Periodically Speaking, Mission Magazines Starting to Dot the Web

by A. Scott Moreau and Mike O’Rear

Back in the “old days” (say, two or three years ago), if you wanted to read a missions magazine, journal, newsletter, or bulletin, you’d have to subscribe—or go to a local seminary library. Not surprisingly, the World Wide Web is providing options most of us never enjoyed in grad or Bible school.

Back in the “old days” (say, two or three years ago), if you wanted to read a missions magazine, journal, newsletter, or bulletin, you’d have to subscribe—or go to a local seminary library. Not surprisingly, the World Wide Web is providing options most of us never enjoyed in grad or Bible school. Thanks to the growing ranks of missions magazines on the Web, researching a topic, locating timely analyses, and seeing mission trends have never been easier.

In this installment of “Missions on the Web,” we’ll introduce you to yet another design of our Web page, taking you on a tour of mission magazines on the Internet. We decided it would be a little easier to find your way around if you had control of the whole screen, so we changed our page to look more like a Web directory. We chose the title “MisLinks” as a simple reminder of the service our page is intended to provide. Finally, we now have “mirrored” sites (identical sites in more than one location). One is with Global Mapping International (www.gmi.org/mislinks/) and the other with Wheaton College (www.wheaton.edu/Missions/mislinks/). For those who prefer the frames version, we provide a link to the frame page in the upper right corner of the new page. All pages provide access to the same sites; feel free to choose the one you prefer.

We’re not all fortunate enough to live near mission libraries and the many mission magazines and journals to be found in them. However, more and more organizations are putting their resources on the Web, often giving you access to previous issues as well as the most recent one. Even the more academic journals are getting in on the action, although they tend to provide searchable indices (to locate articles of interest to you) without necessarily making the full articles available online. Even then, some databases do make the articles available—for a price.

Here we present links to mission periodicals, with the links all organized in our page “Links to Mission Related Periodicals.” You can reach it by clicking on “Journals and Periodicals” in the Mission Resources column of our Home Page. As you can see from the diagram, we have divided the resources into four major categories: (1) journals which are online in part or entirely; (2) home pages for mission journals; (3) magazines from selected mission agencies; and (4) other places to search for articles. We’ll highlight several of them here and leave further browsing and exploration to you.

First are the online journals. The Global Evangelization Movement lets you browse through back issues of David Barrett’s AD2025 Global Monitor (“Scanning, measuring and monitoring the church’s progress in reaching the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ”; http://www.gem-werc. org/adgm/adgm.htm) and Monday Morning Reality Check (“Inform! Remind! Persuade! 1.1 billion people have yet to hear the Good News”; www.gem-werc.org/mmrc/mmrc1998.htm). The Evangelism and Missions Information Service’s Evangelical Missions Quarterly and Pulse (www.wheaton.edu/bgc/emis) give you the latest tables of contents and sample articles, book reviews, editorials, and columns (including our own series, complete with hot-linked tables). Abilene Christian University makes its Journal of Applied Missiology accessible. Included is a section entitled “General Bibliography On China And Christianity In China” from the October, 1995, issue (www. bible.acu.edu/missions/jam/chinabib.htm). The U.S. Center for World Mission’s Mission Frontiers is also available, as are back issues (www.uscwm.org/mobilization/resources/mf/mf.html). Finally, in this category, we found a fascinating journal, To All Men All Things, the main purpose of which is “the effective communication of New Testament truth to Hindu peoples.” This resource is not readily available in the U.S. and contains important academic articles and book reviews on issues relevant to the Indian context.

The second column of links takes you to mission journals that have a home page but do not offer articles online. Apologia Report is an e-mail magazine whichprovides sample issues (www.gospelcom.net/apologia/mainpages/ARsample.html) as well as lists of articles dealing with cults and sects. Missiology and the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, two respected academic journals, offer searchable indices. Typing “context-ualization” in the search page “Title” field of Missiology (www. asmweb. org/search/Article_index.asp) yields 10 articles with the word in their title. You can also search by author and title of book or reviewer (for book reviews). The IBMR index (www.gospel com.net/omsc/ibmr.htm) is split into three parts (1993-96, 1997, and 1998). Each contains a list of articles sorted by author and title, with book reviews sorted by book title and reviewer. To search for particular words on a Web page, use your browser’s search feature by hitting Ctrl-F and typing the word you want to find. Or you can print the three indices and search them the old-fashioned way. In any event, this does not give you the articles themselves, only the titles, authors, years, and pages of publication. The final journal in this column is Mission Studies. For now, it has no articles or indices but indicates that they will be added in the future.

The third column links you to magazines and newsletters developed by mission agencies. There are many more available than listed here; visit ICLNet (www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/christian-missions. html#contents) for a fairly comprehensive list with links and e-mail addresses. Most are available either by regular post or e-mail for free and include e-mail links or online forms that let you subscribe. Advance is an online monthly magazine with issues available from 1995 on.

The DAWN Fridayfax “is a weekly positive news service about what God is doing around the world for those who need up-to-date insights,” with an archive of previous issues available (www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/).

Decision Magazine is the online version of the popular monthly magazine from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. It includes a library of featured articles from March, 1988, to the present. Lausanne’s World Evangelization magazine (www.lausanne .org/wemag/0index.html) has selected articles from 1994 until 1998, when the publication ceased.

World Vision lets you view articles either in text format or through Adobe Acrobat Reader (.pdf) files. If you do not have Acrobat, the site provides a link through which you can download it. Be warned, however, that the pdf files at this site take a long time to download; we advise using the text file option.

The last column provides links to many other mission research resources—databases, directories, and search engines—allowing the user to quickly find mission magazines or articles. The North Atlantic Missiology Project provides a database that locates periodicals by region of the world. The database is searchable by title, area of the world, denomination, etc. Unfortunately, all it provides is publishing information about the periodicals, with no access to the articles themselves. The International Review of Mission link takes you to instructions on accessing the database of its articles through Telenet.

Perhaps the most valuable link in this column is Northern Light, which is an Internet search engine with a special collection of some 5,400 journals, including International Bulletin and International Review of Mission. To get these articles, however, you will need to pay. For example, a recent search for “Contextualization” in Northern Light garnered 3,467 hits. Clicking on the “Special Collection Documents” folder yielded 583 hits. First on the list was “Contextuali-zation: The Theory, The Gap, The Challenge,” written by Darrell L. Whiteman and published in the International Bulletin (January, 1997). A brief description of the article and the choice to buy it (for $1) were provided. To buy articles, you will first need to set up an account (using a credit card), similar to setting up an account with Amazon.com, the well-known online bookseller.

Finally, along the bottom of the page weprovide other journal-related resources. They include links through Penn State to anthropology and religion journals online. Many in these lists are publicly available over the Web, while others are accessible only to Penn State users. H-Net Africa provides a lengthy list of Africa-related periodicals and links to them.

Although the availability of online magazines and journals is still in its infancy, you can access many resources from wherever you live. If you need to get information from magazines, or journals (whether to study a subject that interests you or to keep up to date with a particular ministry), come visit our site and feel free to browse.

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EMQ, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 338-341. Copyright © 1999 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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