by Craig Greenfield on March 19, 2019
You might be a missionary – someone called and sent to serve God cross-culturally – but chances are, you don’t like being called a missionary. That’s because, in popular Western culture, missionaries are seen as pith helmet-wearing colonialists – forcing their culture and religion on people who don’t want it. These concerns go back to […]
by Craig Greenfield on March 5, 2019
The battle is real – compassion fatigue, backstabbing, lack of breakthroughs. And that’s just on Twitter. Ministry life can be even more brutal. Especially if you’re engaged in ministry amongst people who are hurting – which is almost anyone in ministry, right? They hurt. We get hurt helping them. We hurt ourselves – and others. […]
by Craig Greenfield on July 25, 2018
I learnt the hard way what NOT to do in poor communities. When I first came to Cambodia 22 years ago, the place was a mess. People were poor. Dirt poor. Frankly, you’d have had to be a heartless zombie not to respond. And the missionaries came flooding in. We were full of compassion and […]
by Craig Greenfield on April 19, 2018
Got your t-shirts printed? Your passport up to date? Crowd-funding page all set? It’s almost time to go! The Short Term Mission season is almost upon us, and very soon swarms of teams will converge on poor communities around the world. They are ready to paint orphanages and hand out tracts in a language they don’t […]
by Craig Greenfield on January 17, 2018
Ever get the feeling you’ll be complicit in injustice no matter what you do? I remember finding out that slave-labor was used to build natural-gas pipelines in Burma. Thousands of slaves were involved in clearing the land and in construction work along the 65km pipeline. So, of course I decided to boycott the French and British […]
by Craig Greenfield on August 29, 2017
Good intentions to alleviate poverty are not good enough. Sometimes our helping hurts the “helped.” I hesitate to write these words, because I know how easily an article like this can be misconstrued, and even used to justify the opposite of generosity. “What’s the point of giving then?” you might be tempted to ask. “It’s […]
by Craig Greenfield on June 2, 2017
I’m going to wade into this thorny area today, because it’s one of the most common questions I get via email from people: “What do I do when my spouse doesn’t have the same sense of calling to the poor, or mission, or ministry, that I do?” A common scenario is that one partner is gung-ho […]
by Craig Greenfield on May 8, 2017
This summer, church teams of young and old will don matching t-shirts and board a plane to some far-off place. But whether you are building houses in Mexico or volunteering at an orphanage in Guatemala – there is one item in your backpack that is GUARANTEED to undermine your ability to serve responsibly… The selfie […]
by Craig Greenfield on April 26, 2016
Today’s guest post comes from Craig Greenfield, whose new book Subversive Jesus: an adventure in justice, mercy and faithfulness in a broken world is out this month. Subversive Jesus is the story of one family’s experiment in putting the most counter-cultural teachings of Christ into practice. When Jesus says invite the poor for a meal, Craig […]
by Craig Greenfield on February 18, 2016
My neighbors were evicted. I came home to find their worldly belongings – a couple of dirty sheets, a filthy pink pillow and assorted clothing – piled in a puddle outside my front door. They had previously been living crammed together in one of the tiny, windowless rooms that line our alleyway. Apparently our landlord […]
by Craig Greenfield on October 5, 2015
Would you give an addict a clean needle, so they could stay alive until they found freedom from their addiction? Would you give a prostituted woman condoms, so she could protect herself until she found freedom from prostitution? Clearly, the famous evangelical leader I was speaking with in Cambodia didn’t think we should be helping […]
by Craig Greenfield on September 15, 2015
Partnering directly with poor churches is a promising way to do mission for affluent churches. Skip the middleman and Go Direct is the mantra of this internet age. I personally like the idea of this approach because of the possibility it holds for real, long-term, mutual relationships to emerge between rich and poor. But if you’ve […]