My Mission Book Recommendations

 If you would like to learn more about mission, here are my top five book recommendations:

Serving with Eyes Wide Open by David Livermore. Do you know that most mission trips actually make little difference in the lives of the people who go or in the project they go to help with? This book will wake you up. It’s good to go, but there are ways to do it better. A quote:

Some studies demonstrate that while people come home with lofty aspirations of buying less, praying more, and sharing Christ more, within six to eight weeks, most resort back to all the same assumptions and behaviors they had prior to the trip.

When Helping Hurts by Corbett and Fikkert. Despite our good intentions, we often make things worse by how we go about trying to help! This book is a great education for working with the poor, whether overseas or even in America. A quote about the different perceptions of poverty:

North American audiences tend to emphasize a lack of material things such as food, money clean water...poor people typically talk in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation…

Cross-Cultural Partnerships by Mary Lederlietner. I serve on a steering committee with Mary and others from across the USA. We advocate best practices in partnership with indigenous missions (www.cosim.info). This is the best book on how people from different cultures view money and accountability. A quote:

As soon as there is a blackout, we all start going outside. We begin asking, “Do you have electricity…" We transition quite quickly from incredibly independent neighbors to a little collective community…but as soon as the power comes back on, we go back to our independent lives. Individualism is a luxury that can only be maintained if there is a healthy, growing economy…we misunderstand others who approach life without those safety nets.

While You Were Micro-Sleeping by Steve Moore. About how the world is changing so fast and much of our thinking about the overseas context and even the context in our own country is not keeping up. A quote:

Like self-published authors, Christ followers and churches can carry out their grassroots Great Commission agenda in ways that completely circumvent traditional systems and structures. Like it or not, the rules are changing. Forever.

Making Your Partnership Work or Building Strategic Relationships by Daniel Rickett. Dan wrote these while he was with Partners International. They are the most practical books about the nuts and bolts of forming partnerships. A quote:

…to “help someone” is not a good enough reason to partner. Why not? Because it assumes a one-sided view of partnering. In fact, it’s not partnering at all.