In the first half of 2009, news reports poured in of pirate vessels attacking vital shipping lanes along the coast of Somalia in southern Africa. Entire shiploads of cargo were held for ransom by pirates, delayed severely, or even lost at sea.

Amid that chaos, Mark Wilson was learning the ropes for his new job as logistics coordinator for the U.S. headquarters of Africa Inland Mission (AIM)—a ...

Charlie and Agnes are some of the meekest people I've ever known. Charlie is a bright, energetic, hard-working man who could have been successful at just about anything he set out to do. What he set out to do was mission work. He spent his entire career working with some of the lowliest people on earth—alcoholics on skid row. For many years he was director of Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, ...

At Teen Missions, campers give up virtually their entire summer for [a boot camp] on evangelism. They spend two weeks in Merritt Island, Florida, learning the work of a missionary before heading into the world in teams of about 25. They are schooled in evangelism, construction, and Bible studies. They don purple construction hats as they work the ground with hoes and wheelbarrows. They practice public ...

There were five of us traveling across the Sahel of Africa, just south of the Sahara Desert. We had started out in Niamey, Niger, and we were working our way toward the Dogon in Mali. We were traveling through Burkina Faso in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The air conditioning system was broken, and the temperature outside was 120 degrees plus. It was dusty, the windows were open, and it was hard to carry ...

On April 15, 2008, Barry and Marybeth Mosier, Seventh-day Adventist missionaries to Tanzania for eight years, climbed aboard a plane bound for Kinsangani, Congo, to visit their 24-year-old son, Keith. Along for the flight was their 14-year-old daughter, April, and 3-year-old son, Andrew. The plane crashed during takeoff and plowed its way through a crowded marketplace. When the plane—now engulfed ...

In his book The Jesus Revolution, pastor and author Leith Anderson shares a story about the tension that sometimes comes between obeying God and obeying the law of the land. A number of years ago, he and three others were traveling to a Communist country where Christians were regularly being persecuted. They did not have a direct flight to their destination, so they had to stay in a neighboring country ...

In an article for Today's Christian about the rapid growth of the church in China (now 70 million strong), Rob Moll tells the story of a missionary and businessman called Uncle Daniel, offering a glimpse into God's work in a seemingly closed society:

Uncle Daniel spent years as a missionary to China's rural villages. There, he said, it was like the Book of Acts, complete with miracles, exorcisms, ...

With the growth of the multinational church, mission is becoming multidirectional. The U.S. remains the largest single contributor of Protestant cross-cultural missionaries. But which country is the second largest? Not a Western nation, but India. And it is possible that India has overtaken the States in the number of those involved in truly cross-cultural mission—both within and beyond India. ...

Two weeks after the [2008 presidential] election, I traveled to India to meet Christian pioneers seeking to overturn India's institutional form of discrimination, the caste system. One scholar said to me, "You Americans are celebrating the election of a black man after only 250 years of slavery. We are still waiting for liberation after 4,000 years of living under caste." The Dalit Freedom Network ...

In his book Organic Church, Neil Cole describes a number of missional communities that go where the people are, rather than have the people come to them. Such church communities meet in various places, including pubs, community centers, and simple living rooms. One particular church Cole describes meets in a coffeehouse. After the small band of people experienced some growth, they immediately decided ...