Glocal Missions-The What and The Why

Juno Wang

(This article first appeared in the Chinese Baptist Fellowship of the US and Canada’s Kingdom Perspective Newsletter, Volume 2 No.4, July 2021.)

As our life and ministry gradually returns to normal this summer after being lockdown for over a year, has the lockdown given you opportunities to get to know your neighbors? Have you given thought to the meaning of being a church on missions in a diverse community in the new “normal”? Will our local missions to our diverse community have a rippling effect on global missions? The purpose of this and another short article is to present the “what”, “why”, and “how” a church in the Chinese diaspora can be involved in glocal missions when the opportunity presents itself.

The What. “Glocal Missions” means local actions in carrying out the missions’ mandate of our Lord which has a global impact. What is trending right now is the fact that people are on the move around the world. According to the World Migration Report 2020, 1 in 30 people in the world is a migrant, and North American cities are the primary migration destinations with South-North, and East-West moving trends. According to Operation World, the US has at least 31 ethnicities with over one million people in each. It could well be that if you live in communities where higher education, technology, or commercial centers are, non-Anglos are the majority residents in your neighborhood. Therefore, the task of missions is no longer “from here to there” but from “everywhere to everyone” which means that we live among peoples who are different from us, with some coming from where we used to refer to as the “mission field”. As such, the need is for us to reorientate our missional eyes to see the world from a “global” to a “glocal” perspective.

In some ways, the early church was in a similar environment. It was set in a diverse and commercial center context with a dominant language, and they used these as tools for missions. The believers were multi-ethnic migrants who identified with both homelands and were bi-cultural. As first-generation migrants like you and I or the 2nd generation, we are like the early believers with a dominant language proficiency and intercultural skills, living in a similar context! We know the importance of honor and shame, ingroup and outgroup factors, hospitality, and building trust and relationships as we are from a “group culture” which is the majority culture of the world. With real time communication, migrants connect with family and friends back home on a regular basis. Therefore, as a friend of a migrant, you could become a family friend locally and globally. Our Christian witness then, is glocal – local and global all at the same time!

The Why. Our God is a missional God, and “mission” is “missio Dei within the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The foundation of missions begins with sending among the Trinity, where the Father sends the Son to all peoples (Rom 10) who are created in His image, and the Holy Spirit He sends in Christ’s name (John 14) to all believers. That mission is now ex-tended to us (John 17:4). We need to see migrants from God’s perspective, recognizing that it is He who has moved our neighbors here so that they might know Him. God has sent us among them, empowered by His Spirit to bring the Gospel to them through our witness for Him. (Isaiah 43:10-12; Acts 1:8)

God’s salvation is for all peoples, and it is the Good News. It is good because He has covered our shame of unholiness and unrighteousness through His unmerited grace; we are reconciled with Him; and, we have a personal relationship with Him. Our Triune God is relational, and we are created as relational beings. The greatest commandments that Jesus spoke of is to love God and to love our neighbors. We are to first love God through our vertical relationship with Him, and then to love our neighbors through our horizontal relationships with them. In addition, we are sent to invite all peoples to enter His di-verse Kingdom. When we do that in obedience, we glorify Him who sends us. Our King is glorified through the allegiance to His lordship by all His created beings.

Local churches glorify the King by loving our neighbors and become the local solution for our communities embroiled in issues due to cultural differences. That means we are to be outward-looking and not to pick and choose whom to love in our diverse communities. As opposed to individualistic culture, people who are group cultural learn through observation and experience. They want to see and experience what being a believer is like and how we live out our beliefs before they want to know the Holy God we believe. We are to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth, and a city on a hill of being His witnesses for His Kingdom. Once we open our missional eyes and see our neighbors from God’s perspective, we see opportunities.

Opportunities. Living in a diverse community, we see people from the mission fields living among us right at our front door. This is a missional opportunity at our doorstep without travel, visas, or shots requirements. As migrants like us, they have families and friends scattered around the world. Furthermore, if they come from missions restricted countries, we can share the Gospel openly with them.

In their adopted country of residence, migrants from “group culture” backgrounds are most likely looking for identity and a place to belong for emotional security and mutual support. As believers who were migrants, we are in a unique position with the skillsets to reach other ethnic migrants than mono-cultural Christians. The shared migrant experience helps us not only to empathize and understand our neighbors, but also to help them find their new identity in Christ and the Kingdom. We could let them know Jesus, our migrant God who came to die for all peoples, and we are equally loved in His present and future Kingdom. Once they see, hear, and experience the Gospel from us here locally, it will be shared within their networks globally. Thus, our local missions has global rippling effects.

Conclusion. Is God trying to tell us that this is the time for us to reach the people in our diverse neighborhoods connecting local missions with global missions while we do not know when travel would be safe again? However, we do know from the Biblical, church, missions, and world histories that nothing can stop the mission of our Triune God. May the pandemic increase, not decrease, our involvements in glocal missions for His Kingdom and His glory.