A family without borders

Jan 28, 2021 by Jill

by Revd Jem Hovil, Latimer Trust:

After a year of restrictions, why is it more important than ever to connect with God’s worldwide church (not only for the good of God’s global mission but also for our own sake and sanity)? The usual arguments apply, but our current crisis reinforces them and can deepen the connections across Christ’s seamless body.

God’s church has already made a paradigm shift: from viewing global mission as an optional extra – a subject for special interest groups – to understanding that the mission of God is the setting for all of life and ministry. By the end of the twentieth century the move had been made: from a mentality in which churches are those who ‘send’ individuals off to mission, to one in which congregations are living bodies that have already been ‘sent’ out as a whole and who are on an everyday mission themselves. A shift from delegating to doing. At least that is the case theologically. The implications continue to permeate through the layers of church culture, but local churches are now far more inclined to ask, What is our place in God’s grand plan for his world?

The benefits are palpable, not least in offering healthier views of church. For example, if we simply extrapolate from the smaller (our congregation and our mission) to the larger (God’s universal church and his mission) the potential for distortion is immense. A parochial view of mission simply amplifies our peculiarities and emphases on the so-called ‘mission field’; it advertises our own cultural captivity, often in embarrassing ways. How healthy it is to remember how Paul keeps both the local and the global in tension (1 Cor 1:2). If we “go and do likewise” it will help us to avoid confusing our own peculiar styles and iterations of the gospel with the gospel itself.

And we continue to gain immense encouragement from the growing churches of the global South. Global church growth is a breath of fresh air in the face of local decline, a phenomenon that is “largely hidden from people in the West now living in a post-Christian culture” as Lamin Sanneh pointed out.

Read here

See also these recent articles about the persecuted church:

‘Sinicization’: A New Ideological Robe for Religion in China, by Tom Harvey, Oxford House Research

Prayers and Praises from the World’s Hardest Places to Be a Christian, by Morgan Lee, Christianity Today

Save Nigerian Christians: Sign Open Letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, from Barnabas Fund