What Printed (or for E-Readers) Resources about Missionary Member Care are Available?
Short & Simple Summary
There is no shortage of books and articles about member care topics, and the most important ones about member care itself are discussed in this chapter. Books about member care for missionaries are beginning to appear in formats for E-readers, and those are noted as well. Finally, a database of printed materials is presented. Here are the topics covered in this chapter.
Printed Books
Books for E-readers
Periodicals
Annotated Bibliographies
If you want more detail and links to other sources, read on.
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Hundreds of articles and scores of books are available about missionary member care and all the areas it covers. These began to appear about 1980 and have increased in number and in the places producing them in the years since.
E-readers such as Kindle and Nook have been invented and are very popular with missionaries who like to carry many books with them. E-readers will probably never totally replace printed books, but they are becoming increasingly popular in the last few years. Missionary member care resources are beginning to appear for these.
Printed Books
Scores of books related to missionary member care are available; however, there are only a few books that have been about the whole field of member care, and these are all edited books.
· Helping Missionaries Grow: Readings in Mental Health and Missions. (Kelly O’Donnell, Ed., 1988, William Carey Library). This book is divided into four major parts: missionary preparation, missionary families, missionary adjustment, and special issues. It contains 50 chapters written by 49 authors, and most of them had been published previously in periodicals or presented as papers at professional meetings. A list of all the titles of all the chapters in this book is available in Appendix A at the end of this book. Helping Missionaries Grow is out of print, but the entire book is available for download at https://sites.google.com/site/membercaravan/test/helping-ms-grow-book.
· Missionary Care: Counting the Cost for World Evangelization (Kelly O’Donnell, Ed., 1992, William Carey Library). This book is divided into five major parts: overview, clinical care, team development, mission agencies, and future directions. It contains 25 chapters written by 23 authors, and they are a mixture of articles published previously in periodicals and originals. A list of all the titles of all the chapters in this book is available in Appendix A at the end of this book. Missionary Care is out of print; however, the entire book is available to be viewed or downloaded at https://sites.google.com/site/membercaravan/test/mc-counting-the-cost-book- .
· Enhancing Missionary Vitality: Mental Health Professions Serving Global Mission (John R. Powell & Joyce M. Bowers, Eds., 2002, Mission Training International, Palmer Lake, CO). This book is divided into nine major parts: the mental health and missions conference, professional intervention, complexities of cross-cultural service, interfaces with sending agencies, models of preventive services, clinical interventions, innovative models, ethics and professional standards, and applied research. It contains 56 chapters written by 46 authors, and they are primarily chapters written for this volume. A list of all the titles of all the chapters in this book is available in Appendix A at the end of this book. The book is available for purchase from MTI at http://www.mti.org/purchase/.
· Doing Member Care Well: Perspectives and Practices from around the World (Kelly O’Donnell, Ed., 2002, William Carey Library). This book is divided into three major parts: The member care context, regional issues and insights, and providing and developing member care. It contains 50 chapters written by 49 authors, and they are a mixture of published previously in periodicals and originals. A list of all the titles of all the chapters in this book is available in Appendix A at the end of this book. The first part of this book (Chapters 1-5) is available at https://sites.google.com/site/membercaravan/test/doing-member-care-well. It is also available for purchase at MTI.
· Other Books. Of course, there are many other books about specific topics in missionary member care. An excellent list of 50 books is at Member Caravan at https://sites.google.com/site/membercaravan/home. This site offers excellent materials to support those interested in member care, and it is oriented toward students receiving training in member care. Explore the whole site to see what is available. For the 50+ books list click the link on the left side of the home page, then download a pdf of the list at the bottom of that page.
Books for E-readers
Some missionary member care books are available either as printed books or as digital books to be read on E-readers. Other member care books are available only in digital formats to be read on computers or E-readers. Missionary Care has 14 E-books available in several digital formats. Here are the most popular ones.
