Chapter 10

 

The Second Five Years:

November 2003—October 2008

Another website, a new series of brochures, and more books

 

 

 

 

            About a year after missionarycare.com became a reality. Bonnie and I were meeting in Thailand with a group of  teachers serving in five or six countries in Asia.  They met in northern Thailand in January 2005 because it was a place where all 600 of them could gather and worship God openly. 

            When we passed out our card with our website (www.missionarycare.com) on it, many of them said, “We cannot (dare not) visit your website.”  Realizing that many of those serving God in the most difficult places would risk their ministry, we resolved to create a website they could visit.  We decided to keep our website an openly Christian one, but we made it a website that never mentioned “missionaries” or “evangelism” in any way.  This was acceptable to the agency of the teachers we were serving.

            After considering several names for the website, we chose www.crossculturalworkers.com.  Material on the website was clearly Christian and quoted scripture, giving the references.  However, I went through all of the brochures and books to remove all mention of missionaries.  “What Missionaries Ought to Know…” was changed to “What Cross-Cultural Workers Ought to Know…,” and other necessary changes were made.  It would have been nice if I could have done a simple “find and replace.” Then I could have clicked “replace all” for each brochure and each book.  However, while that made sense much of the time, there were always times that the results were nonsensical.  So, I had to click “find next” and then either click “replace” or “cancel” out of the “find and replace” window and key in a reasonable change.

            Although I could do this for the things I had written, I could not do that for the material in the database.  Those references included “missionary” words in titles and quotes, and I could not change them.  So crossculturalworkers.com contains all of the brochures and most of the books and I have written and could change, but it does not contain the database.

            Making those changes took many months, and I had the approval of the agency for all of the changes so that their teachers could visit it (this was in the days when there were no ways to visit places on the Internet without IT people in the host country knowing one was doing so).   By the end of October, 2005, crossculturalworkers.com was in operation.  By the end of October 2008 (3 years) people had downloaded 8802 books and 72,365 brochures from crossculturalworkers.com.  Such a website was clearly needed.  Of course, each agency has its own requirements about what their members can visit, so not everyone can visit this site—but many can.

            Now all of the brochures and books are available on two websites, both missionarycare.com and crossculturalworkers.com.  This makes them available to many people serving in limited access countries where missionaries are not allowed.   

            In addition to this new website, I presented another paper and published another journal article about missionary member care.  In March 2006, I presented “Internet activity—A New data source:  What people want to know about caring for missionaries” at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Studies in Cincinnati, OH.  As I attended that convention, I realized how much I had changed.  I was no longer interested as much in the integration of psychology and Christianity as I was in missionary member care.  I also published a journal article, “Missionary member care:  What people want to know” in the Fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.

 

Brochures

 

            During these five years, I continued to write brochures for the “What Missionaries Ought to know…” series which appear on the crossculturalworkers.com website as well.  I also encountered several issues that were important in the marriages of missionary couples, so I began a new series on “Missionary Marriage Issues.”

 

Additional brochures for the “What Missionaries Ought to Know…” series.2003-2008

 

 

Stewardship of Self (no new brochures)

 

New brochures in the Missionary Marriage Issues:

 

Additional brochures during 2003-2008

 

27 new brochures as follows:

13 brochures in the Ought to Know series and

8 brochures in the Missionary Marriage Issues Series 

 

Total Brochures Available by October 2008

40 brochures in the Ought to Know series 

9 Brochures in the Stewardship of Self series

8 brochures in the Missionary Marriage Issues series

57 total brochures

 

Brochures downloaded during these five years

 

Database

 

            I also continued to add new references in the database.  During this five year interval I added 110 new records, and by the end of October, 2008, there were 847 records in the database.  People viewed 410,414 full citations during these five years.

 

Books

 

            I revised What Missionaries Ought to Know each year, and I added several other books to the e-books page.  Here is a list of the books.

 

            During these years I revised one book and added six new books.  Thus a total of eight books are posted.

 

Books downloaded during these five years

 

Summary at the end of October 2008

 

2 Websites (Pageviews)

·         Missionarycare.com                1,444,447

·         Crossculturalworkers.com          105,046

·         Total Pages Viewed                1,549,493

57 Brochures (Downloads)

·         Missionarycare.com                   236,671

·         Crossculturalworkers.com            72,365

·         Total Downloaded                     309,036

8 Books (Downloads)

·         Missionarycare.com                     32,101

·         Crossculturalworkers.com              8,802

·         Total Books Downloaded            40,903

Database (only on missionarycare.com)

·         Records                                             847

·         Full citations viewed                  410,814