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October 9-11, 2025
Judson University, Illinois

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The Missions Construction Conference is a first-of-its-kind conference dedicated to bringing together gospel-centric organizations, churches, and individuals to edify, equip, and engage one another in the realm of planning, designing and constructing ministry facilities around the world.

Living as a foreigner taught me how to live as a Christian

ECOL Video

Some felt pressure to keep it secret, worried that if they reported their abuse, their parents would be sent home from the mission field.

Children felt that the mission work of their parents came before their needs. One alum in the report said going away to boarding school as elementary-age children left children with a “profound” sense of abandonment.

Wings for the Word -- by Arlene Cornelius

Stories from the lives of Rolen and Arlene Cornelius, radio missionaries in Africa and the Caribbean

PDF and Audio Book

in moments of deep grief you’re faced with a decision: either cling to God and let him be your source of comfort, or run from him and wade through the grief on your own.

You can’t make it through the expatriate life without experiencing the touch of grief. Grief is temporarily or permanently losing something that you loved. Living a life of high mobility, constant goodbyes, and exposure to big and little traumas causes griefs to steadily stack up along the way. I’ve written a couple of books on this metaphor, which I call the Grief Tower. //

Our personal storylines tend to subconsciously ripple into an assumption that God responds the same way to our grief that we as humans do.

When people say, “Look at the bright side,” we think the right thing to do is to stay positive. We forget that God invites lament. When people say, “He works all things out for the good,” we forget that when it doesn’t feel good in the moment, God is still there to empathize, comfort, and acknowledge that this feels so hard. When people say, “You’re so strong for how you’re handling this,” we don’t remember that God doesn’t expect us to be strong. We forget that He is strong so we don’t have to be.

What Is a Missionary Kid Worth?

Risks remain higher in cross-cultural contexts. And misconduct is harder to report.

The young American stood in the back of the truck as it moved slowly through the streets of Nalerigu, Ghana. Friends gathered along the road held up flags and cheered for the teenager clad in a Ghanaian national shirt. Bystanders called out to see the two medals clanging on Trey Haun’s chest. He held up the silver and bronze, waved and then quickly ducked his head, trying to hide his smile.

The 16-year-old has lived somewhere between embarrassed and excited since the 2022 Unicycle Convention and World Championship ended. Winning the first ever medals for Ghana created not only international media-buzz but guest appearances at celebrations all over Northern Ghana. While the world wanted the story behind an American representing Ghana at an international competition, the Mamprusi community just wanted to celebrate their son, Manboora Trey.

I pined away for a different life. Now I’m living that life and pining away for the life I lost.

Is it just discontentment? Am I just restlessly looking for greener grass?

Certainly that’s part of it. I am a mortal hunting for the immortal, and my heart will be restless until I find it.

But I’ve also discovered that history is what binds me to places. I have visited remarkable places like Slovenia, Turkey, and Kazakstan, but I don’t long for them; they don’t appear in my dreams. I’ve loved places for their unique beauty and experiences, but mostly, I miss history.

The places I long for hold a million memories. Ironically, most of them were ordinary.

Guidepost’s findings include an email sent by the executive vice president and general council of the SBC’s Executive Committee, in which he comments on those bringing accusations against the SBC:

This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. It is not the gospel. It is not even a part of the gospel. It is a misdirection play.

This line of thinking has played out on the mission field, too, as can be seen in published reports on the treatment of victims of child abuse overseas. For example, in 1997, the Christian and Missionary Alliance’s Independent Commission of Inquiry reported on claims of abuse at Mamou Alliance Academy, a boarding school in Guinea run by the C&MA from 1950 to 1971. About the students at Mamou, one missionary mother told the commission,

They were never allowed the freedom of expressing their hurts, their problems, their emotions to us. Each week the obligatory letter was not only read but censored, and forced to be rewritten if it appeared at all negative. This destroyed a vital link that could have helped maintain a fragmented family bond. They were repeatedly told not to share adverse happenings either by letter or by word on vacation with parents, lest it upset the parents and interfere with the work they were doing for God. The hidden message to the child was that God was more important, work was more important to the parents that [sic] one’s own child.

The commission summarized the reasoning behind censoring letters as “Children were advised not to upset their parents, lest their ministry to Africans be compromised and Africans left to their pagan ways.” //

We must be alert. Talking points for conversations with children—and adults—should include that secrets shouldn’t be kept, wrongs shouldn’t be hidden, and complaints shouldn’t be silenced in order to “protect the mission.” That needs to be said out loud over and over again to combat all the times that the opposite has been spoken or inferred.

