Glocal Missions-The How

Juno Wang

(This article first appeared in the Chinese Baptist Fellowship of the US and Canada’s Kingdom Perspective Newsletter, Volume 2 No.5, September 2021.)

The Mission of our Triune God is to restore the relationship He had with humanity before the Fall. We could see how determined He was in pursuing humanity as salvation history that was played out and recorded in the Bible. Through the sending of the Holy Spirit, He empowered Christians to participate in His Kingdom mission to all peoples. As the world has become glocal so must our missions. We need to take hold of the missional opportunities God puts at our doorsteps! This article will continue with how to make glocal missions a reality in our communities and overcome obstacles and challenges, sharing from my own experience. Several glocal missions resources will also be listed for your reference.

The How. Missions in the church has changed from a traditional way of going overseas to glocal missions because people in the mission fields have now come to live in our neighborhood. Missions now would not only mean going overseas to engage the lost but also going outside the four walls of our church buildings to engage, invite, and love the people in our diverse neighborhoods as well. Therefore, our first concern is to see our neighbors with a Kingdom mindset through God’s lenses. It is out of our obedience to God’s commands of loving God
and neighbor and being His witnesses, that we tear down the barriers to love and serve our neighbors through whatever means that would help them to understand and experience the Gospel in order to reach them. With people coming from a “group culture” orientation, we reach out to them with a group approach to provide acceptance, a sense of belonging, emotional security, identity, and mutual support.

In this, we create groups that have a combination of Christians and non-Christians. We take a cue from the St. Patrick’s group approach model in the 5th Century. It is an approach/model where non-Christians can find a place/group in which they are accepted and have a sense of belonging, and in that relationship behave and live
like a ‘believer’ in the group, and then in time, affirm their faith and belief in God (Belong, Behave, Believe). Christian witness in such an approach focuses first on our BEING and then our DOING through our common migrant experiences and intercultural skills to build trust and relationships. As we have limited resources, we can partner with other churches and mission organizations to be a faithful and obedient steward to our King. And we pray and trust the Holy Spirit to bear fruits in His time.

Steps to Develop Local Missions. 1. Pray. 2. Study the community demographics. 3. Find out where and when we can meet non-Christians on a regular basis. 4. Build trust and relationship. 5. Pray for and with them often. 6. Conduct church and community surveys. 7. Understand the differences in needs and available resources between church and the community. 8. Choose a target group. 9. Create a group with a good mix of Christians and non-Christians of the target group. 10. Let people in the target group observe and experience our witness in being and doing. 11. Help them learn to behave like a Christian and then to believe. 12. Become a follower of Christ.

Obstacles and Challenges. As we think about glocal missions and consider the call to intercultural ministry, discomfort, ethnocentrism, fears, ineffectiveness and inefficiency, multi-cultural competency, spiritual gifts, and other obstacles and challenges might come to our mind. Glocal missions is an obedience issue of our hearts and will because the calling of being His witnesses has already been given to us. (Acts 1:8) Therefore, do not let our disobedience harden our hearts.

How to Overcome. Glocal Missions must be intentional because cross cultural missions is almost always against our human nature. He has given us His Holy Spirit as a powerful resource to help us overcome any obstacles and challenges. We need to reclaim the role and work of the Holy Spirit in missions, lost and overlooked with the rise of secularism, rationalism and “enlightenment”. To be a witness for our Lord, a transformed heart, commissioned by the Holy Spirit is more important than the knowledge in our heads and the doing by our hands in order to fulfill the Great Commission of our Lord Jesus Christ. By the empowerment of the Spirit, we tear down the barriers of egocentrism of “my people”, “my place”, “my plan”, and “my comfort and pleasure” to serve the people in our diverse neighborhood with a Kingdom mindset. Glocal missions is for His Kingdom expansion because the people we reach might not come to Christ right away or even attend our church after conversion. Hence, we need to submit ourselves to the Lord and get down from our Tower of Babel of self-centeredness because the biggest barrier we face is ourselves. And our approach should not be making people our own converts.

Our missional approach needs to be contextualized for our neighbors as
they come from a “group culture” background of being communal, holistic,
and relational. We need to use a diaspora missiology to supplement the
traditional missiology for glocal missions. It is important to equip our
church members to be bridge builders in relationships toward our diverse
neighbors in a cross-cultural context. Above all, our motive must be genuine because no one likes to be coerced into making a decision for Christ or
be treated as a project or a number. And our outreach style and strategy
also need to be adaptable and flexible since every context and the people
we reach are different. There is a price to pay in this approach to missions.
Are you willing to invest your time and energy to love the people in your
neighborhood for the Kingdom?

Conclusion. The Gospel is about God’s Kingdom, a Kingdom for all peoples to serve Him with total allegiance and obedience. Everyone at church
needs to understand what God is doing at the global level and involve themselves at the local level. Seeing lost souls living in the community, we would want to reach out to them in obedience to God’s commands as they are still outside the Kingdom and yet to know God’s love and grace. Our mission is to invite them into the present Kingdom, and to enjoy the Messianic banquet with us in the future Kingdom. May we be like the apostle Paul who laid down his life daily, and the early church that was known by its love for missions to diverse migrants.

Free Glocal Missions Resources: 1. Dr. Enoch Wan is a pioneer in diaspora missiology and relational realism. Check it out at http://www.enochwan.com, 2. Global Missiology online magazine: http:/www.globalmissiology.org/, 3. Diaspora of Lausanne Movement: https://lausanne.org/networks/issues/diasporas, 4. My blog— Relational Realism for Christian Ministry: https://relationalrealism.net/, 5. My book Multi-ethnic Outreach in the Silicon Valley: A Chinese Diaspora Reaches Out to Multi-ethnic Diasporas in print and eBook formats.