If you have an international missions ministry, whether it is long-term residential or involves short-term trips, you probably have a desire to learn, grow, and become more strategic in your work. That involves gathering information and hearing from those with more experience or who have different perspectives.
In an age where the availability of information has exploded, sometimes finding relevant information can be a challenge. This is also true for those engaged in missions. Sure, there are the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, but they can be exhausting. There is, however, a great resource for the missions community the pulls together a significant amount of missions-related writings. It is the KnowledgeBase provided by the Network for Strategic Missions (NSM) at http://www.strategicnetwork.org/index.php?loc=kb. It is a centralized place for missions related commentary, housing a collection of 16,000 articles from a variety of sources. Anyone engaged in missions will find helpful and thought-provoking articles on a broad range of topics.
The NSM KnowledgeBase includes several missions magazines, journals and scholarly writings, as well as articles from mission agencies, pastors, missionaries, professors and others. Included are periodicals such as Mission Frontiers, Evangelical Missions Quarterly and Missionary Monthly.
There are articles dealing with various world religions and the Christian response to them. Insights on contextualizing the gospel, ministering in HIV infected areas, and understanding various unreached tribes are just a sampling of this vast resource. The site provides five ways to search for information. You can search by collection (such as the different periodicals), topics, most popular, recently posted, and with the built-in search engine. Ministering in an area heavily affected by alcoholism? There is a series of articles on that. Working with orphans? Learn what others have done around the world to help and discover best-practices.
The site is undergoing change, and it does not have the latest articles, but it is still a very valuable tool for the missions practitioner. There are links to the various publications and sources so you can see their latest articles. Also, for those interested in missionary biographies and researching older articles, NSM KnowledgeBase is a wealth of information.