In Mission Together Resources

The Abundant Community: Awakening the Powers of Families and Neighborhoods

We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us.
The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community.  This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all.

The World Cafe: Shaping Our World Through Conversations that Matter

The World Cafe process has been used by tens of thousands of people around the world to tackle real-life issues. Based on seven key principles, it begins with small, intimate conversations at cafe-style tables; these gatherings then link and build on each other as people move between groups and cross-pollinate ideas. In this way, cafe learning enables even very large groups to think together creatively in a single, connected conversation. 

Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: The Power of Dialogue in Educating Adults

In this updated version of her landmark book Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach, celebrated adult educator Jane Vella revisits her twelve principles of dialogue education with a new theoretical perspective gleaned from the discipline of quantum physics. Vella sees the path to learning as a holistic, integrated, spiritual, and energetic process. She uses engaging, personal stories of her work in a variety of adult learning settings, in different countries and with different educational purposes, to show readers how to utilize the twelve principles in their own practice with any type of adult learner, anywhere.

The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom in the Workplace

Communication within many organizations has been reduced to email, electronic file transfer, and hasty sound bytes at hurried meetings. More and more, people appear to have forgotten the value of wisdom gained by ordinary conversations.
But, at different times in history, conversation has been regarded as an art form - a crucial component of human relations. Conversation has the power to solve a problem, heal a wound, generate commitment, bond a team, generate new options, or build a vision. Conversations can shift working patterns, build friendships, create focus and energy, cement resolve.
The Art of Focused Conversation convincingly restores this most human of attributes to prime place within businesses and organizations, and demonstrates what can be accomplished through the medium of focused conversation.

The Workshop Book: From Individual Creativity to Group Action

Increasingly, people working in teams face complex issues that need resolving in an efficient, participatory manner that honors the group’s diverse perspectives and individual creativity. The Workshop Book outlines the best practices of the workshop method, based on the Institute for Cultural Affair’s Technology of Participation,™ and its use in consensus formation, planning, problem solving, and research. It also discusses workshop preparation and design, leadership styles, dealing with difficult behaviors, and special applications such as its use in large groups and for planning purposes.

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself

Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good.
But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself.

Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission

One of the biggest challenges in global mission work is money—not merely the need for it, but working through cross-cultural differences surrounding how funds are used and accounted for. Cross-cultural missteps regarding financial issues can derail partnerships between supporting churches and agencies and national leaders on the ground. North Americans don’t understand how cultural expectations of patronage shape how financial support is perceived and understood, and Western money often comes with subtle strings attached. So local mission work is hampered by perceived paternalism, and donors are frustrated with lack of results or accountability. How do we build financial partnerships for effective mission without fostering neo-colonialism?

Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, And How to Reverse It

Veteran urban activist Robert Lupton reveals the shockingly toxic effects that modern charity has upon the very people meant to benefit from it. Toxic Charity provides proven new models for charitable groups who want to help—not sabotage—those whom they desire to serve.

We Are Not the Hero: A Missionary's Guide to Sharing Christ, Not a Culture of Dependency

While globalization gives North American Christians unprecedented opportunities to influence the world, we need to take care not to slip into a type of postmodern colonialism in which we make ourselves the experts or the 'hero come to save the day.' The day has come when all of us who influence or practice missions need to intentionally guide others to look to God and to their own communities for resources, solutions, creativity, ingenuity, hard work, and interdependence, instead of making them perpetual recipients of all the good things we can do for them.

When Charity Destroys Dignity: Overcoming Unhealthy Dependency in the Christian Movement

This book is about avoiding or overcoming unhealthy dependency in the Christian movement. It contains a description of the dependency syndrome, its historical development and how to overcome it. Though unhealthy dependency is widespread, the basic premise of this book is that it does not need to be considered an incurable illness. The reader will be introduced to churches that were once victims of unhealthy dependency but learned how to overcome it. There are many practical illustrations and suggestions for those in Christian service who face the challenge of avoiding or overcoming unhealthy dependency.

The Great Omission: Fulfilling Christ's Commission Completely

In this powerful call for the inclusion of indigenous believers in the Great Commission, Steve Saint shows how current missions strategies have unwittingly harmed the indigenous church and kept millions of believers from fulfilling their roles in God's Kingdom -- and millions of others from hearing the Good News.

Missions and Money: Affluence as a Missionary Problem...Revisited

The first edition of this text became a much discussed book in Christian missionary circles. This edition offers reflections in the light of a changed situation, one marked by increases in the number of short-term missioners and in the numbers of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans leaving their homelands to serve as missionaries.

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: And the Causes That Hinder It

If it were once believed that the freedom of churches should be restricted to bring greater control to missions, Roland Allen sets out to overturn this conception. Warning against the danger of imposing greater limits on churches, the Author advocates that all members of the church, 'natives' and foreigners alike, must take an active role in its establishment and daily life.

Making Your Partnership Work

Making Your Partnership Work is a practical guide for church and mission partnerships. Drawing on 30 years of experience, Daniel Rickett shows how effective mission partnerships are a blend of vision, relationship, and results.