Which One is It?

On Tuesday morning I started the first intensive associated with my DMiss program. So far it’s been amazing. As we meet these two weeks, I’m aiming to get to know my cohort, to refine/narrow my topic and to plot out my research process.

In the run-up to these two weeks, I’ve been doing some reading. OK, a lot of reading. Like a 7-8 books in the last month level of reading. And I discovered late last week that I also need to read a bunch of missiological journal articles. (Note to self…read the syllabus more closely!).

So last weekend I did a bit o’ online research, looking for recent missiological articles related to my topic. The result?

For the most part, “crickets.”

For instance, I went to the site for Evangelical Missions Quarterly, searched for “gender partnership” and found nada. Here’s a shot:

Same thing for “gender.” In fact, if you search the site for “gender” all you get is an article that contains the word “engendered.”

So then I tried Mission Frontiers, the magazine/site of the U.S. Center for World Mission.

Again, a search for “gender partnership” came up empty:

And then I tried the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and, same story. Here’s a shot of the search page:

In this case, at least it only took 16.45 seconds to find out the news!

Similar stories with Missio Apostolica, Missiology and Mission Studies. In fact, the one place I found articles was on the Lausanne site.

So what’s going on here?

I think it’s either one of two things.

Maybe there’s really little out there on the topic of intra-gender partnerships in mission. I mean, I might be plowing new ground here.

Or, I’m just a really bad researcher who needs of some better search keywords!

Either way, it’s going to be fun to learn and grow through the process.