The theme of our study is “Mission in Christ’s Way”, which is a call to rethink our concepts about mission, which, in some cases, involves a U-turn in our understanding. For example, missions is about the Kingdom of God and Jesus is the Kingdom, In other words, without Jesus, there is no sense to the reign of God’s Kingdom, nor to mission. Participating in his Kingdom does not mean establishing a mission program or movement, but rather participating in what Newbigin calls “costly discipleship”. Mission is therefore not a success story, at least as defined by our worldly business model. The Holy Spirit is the success story and is reflected in Acts 1:6-8 as the promise to the disciples.  This occurs right after Jesus commanded his apostles to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the gift he was going to give them. The disciples, however, had another question in mind:

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Personal

Date and Place of Birth: April 12, 1933, Patterson Grove, PA

Married to: Joice A. Barnett Franklin (1956)

Children: Kirk James (12 April, 1959, born in PNG); married November, 1981 to Christine Tierney; Dr. Karol Joy (30 October, 1965 born, in PNG); married August 1994 to Dr. Mike Hardin.

Retired: December 1, 2014, now living in Waco, Texas

Website: karlfranklin.com

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Mission in Christ’s Way 

About Newbigin

Bishop James Edward Lesslie Newbigin (8 December 1909 – 30 January 1998) was a British theologian, missiologist, missionary and author. Though originally ordained within the Church of Scotland, Newbigin spent much of his career serving as a missionary in India and became affiliated with the Church of South India and the United Reformed Church, becoming one of the Church of South India’s first bishops. A prolific author who wrote on a wide range of theological topics, Newbigin is best known for his contributions to missiology and ecclesiology. He is also known for his involvement in both the dialogue regarding ecumenism and the Gospel and Our Culture movement. Many scholars also believe his work laid the foundations for the contemporary missional church movement, and it is said his stature and range is comparable to the “Fathers of the Church.” (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesslie_Newbigin, Accessed May 7, 3025)

According to Martin Robinson (“A passion for mission”), in the Bible Societies tribute to Newbigin in TransMission, “his offerings include his writings, but beyond the written page his unceasing energies as teacher, pastor, and ecumenical statesman mark him out as one that matched a keen mind wit personal kindness and zealous conviction”

In addition to Robinson, the Bible Society tribute includes contributions by Wilbert B. Shenk (“Lesslie Newbigin’s contribution to the theology of mission”); Harold Turner (“Lesslie Newbigin: A New Zealand perspective”); H. Dan Beeby (“Walking with Lesslie: A personal perspective”); George R. Hunsberge (”Renewing faith during the postmodern transition”); and Colin Greene (:Lesslie Newbigin: A Bible society perspective”).

Mission in Christ’s Way

Mission in Christ’s Way was published in 1987 by the World Council of Churches as a study on missions. A study guide that accompanies the article, prepared by Inagrace T. Dietterich. It is designed for small group discussion, with comments and questions on each of the four sections of Newbigin’s article.

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Steven Pinker is a Professor at Harvard College, specializing in evolutionary psychology. He has published a number of books dealing with psycholinguistics and cognition and, although Jewish, is a confirmed atheist.[1]

Steven Pinker’s hypothesis (Pinker 1994) follows the standard evolutionary dictum that, “given enough time anything can happen,” meaning that for language there is no need for a creator or designer. Nevertheless, Pinker uses the terms creation and design frequently and freely in his highly speculative claim that language is an instinct. Instead of being a barking human, our brains are much further along the evolutionary scale and have developed language that it “could have been on the order of 350,000 generations” (p.345) old. Therefore, given enough time, language happened.

The sub-title of his book is “How the mind creates language,” proposing once again that language is a self-selecting, self-creating mechanism that somehow had to happen with humans just because we recognize and call ourselves humans instead of dogs. Although Chomsky is Pinker’s hero, he does not accept Chomsky’s dismissal of natural selection as having no substance in language evolution and adheres instead to his own definition of innateness in language. Pinker also laments that Chomsky sometimes sounds like a “crypto-creationist,” although he is quick to assure his readers that this is not the case (p. 355).

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Small Languages in PNG: Are they declining?

This note studies the population figures given in the last two Ethnologue editions (14 and 15, 1996 and 2000, respectively) for languages with 500 speakers or less in PNG.

My conclusion is that the number of such small languages has declined in every population category and that overall the number of small languages has declined by 41.

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