Abuse in the church hinders the mission, not the exposing of that abuse. Silencing or shunning those who make accusations hinders the mission, not the act of hearing them out. //

There’s more to the mission of the church than just going and making disciples. There’s listening to and looking out for the oppressed and the vulnerable. There’s shining the light in dark places. And there’s speaking and acknowledging what is true.

The mission. The mission. The mission. The whole mission.

Welcome to Clearing Customs, by Craig Thompson. This space is part blog, part annotated bibliography. It’s a collection of thoughts, information, links, and articles about cross-cultural interaction and how we deal with transitions from place to place. It’s for those of us who, on our journey, sometimes have to check the box “something to declare.”

The AMH Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson L’Chaim Prize Initiative for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service.

Thanks to the generous support of our Co-Founders, Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson, AMH has established the Gerson-L’Chaim (“To Life”) Initiative. This initiative was launched in 2016 with our initial Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service. The annual L’Chaim Prize of $500,000 is the world’s largest annual award dedicated to direct patient care; the recipient is selected by a panel of leaders in African clinical medicine. The Initiative includes the L’Chaim Prize, an annual $500,000 award given to the winner’s institution to support transformational medical projects. AMH’s Mission Hospital Teaching Network is also a component of the L’Chaim Initiative. The MHTN brings together like-minded institutions committed to significantly expanding their training capacity. AMH’s MHTN includes signature 10-year, $2.5 million grants to hospitals in Kibuye and Malawi to enhance sustainability and expand medical educational programs.

We never told our supporters what had happened with Abbas. We never told our teammates. It took years before the two of us could even talk about it between ourselves.

We’d absorbed the unwritten rule in missions: Failure is unacceptable. I’d grown up immersed in missions culture, yet I couldn’t remember a single time that a missionary story, presentation, or newsletter ever included failure.

I know better now. But even today, missionaries are reluctant to share defeat, depression, or despair. Maybe there is too much at stake. Hundreds of people are donating thousands of dollars for you to do this work. Everyone craves numbers: numbers of converts, numbers of churches planted, and so on.

The “successful” missionaries always have lots of numbers. They fill their newsletters with compelling stories and photographs of large groups of believers. But nobody gives presentations about evangelistic events where no one showed up, or posts a picture of the local pastor who abused his daughter, or writes a newsletter about the exciting convert who just slowly disappears. //

Could we have done anything different with Abbas to prevent his falling away from faith? At the time, we were so consumed by our own hurt that we never helped him explore the root cause of the theft. Maybe we could have taught him to lean more heavily on grace—and reminded ourselves to do the same. Maybe we could have remembered that missionary stories in a broken world rarely end with a “happily ever after.” Until that day when all things are made new, life is always going to be messy.

1. God wrote the Bible chronologically.

2. People understand a story better if you start at the beginning. The Old Testament lays the foundation of the gospel, it explains the problem we are in: God is holy and we are not – therefore we need help, we need Jesus. Below is a video explaining more.

Too often, missionary families are seen as “super Christians” who are invulnerable to the negative consequences arising from their many sacrifices for the mission of God. And so, while missions agencies have a special responsibility to help MKs, local churches who partner with missionaries must also recognize that these kids are paying a high price for their parents’ commitment to God’s kingdom. //

Brazil is the second-largest sending country after the United States, with an estimated 40,000 outgoing missionaries. Brazilians often join an English-speaking team in other countries. Their kids may attend English-speaking international schools, which adds an additional language they must learn, said Alicia Macedo, who is the MK coordinator for the Brazilian Association of Cross-Cultural Missions.

Regardless of where these kids are from, however, the problems they face are largely universal. //

For missionary kids, the answer to the question of who sent them overseas is much clearer: God did. That adds complexity—and sometimes pain—to the MK experience.

Many missionary kids have grown up in a culture in which negative feelings are dismissed. They feel lost in the bigger purpose of God’s mission, and their grief gets hidden away. God is not seen as a safe place for some, said Wells.

