During the 1990s I set out to write a series of brochures about mental health and missionaries and posted them on the Asbury College website. I wrote the brochures basically in response to the questions missionaries asked and the problems they discussed as they talked with Bonnie (my wife) and me.
I had no intention of writing a book when I started writing the brochures because I was just writing in response to issues missionaries raised. About the turn of the century Friedhilde Stricker requested permission to translate the 25 available brochures into German and publish them as Was Missionare Wissen Sollten…:Ein Handbuch fur Legen und Dienst. Soon after that I also gathered the available brochures and posted them on-line as an E-book by the same title in English, What Missionaries Ought to Know: A Handbook for Life and Service. Although the brochures are gathered into several sections, that book has no “logical” outline, just groups of “related” chapters.
I taught psychology in Christian colleges for 35 years, and during that time I wrote two books about psychology, both published by Abingdon Press. The first was Psychology from a Christian Perspective in 1980, an academic book consisting primarily of journal articles I had written. This was soon followed by General Psychology for Christian Counselors in 1983, a book written to supplement textbooks used by undergraduate students in general psychology.
Near the end of the first decade of the 21st century I realized that many of the brochures logically fit into the Christian perspective I had used three decades before while teaching psychology. Therefore, writing a book about psychology for missionaries seemed like a “natural” for me.
This is an E-book, different from any other book I have written. Please read “Introduction to This Book” on the pages that follow. They will orient you to differences from ordinary printed books.
I want to acknowledge the invaluable help of two people editing this book. Art Nonneman gave excellent suggestions chapter by chapter related to the content of the book and Yvonne Moulton did the final editing making sure that my grammar, punctuation, and so forth were corrected.