GlocalNet

In the past few weeks I’ve spoken many places to many audiences.  The stories I tell are the same, the principles the same - whether a University or a group of pastors or a group of business leaders.  What is radically different is the response.  When I speak of the shifts in the world and the opportunities to engage the world, college students, business leaders, and global leaders (both faith & secular) have been seeing the shifts, excited about them, and ready to redefine what faith looks like in the 21st century. 

When I talk to pastors - it’s another story.  Just a few short decades ago, pastors were the most global of any group in America - because of missions.  Not anymore - and for the same reason -because of missions.  Early missions taught us the nations, the peoples, the cultures, their beliefs, and worldviews - and of course, how to share our faith with them.  Somewhere along the way, learning climaxed and began to slow to a drip, while missiological and church development programming took its place.  The result was a search for a global template of how to plant churches and evangelize nations.  The result of that was, it became more about the presentation and the strategy than it did the people that were being presented to.  After all, we knew their language, history, culture, and worldview - what else was their to know?  As if, each culture was static and stuck in time and nothing new to learn.  But then came globalization, and it changed all that.  The rest of the world wanted wealth like America.  They got certain things from America like education, and even a few products.  So, to us in America, globalization became about our culture spreading around the world.  We confused the fascination with American money and products with globalization. They really are two different things.  The result was we began to lose touch with how cultures globally were morphing, developing, and even rediscovering their roots and at the same time strengthening their tribes.  In reality we were the ones who were stuck in a global time warp - the world has been moving forward.

To the Western pastor, missions was something you gave money to, funded missionaries to do, prayed for, watched slide shows from, and occasionally even took a mission trip to somewhere in the world.  Today, people from western churches are taking mission trips from the West to the world like never before - along with their preconceived ideas of the world and how the gospel should spread.  Have you ever been with someone who is embarrassing themselves and they don’t realize it?  You want to shout stop, but they don’t see it.  I fear this has become the norm for some in the western church - and it hurts the gospel.  We live in the most fascinating, exciting, time and opportunity for the gospel in the world like never before.  We don’t need to miss this moment when we can serve, communicate, reach, and engage like no other time in the history of humanity. 

Many pastors like the current model of missions.  It requires very little.  If you give a lot of money, pray for missions, occasionally take a trip, and preach a sermon on the Great Commission and how the whole world needs to hear - you’re doing all you’re supposed to do.  We celebrate missions funding of organizations - but ignore the greater call of the whole body of Christ to engage the world. 
I love what David Platt has written in Radical - I recommend it to everyone, and we are using part of it in November in our church.  The greatest sacrifice however, is not us living in less square footage or driving a Honda instead of a BMW - but our willingness to actually go and engage, and release the body of Christ to serve people on the grid of society all the while sharing the good news of Jesus.  If we do that, it requires more than upping the missions offering, it requires us changing the definition of what a disciple is.  It requires us modeling for the rest of the church engagement.  It requires us letting go of some “ministries” in order to prioritize the fulfilling of the Great Commission. 

I was in a room with pastors talking about how hard it is to focus outside their own city and local church.  I don’t deny this.  I asked them, “When you lead someone to Jesus - how much of the Gospel do you give them?  What if you told them, you have to stop the affair, but a little pornography is OK?  What if you told them, you don’t have to witness but you do have to tithe?”  Would you ever tell anyone that?  “Of course not,” they responded.  Then tell me this, as pastors, the people who are defining faith for those that we shepherd and teaching them all that Jesus teaches, is it right for us to say, “Yes, I’m going to focus on my church and my community but the Great Commission, it’s just too much, down the line when we’re bigger or stronger we’ll do it then?” Of course not. 

We have two massive challenges for the future as American pastors.  First is not to worship the church, but worship the king of the church - Jesus.  Church has become too much about personalities and not near enough about Jesus.  The second, challenge is to engage the world.  No generation in the history of humanity has had more opportunity and therefore none will have as much accountability as we do when we stand before God.  For what that looks like - you can read Glocalization & Real-Time Connections that I wrote - every disciple using their vocation to serve humanity while sharing Jesus.  The Great Commission will not be fulfilled because we raise up more preachers and missionaries like me - but because we raise up disciples that don’t “do” church but “be” the church on the grid of society.