Christian Love

From the last paragraph of Paul Hiebert’s final book:

As fallen humans we love ourselves.  When we are with others, we love to talk about ourselves and our experiences, show our pictures, and demonstrate our skills.  When we run out of things to say, we move on to find other audiences.  When conversations turn to others and their stories, we are soon disinterested.  To love is to focus attention on the persons around us.  It is to ask them questions about themselves in order to truly learn to know them.  It is to affirm their personhood and the gifts God has given them.  And it is to invite them to come to know Jesus Christ, too, within their cultural contexts, just as we ourselves, by God’s grace, have done.  Such Christian love is the central element in the work of missions.  Without it, all of our best efforts are in vain.

The Gospel in Human Contexts: Anthropological Explorations for Contemporary Missions pg. 199.