Book Review - Global Missions Handbook: A guide for Crosscultural Service

Global Mission Handbook: A Guide for Crosscultural Service – Steve Hoke & Bill Taylor
InterVarsity Press, 2009
Reviewed by Kevin Book-Satterlee

Note: Due to the workbook style of Steve Hoke and Bill Taylor’s Global Missionary Handbook, this review will be one in a series of reviews broken up over multiple issues. This review will focus on the first section on becoming a missionary and discerning the call while exploring missions.

InterVarsity Press has published the well-updated revision by Hoke and Taylor, previously titled Send Me! Your Journey to the Nations. Hoke and Taylor have remained well ingrained in the missions world and the cultural shifts of potential western missionaries, updating and keeping their work current.

They begin as any missions handbook would do by defining missions. While missions encompasses a number of things and may take shape in multiple ways, Hoke and Taylor both define missions and missionaries in the traditional sense. Traditional meaning having been sent to a particular context be it international or domestic. Unlike some who use the term missional to encompass the God given purpose of all Christians, Hoke and Taylor reject this notion, claiming that if all are missionaries, none are (21).

Defining missions as Hoke and Taylor do protect the integrity of what has been considered missions for some time. However, to define it as such limits the true understanding of God. Like the priesthood of all believers, classifying all Christians who take their discipleship seriously as missionaries does not limit cross-cultural or domestic traditional missions status. By contrast however, limiting the term as Hoke and Taylor do fails the Church in its total inclusion of the mission of God. The worry of a blurred distinction can be corrected by demarking the type of mission, such as cross-cultural, or urban, etc.

Despite their fairly protective definition of mission, Hoke and Taylor have created a valuable section for pre-missionaries or those exploring entering into a context in the sense of traditional missions (for the sake of this review, when referring to missions it will mean missions as Hoke and Taylor define it).

The article, “The Global Canvas: How Your Story Fits into the Big Picture,” written by Taylor and Hoke does an excellent job in discussing current missions issues from the major challenges with globalization, changing world-views, to the shift of Christianity from the North to South and other such issues. The use of the term “story” in this article and others, shows the sensitivity to the changing world-view and language of the up-and-coming generation of missionaries.

The assessments at the beginning of the book serve the reader well in the ability to begin engaging the thought of global missions. For those who have already begun exploring the call to missions before reading the book, these sections will serve as radically affirming, but can also guide a person with the first inklings of the call to missions (or not).

All this is basically introduction, the pre-“Getting Ready” section which is called phase 1. The layout of the book is already deeply engrained and organized, breaking each piece into small articles and workbook guided reflections.

One of the most valuable pieces to this book is the inclusion of the “Global Perspectives” articles, written by those, naturally, with a global perspective. By including these articles, the reader begins to be let in on the collaborative work that is missions today. Hoke and Taylor quickly affirm the partnership collaboration needed among missionaries of differing cultures. Readers cannot easily imagine their place in missions without understanding the equalization between missionaries from all over the world. The missionary enterprise is now globalized and must be addressed hereon when discussing missions, especially the preparation of missions.

All in all, while the book takes a good deal of introspective and interactive time, from just the introduction, it will be a valuable resource. This would be a great book for those teaching missions formally or informally and for missions organizations working with inquirers and early applicants. It will resonate well with younger audiences and be incredibly informative even for “finishers” as they enter the field of missions with their “beginner” counterparts.

From the introduction alone, the book is powerful. Look for section 1, “Getting Ready” in the following issue.