This is a side bar to the article “Is Planting Churches in the Muslim World ‘Mission Impossible?'” in the April, 1997 issue of EMQ.

Visit Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and you’ll see an enormous digital clock. It proclaims to the world how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds are left until Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997. While there is no corresponding clock in the prosperous, freewheeling British colony of 6.3 million people, alarm bells have been ringing for some time.

Two perspectives from veteran missionaries that will provoke thinking—and, we hope, prayer.

I find scouting and developing Major League ballplayers surprisingly analogous to recruiting and developing major league missionaries.

The concept of partnership in mission is the focus of discussion and debate across a wide spectrum of mission agencies. This article looks at issues of partnership as expressed in the sending and receiving of personnel in cross-cultural mission.

Access to information is becoming increasingly synonymous with the world’s definition of success and power.

One of missionaries’ greatest concerns today is their children’s education, an issue to which mission agencies are becoming increasingly sensitive.

Two half-truths: (1) Church planting among Muslims is an impossible task; and (2) God must intervene in a special way to reveal how to do it.

Many mission agencies, including my own (CBInternational), want to send more missionaries to the frontiers. But relatively few American missionaries are doing evangelistic, church-planting work among the world’s 3.8 billion non-Christians, followers of non-Christian religions, living in non-Christian lands.