Christian Health Service Corps is a community of Christian doctors, health professionals and health educators committed to serving the poor in places that have little or no access to healthcare

They recount the story of Amy Medina, an American missionary in Tanzania, whose husband was teaching a class on developing a biblical worldview. Somehow, the subject of tattoos arose, and the class reacted so negatively to the idea of a Christian getting a tattoo that the missionary asked: “Which would bother you more: if your pastor got a tattoo, or if he committed adultery?” The class was unanimous. The tattoo would be more disturbing! //

In this case, as the conversation progressed, the missionary acknowledged that the Scriptures explicitly forbid both tattoos and adultery (Lev. 19:28; Deut. 5:18). The majority of American Bible-readers believe the tattoo prohibition to be irrelevant today, but the Tanzanians believe both commands are binding, and surprisingly, the tattoo represents something even worse than adultery. Muehlhoff and Langer explain the students’ mindset:

“Tattoos are associated with witchcraft and evil spirits. A tattoo, regardless of personal intentions, is a mark of ownership placed on your body that either confirms the influence of a witch doctor or an evil spirit over your life, or at the very least implies or invites such influence. Adultery is wrong, but surely even Americans think it is worse for a pastor to publicly identify with an evil spirit.” (69) //

Beginning with common ground helps us find greater clarity on where the real disagreement lies. One area presents itself quickly: the principles we use in applying biblical commands across historical and cultural contexts, as well as the difference between the covenants. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the debate isn’t over the authority of Scripture, but how we interpret this Old Testament command.

A second takeaway is the emphasis the students give to spiritual warfare. Faithfulness to one’s spouse is a moral mandate, for sure, and to break one’s covenantal vows is to fail morally. The tattoo, however (at least in this culture), is a public sign of allegiance to a witch doctor, evil spirit, or something supernatural. The Americans may object that we shouldn’t read African cultural concerns into every tattoo, while the Tanzanians may object that Americans too often underestimate or neglect the dynamics of spiritual warfare. (This cross-cultural discussion of how much or how little we should emphasize the powers and principalities is a subject I devoted several columns to last year.)

A third area of disagreement arises from the difference between living in a guilt/innocence culture versus an honor/shame culture. That’s the primary reason the students believed the tattoo was a greater scandal than the adultery. “Guilt before the law as opposed to shame before the community is valued differently in the two cultures,” Muehlhoff and Langer write (71). //

“The conviction spectrum does not eliminate disagreements but rather locates and clarifies our disagreements. The goal is that appreciating the common ground lays a foundation for respecting differing convictions. This opens the door to further conversation and hopefully to respectful compromises along the lines which Paul suggests when he exhorts those who are stronger in faith not to flaunt their freedom and those who are weaker in faith not to judge their brothers.” (72)

The bed where missionary Murray Brown lay was on the fifth floor of a hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. A pressure cooker had exploded, leaving severe burns on Murray’s hands, abdomen and legs. On his right hand the wounds were so deep that the muscles and ligaments were exposed.

“For burns as deep as these,” his doctor advised, “you will need skin grafts.”

Very early one morning as Murray lay awake, he saw a procession of African army ants creep across the floor of his room. In horror he watched them come toward his bed. Up they crawled until they reached his body and made their way under the bandages to chew at his burned flesh.

“Help!” Murray cried. But at that early hour there was no nurse on the hospital floor to hear him.

“Isn’t there anyone to help me?” he called. But no one answered.

Three times he repeated his anguished cry. But his pleas went unheard.

In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, it was the middle of the night. A friend of Murray Brown’s lay in bed, sound asleep. Suddenly he was awakened by a cry of distress. Thinking it might be one of his children, he got up and went to look at them. But they were all sleeping soundly.

After returning to his bed, he again heard a cry for help. Once more he went to look at the children, but they were still asleep.

This time when he returned to bed, he distinctly heard these words: “Help! Isn’t there anyone to help me?”

The man awakened his wife. “I’ve just heard Murray Brown’s voice,” he said. “He is calling for help.”

The man and his wife prayed for their friend. They had no idea what his need might be, but they wrestled in prayer until they were assured victory had come.

No one came to the missionary’s aid that morning in the hospital in Kumasi. But suddenly, to Murray’s amazement, the ants turned away from him and left his bed. They crawled across the hospital floor and disappeared, just as though someone had called them.

Later, when the doctor removed the bandages, he found new flesh forming over the wounds. Even over the exposed tendons on his right hand, healthy pink flesh had appeared.

Murray’s healing was so complete that there was no need to graft skin. Eventually, only a tiny scar remained on one thigh to remind him of his dreadful experience.

Many months later Murray learned how his friend in Scottsbluff had heard his voice from the other side of the world. At last he understood why the ants had turned and crawled away.

Murray Brown and his wife, Marjorie, were missionaries to Africa from 1939 to 1980.