Note: Andy’s paper, “Righteousness, suffering and participation in Philippians 3:7-11: Integral mission and Paul’s gospel”, will be published at the 2018 Micah Global Triennial Consultation (Philippines, 10-14 Sept 2018), and can be viewed here. A short summary follows.  Snapshot Cross-cultural missionaries leave family, security, predictability, community – motivated by the gospel.  But what is their understanding of the gospel?  How do they measure “success”? What is their understanding of the value of the work itself, apart from outcomes and “success”? What has eternal/future significance and how does that intersect with the present? Asking these questions and considering them deeply is important, as our picture of God and what God is doing in the world around us has a first-order influence on our behaviour. The idea in brief         Faith-based cross-cultural workers in sub-Saharan Africa, where under-5 mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa are an order of magnitude higher than in the West and there is only one surgeon for every 200,000 people, might be forgiven if they emphasize metrics and improved health outcomes (action) over thinking deeply about their picture of God (contemplation). Having worked closely with such a group of medical workers in low-resource contexts for seven years, I sometimes wonder if it is even reasonable to suppose that this bias towards action could be anything other than what it is, given the profound human suffering surrounding them. However, a focus on metrics and ‘doing’ can be detrimental, resulting from its prioritisation of relatively recent modern Western paradigms of mission...