I have been working really hard on my new book, and it is going to be released soon. 🙂 It will be titled How to Bless a Missionary. I am so excited that it will be released and ready for everyone to be a blessing to the missionaries that they know for the holiday season. I can’t wait to tell you more about it!
Today, though, I’m going to let you know about a few of the books about missions that I have read in the last few months. I’m going to share my opinions and an honest review of the books so that you can choose whether or not they might be helpful to your interest in missions. These links are affiliate links to Amazon (which means that if you click them and then purchase something, familiesformissions.com will receive a small commission at no expense to you.)
One book I read was called Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global by Andy Johnson, and it’s part of the 9Marks series of books for Building Healthy Churches. This book talks about how the local church can have the vision for World Wide missions, and it also talks about how your local church can send and support missionaries well. The author of this book really emphasizes that the local church should invest deeply in a few missionaries and not widely in many, many missionaries supported at low rates. He advocates for the church to get to know their missionaries on a more personal level, and he also encourages the local church to consider themselves as the primary source of support for the missionaries. He also talks about the benefits or detriments of short-term mission trips. He emphasizes the need for pastors and elders to visit missionaries, which I fully support. This was a great, short little book, and it is easy to read in one afternoon. It would be great to pass on to your pastor or local Mission leader.
One of the next books that I read is called The Reentry Team: Caring for Your Returning Missionaries by Neil Pirolo. This is a really great book about learning about the returning missionary and the challenges each may face. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a missionary that they support overseas. This is a great book for mission committees and Mission leaders to read as well.
The beginning of the book is written as an introduction and then the remainder of the book is written as a compilation of notes, letters, and first hand accounts of missionaries or missionary kids who returned from serving overseas to their home country (or their parent’s home country). The author then gives some commentary after each short story, and tries to help the reader see the downfalls, errors, and problems the missionaries experienced. He addresses how the missionary could have had a better reentry into their home society.
Another book written by the same author, Neil Pirolo, is called Serving as Senders Today: How to Care for your Missionaries as they Prepare to Go, Are on the Field and Return Home. Written years ago, it talks about the need for churches and individuals to send missionaries well. It describes the missionary who is going overseas and talks about what they need from their team at home (moral support, the logistics that they will need help with, the financial support, communications support, and then reentry support). Churches and small groups are encouraged to invest in a missionary family and to help them no matter what the need. While it has some great information and good points, I did not enjoy the writing style. I feel like the editing could have been tightened up a little bit. One good thing in this book is that it gives action steps and ideas for your personal involvement at the end of each chapter. This will help you as the reader if you have gotten lost during the chapters to really hone in and focus on what’s important.
  
Another book that I recently read was called Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World’s Difficult Places. This book was written by Tim Keesee, and there is also a video series that can be purchased separately from the book. This book and video series document this man’s journey as the person from the mission agency that went to visit workers overseas in difficult or hard-to-reach areas. The book is written as a journal along his journey, so you read short snippets from each step along the way as if you’re reading his journal or diary. But it gave me a big-picture view of what it would be like to try to spread the gospel in places like China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and India. You can see firsthand from his writings the challenges that the mission workers in those areas are facing and the dangers they confront every day. I would highly recommend this book to mission leaders as well as those who feel that they are interested in serving God in hard-to-reach and dangerous places.
Well, I think this post is long-enough for my first installment of books about missions. I’ll pick other books for me next update on what I have read and what you might like to read. What books have you read? Can you recommend some to me?
