Here’s something I’ve learned as a journalist over the course of my many interactions with missionaries: Don’t entrust your schedule to the hands of missionaries, unless you’re prepared to spend the whole day with them visiting all sorts of people and places.

You see, their ideas of time management and efficiency may differ from yours. For them, spending a three-hour lunch with someone, traveling long distances to visit a family in the middle of nowhere—all those long periods of seemingly doing “nothing” aren’t nothing, but mission work.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: If you don’t already have a missionary for a friend, find one. I have the incredible blessing of being born into a missionary family, but I can never have enough missionary friends who remind me of God’s mission for us on earth: to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. 

Indian authorities continued over the weekend to search for a way to recover the body of John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who was killed a week and a half ago by inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal.

Authorities in India on Friday continued to search for the body of John Allen Chau, an American Christian missionary who was killed by island tribesmen known for their hostility to outsiders. After several visits to North Sentinel Island late last week to share Christianity with the island’s inhabitants, Chau, 26, returned a final time Friday. According to his journal, he had survived an arrow shot by one of the younger tribesmen on an earlier visit, noting that the arrow hit a Bible he was holding before he fled. “Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue,” he wrote.

Family members of an American missionary in northwestern Cameroon confirmed he died Tuesday after being caught in crossfire between security forces and separatists amid ongoing post-election violence in the country. Indiana native Charles Wesco arrived in the city of Bamenda less than two weeks ago with his wife, Stephanie, and their eight children.

In March 1994 Ray Rising disappeared into the Colombian jungle. FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) had abducted the Wycliffe missionary and radio technician. For the next 810 days, hard men with machine guns in their hands and murder in their hearts held him captive, constantly moving from camp to camp, always watching.

When the guerrillas released Rising in June 1996, he thought his ordeal was finally over. But Rising’s battle had only just begun.

In a residential neighborhood in Hanoi, Vietnam, church leaders of the Dao ethnic group gather in a newly built classroom to learn about Christian leadership.

Afterward they stream downstairs to a communal kitchen where attendees of a women’s training program are eating lunch, the room filled with sounds of Vietnamese and the Dao’s local dialect.