Jolly Digest - 3-17-07 - St. Patrick's Day Edition

Today is St. Patrick's Day so let's do a St. Patty's Day Jolly Digest.  Today's theme will be not just St. Patrick himself, but we will be honoring missionaries as Patrick was one of the greatest missionaries in history.

First though, you have to wear green on St. Patrick's Day and a blog is no different.  So here's my attempt to dress the blog up with a little bit of green and also a way of honoring my Gator's blowout of Jackson State in the opening round of the NCAA tourney.  Yeah, yeah, I know, it wasn't much of a game and I'm not going to get all excited yet.  The truth is that the real tournament starts now, now that all of the round one mismatches are over - like Florida - Jackson State, Kansas - Niagara, Tennessee - Long Beach State and Virginia Commonwealth - Doooooooooook.

But enough basketball for now - on to St. Patrick and missions.

Here's a couple of blog posts about St. Patrick

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Mars Hill

St. Patrick at Faith-Journey.com

There's actually not a lot out there on blogs about St. Patrick.  Maybe next year if I'm more on the ball I'll find an old sermon I preached about him and post it - right now it's archived somewhere I can't find it.  In the meantime though there are a couple of books out there that will give you some good insight into Patrick, his methods and his influence - The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter an How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.  I did read Patrick, a novel by Stephen Lawhead.  It was decent although I have liked other books by Lawhead better. It claims to be based on some new historical resources but I have never taken the time to track them down to see if Lawhead was accurate.  What is particularly interesting about Lawhead's account is his suggestion that Pelagius had a major formative influence on Patrick.  I'd be curious to see if there are any historians who back him up on that.

As to missionaries here are a few that are in my bloglines reader.

Under the Acacias - a blog by Keith Smith about the Fulani people of Burkina Faso.

And, two of the kids from my old youth group at Pinewood Presbyterian in Middleburg, FL are now missionaries in Thailand.

Grace for the Moment is the blog of Paul and Crystal Henry.

God's Sufficient Grace is the blog of Catherine Rogers.

And, as far as missions philosophy goes, one of the best things I have seen lately is an article by Christopher J. H. Wright in Christianity Today called An Upside Down World.  Here's my favorite quote from the article which I hope will whet your appetite for the rest of it.

So another piece of unlearning we must do is breaking the habit of using the term mission field to refer to everywhere else in the world except our home country in the West. The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality. Not only does it perpetuate a patronizing view of the rest of the world as always being on the receiving end of our missionary largesse, but it also fails to recognize the maturity of churches in many other lands.

I'll conclude here but as I do let me invite/solicit comments from anyone who knows of a blog from a missionary in any part of the world (including the West!) that you think it would be good for us to know about.

Related Tags: Religion, Theology, Church, Christian, Christianity, St. Patrick, St. Patrick's Day, Missions, Missionaries