Three Things The (British) Church Needs to Know About World Mission?

I realise that my “Mission Is…” series has been on hold for a while. I’m sorry about that, I’ve got a few other projects that I need to work on outside of the blog and they are slowing me down. I will get back to it shortly.

In the meantime, I thought that I’d something short; three bullet points on what the British church needs to understand about world mission. I put the word British in parentheses in the title because I suspect that the points are more universally applicable.

The Church Has Grown Enormously Around The World. The most important point to realise about world mission is that the church is growing amazingly in many parts of the world. We have to realise that Christianity is not just a Western phenomenon. Not only that, but many of the places that we consider as mission fields now have large and growing churches. If we want to be effective in where and how we are involved in mission, this has to be a part of our thinking.

Many People Have Not Heard of Jesus. This is the other side of the first point. There are still billions of people who have not heard anything about Jesus and who are unlikely to do so unless something changes. One of the reasons that these people are “unreached” (as the jargon goes) is that they live in places that are difficult for mission work; places where local politics, religion or security issues make it very hard to talk about Jesus. If we are serious about working in places like this, we will have to commit to long-term involvement and we cannot expect quick or easy results.

Mission Is Polycentric. We still tend to think of mission as unidirectional, from the West to the rest of the world. However the reality is that mission has no single origin and many places of action. This means that any missionaries from the UK will need to get used to working in multicultural, multinational teams and under the leadership of people from around the world. More crucially, the church in the UK needs to understand that it is the locus for mission work from around the world. We need to receive input and support from Christians in other parts of the globe, just as much as we need to send missionaries.

Three simple points, but any involvement in world mission needs to take them all into consideration.

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