnership“