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And that has affected the kind of courses that missionary trainees take in seminary.

Here we instituted a course in spiritual warfare in 1993. I would say it was because graduates would write back and say, "How come you didn't get me ready for the real world?" We decided we were going to launch this course. I had an interest and a certain amount of experience in it, and so I did. Right now, I've got 26 people in a spiritual warfare course. We repeat it every two years. There will always be a nice enrollment for that.

I get asked to teach the course even more overseas. Non-Westerners are caught between having a wildly fanciful view of spiritual warfare that needs to be moderated by biblical teaching, and the need for straight biblical teaching to handle the situation that they actually are facing. I find many people, whether in Russia, Colombia, or Venezuela, a number of places that are deeply concerned about spiritual warfare. They just feel they ought to be routinely better equipped.

Could you comment on how postmodernity has affected how we do missions or our view of missions?

The world of spirits is not traditionally thought of as an area of scientific investigation. In the Western world, that's part of why it's de-emphasized—if it can't be measured, then it must not be happening. Well, postmodernism is really a movement that says there is an element of reality that is not entirely susceptible to modern methods. Modernism is arrogant. Modernity or scientific rationalism is too arrogant in essentially making a case that what's real is what is explore-able in a lab or by means of scientific investigation. What is not investigate-able or study-able by those means either doesn't exist or is relatively unimportant, or else you can't make any decisions about it.

There's obviously a huge variety of postmodernists, from those who would be willing to say nothing is possible to know, over to people who are just more ambiguous about knowledge, willing to use fuzzy logic. I think that's where Christians are being affected. Not necessarily negatively by the postmodern spirit that's in the air. They are more open to that which is mystical, and they accept the fact more readily that the way that God works is somewhat incomprehensible. It's not as predictable as you think.

Therefore, Western methodologies have been criticized. We mention in the book that people are accusing the West of "managerial missiology." There have been others who have accused us of having a militaristic strategy because we use militaristic terms—logistics, strategy, tactics. That's an extension, to me, of our Western, rationalistic approach, because it looks so nice and cut and dried.

Yet I think for a postmodern person, such terms makes them feel uncomfortable when it comes to spiritual issues. I don't think it's that cut and dried. I think we're operating at a different level of dynamics.

Business is a new way of entering countries that don't accept traditional missionaries.

There has just been a conference in Minneapolis of the Evangelical Missiological Society and the Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association. The theme was business and missions, or how business has become a vehicle for missions. They discussed whether that's legitimate, like traditional tentmaking. Is it really effective? Does it have integrity? If you're trying to get access to a country, but you're not saying, "I'm a missionary," you're saying, "I'm a business person" or "I'm starting an NGO or a social service," is that legitimate? Increasingly, that is the way of getting into a difficult-access country. And some of the efforts are very, very effective.

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November (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49