Bradley Bell and Ted Esler, eds. Missiology for Missions Pastors: A Practical Introduction for Church Leaders. The Upstream Collective, 2025. 229 pp. Paperback, $16.99.

I was excited about the prospect of reading Missiology for Missions Pastors because I have long respected Ted Esler and have found his work through Missio Nexus helpful. Also, I was feeling the need for an up-to-date book on this subject. It has been fourteen years since Paul Borthwick’s Western Christian in Global Mission (2012) was published and sixteen years since Fritz Kling’s The Meeting of the Waters (2010). No books have been more helpful to our work of equipping American churches for missions engagement at MRN. They have helped us set the context of global mission for American Missions leaders at the congregational level in accessible ways. But both books are getting dated. Much has happened since they were researched, written, and published. We have needed similar books for some time. Esler and Bell’s edited volume has made a significant contribution that helps fill the gap.

There is much to appreciate in this work. Like most edited compilations by multiple authors, the chapters can vary in quality and usefulness. Several of the chapters are summaries and updates of helpful companion books by their authors. For example, J.D. Payne and Brian Fikkert both contribute helpful chapters that draw on their other longer works.

Bell and Esler have done a great job of creating a helpful set of topics in well-aligned categories. Part one provides an introduction to missions, with three chapters devoted to defining the Mission of God, summarizing the history of missions, and offering an excellent update on the state of missions in today’s global church. This third chapter alone, by Jason Mandryk, is worth the price of the book. The data and analysis of the state of global Christianity are informative, inspiring, and useful for prioritization. The other two chapters are needed and helpful as well, but tend at times to overly simplify history and minimize problems with missions. They speak as if the best missions have been the norm, which is highly questionable.

Part two focuses on issues related to the local American church and the church’s role in missions. Chapters in this section describe the appropriate roles of American churches and mission pastors, both within the congregation and in works in other countries. While there are some helpful frames and suggestions here, these chapters are the book’s weakest. They point in some helpful directions and provide a few useful models, but often, there just isn’t enough direction to follow up on the suggested approaches. I do greatly appreciate the emphasis on getting local churches involved in raising up mission workers and getting congregations involved in supporting mission partners in a variety of ways. But just as helpful suggestions were being articulated, they were dropped, and the subject changed.

In fairness to the authors of chapters in this section, each was given topics too big for the scope of the chapters they were asked to write. I got the sense that each chapter could have been a helpful book, and that the authors had a lot more help to provide, but were not given the space to go into enough detail. Such is the nature of survey works.

Part three, called “Application of Missions,” is sort of a miscellaneous drawer of subjects that need attention but are not easily categorized. There is a helpful chapter on Short-term missions and on Mid- and Long-term missions. Again, there is a lot of helpful material here that begs for further development. They point in the right direction and provide some useful perspective, but are also overly optimistic and minimize concerning issues.

However, the final two chapters by Brian Fikkert on issues of dependency and sustainability, and by Ray Mensah on global partnerships, are both substantive and appropriately challenging. While Fikkert’s larger work, When Helping Hurts, is well known, it is still highly important. Mensah’s chapter on partnership is just as essential as Fikkert’s, but fewer Americans are aware of how complicated and yet essential a healthy global partnership is. Along with Mandryk’s chapter on the state of mission (mentioned above), these two chapters make this volume a good purchase.

I am thrilled to see Bell’s and Esler’s book made available, and I’m thankful to The Upstream Collective for commissioning it. It is long past time for local American churches to live into their responsibility to steward global missions. For too long, most local churches have outsourced global ministry to missions agencies. This has resulted in a massive gap between American expatriate workers and the church in their passport country. Agencies can do many things well, but they are not churches (despite some IRS legal categorization). They cannot be the community and spiritual support that American churches can and should be for global workers. In addition, when mission is outsourced to agencies, beyond funding, American Christians feel little to no connection to their global partners. They cannot be inspired or informed by what God is doing in other countries, which should be shaping what we do in the United States.

There are also some disappointing aspects of this book, more like missed opportunities than wrong directions or improper conclusions. With many chapters, there is some degree of minimization and even denial about the harm done by cross-cultural workers and approaches. The authors seemed to be afraid of offending or discouraging their readers. This is highly likely if their target audience is mission committees composed of laypeople. But I would expect missions pastors to realistically handle nuanced topics with greater cross-cultural awareness than the authors seem to assume.

At times, the authors are overly practical. They don’t provide much substantive missiology. The book claims, in its title, to be practical, which it is. But there are deeper concepts of missiology that directly impact the practice of mission but are glossed over or ignored, such as issues of Western superiority mindsets, racism on a global scale, gender and leadership, and various funding models and economic issues related to business-as-mission efforts.

While this book is helpful and serves an important need, it aims too low in my opinion. It is a great resource for lay members of a missions committee or missions support team at a local congregation level. However, I would expect a book aimed at mission pastors to dive deeper and accomplish more. However, mission pastors are limited to very large or mega churches. Most congregations have missions ministries led by lay volunteer committee chairs. This resource is well-suited to them. All things considered, this book claims to be both an introduction and a practical resource. So, perhaps my expectations are excessive.

Some of my favorite quotes from Missiology for Missions are:

We cannot, however, let the dark science of missiology and its attendant fear of making disciples keep us from obedience to what God has commanded his church regarding global mission. – Ted Esler, p. 3

Christian mission is a driver of change, a product of change, and a means by which we become aware of change. – Jason Mandryk, p. 38

But we can be fairly confident our task is nowhere near complete when 28 percent of humanity—2.3 billion people—are without meaningful access to the gospel, a number increasing by around 50,000 people every day. – Jason Mandryk, p. 38

Good trips are ones that help missionaries stay on the field longer. — Julius Tennal II, p. 125

The most effective missionary work flows from deep, intentional discipleship within the local church. – Nathan Sloan, p. 129

The four most dangerous words today are “I. Don’t. Need. You.” – Ray Mensay, p. 166

In summary, this is a great resource for mission pastors to give to the volunteers in their church who help discern what mission projects to engage and who are seeking to understand what they are doing and how to support them. It would provide helpful conversation starters for a wide variety of topics needed to train missions committee members for effective service, and which can be developed in more depth from other resources, often coming from the same authors of the various chapters. For these reasons, I am grateful this book is now available. In our work of church equipping at Mission Resource Network, we will certainly recommend it to churches we are training and coaching in missions stewardship. But we will also recommend that a dedicated missions pastor or minister on staff wrestle with more substantive works of missiology.

Two such books I recommend are:

• J.D. Payne, Pressure Points: Twelve Global Issues Shaping the Face of the Church, Thomas Nelson, 2013.
• B. Hunter Thompson with Bala Khyllep, Freeing Congregational Mission: A Practical Vision for Companionship, Cultural Humility, and Co-Development, IVP, 2022.