· What Missionaries Ought to Know
· Psychology for Missionaries
· Missionary Marriage Issues
· Missionary Singles Issues
· Third Culture Kids and Adolescence
· Raising Resilient MKs
All of these books, as well as others, are available at http://www.missionarycare.com. People may download the books in .mobi format for Kindle, in .epub format for Nook, and other formats (.doc, .pdf .zip) to be read on a computer.
Serving as Senders Today by Neal Pirolo, a missionary member care book for churches or anyone else helping send missionaries to other cultures, is available in many places as a printed book or in Kindle format at Amazon.com.
Periodicals
Mission agency publications sometimes have articles in them suggesting what people can do to help the missionaries they support. Likewise, denominational publications occasionally urge their readers to encourage their missionaries. However, two Christian mental health professional journals have frequent articles related to missionary member care.
· The Journal of Psychology and Christianity (http://caps.net/membership/publications/jpc) has published articles for more than three decades. In fact, an article in a 1983 issue was reprinted in that first major book, Helping Missionaries Grow.
· The Journal of Psychology and Theology (http://journals.biola.edu/jpt) also had an article reprinted in that first book. In addition to that, this journal has devoted three complete issues to missionary member care articles.
Finally, Evangelical Missions Quarterly (EMQ) has an article about some aspect of missionary member care in nearly every issue. This publication is widely read by missionaries around the world at http://www.emisdirect.com/.
Annotated Bibliographies
The database on Missionary Care has the largest number of references for published material relevant to missionary member care at http://www.missionarycare.com/database.htm. Useful to those involved in missionary member care, this database has information about 900 published articles, books, and chapters in edited books. People who know how to use Microsoft Access can download the entire database and carry it with them on their computer’s hard drive. Those who would prefer to search the database online can do that as well.
People can click a link to get a list of more than 100 topics relative to missionary member care and then browse the database by topic. For example if they click “anxiety,” they will get an annotated bibliography of scores of available articles in the database about missionaries and anxiety from 1966 to the current date. This bibliography contains full reference information for each item as well as a brief summary of it. This does not mean that the whole article or book was about anxiety, but that it contains some information about anxiety in missionaries.
People who click on the title of the article or on “read full citation” will get a short quote from the article (Gems) and an outline of the article. I just did that for the top article in the list, and here are the results.
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Gems: |
After 25 years serving overseas, one missionary family recalls walking into their home that had been completely stocked with food, cleaning supplies, paper products, along with cards, notes, and flowers from the congregation. Included was a church directory with a list of phone numbers of key people they could contact if they needed anything. They felt accepted, loved, and cared for the moment they arrived home. |
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Outline: |
Introduction (11 challenges listed) |
The full citation also includes a list of links to other topics discussed in the article and a link to other articles written by the same author.
People who want to find what a particular person has written can click a link to get a list of the more than 450 authors in the database. Then when they click the author’s name, they will get an annotated bibliography of everything in the database by that author.
This database has been very valuable to students who are writing papers, theses, and dissertations in the area of missionary member care. Of course, they must keep in mind that this is a database of printed material, not a database of material on the Internet. If they are attending a Christian university or a theological seminary, they may find the books and articles they need there. If books or articles are not in the library, students usually find that they can get the needed material through interlibrary loan at their institution.
Many of the articles in the database are from Evangelical Missions Quarterly, and those articles are available on-line, but they are not free. People who buy an on-line subscription from Evangelical Missions Information Service can search all back issues for a year. http://www.emisdirect.com/store/subscriptions/new-subscribers/emq-online-new-sub-1yr.
In summary, printed information about missionary member care is available. Some of it is also in digital formats and can be downloaded. If it is out of print, much of it can be found through interlibrary loan or through used books available on-line.
Note to the reader: If you have suggestions about other things that would better answer this chapter’s question, please email those to me at ron@missionarycare.com. In that email please tell me three things: (1) what you believe needs to be included, (2) links to relevant websites if available, and (3) how it better answers the question “What printed (or for E-readers) resources about missionary member care are available?” I plan to periodically update and expand the book with these suggestions.