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Tender Care: Providing Pastoral Care for God's Global Servants
The heart and soul of caring for God's scattered a conversation with the Seabrook seven.
207 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 5, 2019
Crash Course in Missionary Care
I purchased Tender Care: Providing Pastoral Care for God’s Global Servants from an instructor at a recent Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course. The Instructor represented the organization that publishes this book, Barnabas International. The staff at Barnabas International “are passionate about caring for global workers through going, speaking, listening, and giving. We desire each worker to thrive wherever they have been planted.”
The title Tender Care is a double entendre that refers to both compassionate missionary care and the role of a “tender” in deep-sea diving. In commercial diving the tender is responsible for the overall safety and support of the diver (Chapter 1 - The Picture of a Tender). Like the famous “holding of the ropes” mining metaphor used by William Carey in the 1800s, the tender holds the vital hoses required to sustain the life, support the efforts, and secure the safety of a deep-sea diver. As the cover of the book says the tender metaphor refers to “holding the lifelines for those engaged in cross-cultural living.” There is no doubt that the tender diving metaphor provides a wide-range of relevant connections to missionary care that the “rope holding” metaphor does not.
Tender Care is a collaborative effort by seven Barnabas colleagues. Consequently, the writing style reflects this collaborative effort and the result is choppy and uneven writing that can be a distraction for the reader. But persevere in reading this book and you will be rewarded with rich encouragement in providing compassionate care for missionaries.
Tender Care is ideal for pastors, missions leaders, and missions teams to read together and discuss. Even though it is written with the role of a missionary care provider in mind, anyone who loves missions and missionaries will benefit from reading this book. Missionaries themselves would be wise to read this book for proactive care and preventive medicine for themselves and their fellow missionaries.
The Missionary Care Toolbox referenced in Tender Care along with other books like it can be found at Barnabas International.
Missionary attrition is a tragic reality. Missionary care is an essential component to reversing a trend that is costly in dollars and, more importantly, human lives. Reading and applying the wise counsel of this book will not only help reverse attrition but also help the reader and local churches to live out this classic passage on missionary care:
I purchased Tender Care: Providing Pastoral Care for God’s Global Servants from an instructor at a recent Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course. The Instructor represented the organization that publishes this book, Barnabas International. The staff at Barnabas International “are passionate about caring for global workers through going, speaking, listening, and giving. We desire each worker to thrive wherever they have been planted.”
The title Tender Care is a double entendre that refers to both compassionate missionary care and the role of a “tender” in deep-sea diving. In commercial diving the tender is responsible for the overall safety and support of the diver (Chapter 1 - The Picture of a Tender). Like the famous “holding of the ropes” mining metaphor used by William Carey in the 1800s, the tender holds the vital hoses required to sustain the life, support the efforts, and secure the safety of a deep-sea diver. As the cover of the book says the tender metaphor refers to “holding the lifelines for those engaged in cross-cultural living.” There is no doubt that the tender diving metaphor provides a wide-range of relevant connections to missionary care that the “rope holding” metaphor does not.
Tender Care is a collaborative effort by seven Barnabas colleagues. Consequently, the writing style reflects this collaborative effort and the result is choppy and uneven writing that can be a distraction for the reader. But persevere in reading this book and you will be rewarded with rich encouragement in providing compassionate care for missionaries.
Tender Care is ideal for pastors, missions leaders, and missions teams to read together and discuss. Even though it is written with the role of a missionary care provider in mind, anyone who loves missions and missionaries will benefit from reading this book. Missionaries themselves would be wise to read this book for proactive care and preventive medicine for themselves and their fellow missionaries.
The Missionary Care Toolbox referenced in Tender Care along with other books like it can be found at Barnabas International.
Missionary attrition is a tragic reality. Missionary care is an essential component to reversing a trend that is costly in dollars and, more importantly, human lives. Reading and applying the wise counsel of this book will not only help reverse attrition but also help the reader and local churches to live out this classic passage on missionary care:
Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, and especially when they are strangers; and they have testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. For they went out for the sake of the Name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. Therefore we ought to support such men, so that we may be fellow workers with the truth. 3 John 5-8 NAS
July 3, 2019
This book is for a very specific audience of those working with cross-cultural workers or those in the church who want to better care for cross-cultural workers in their Church family. If this is you, then I would highly recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews