Among my denomination or tribe and I suspect many others we have become more diverse over the years. At times I have heard this described as reaching out. In reality there is much less reaching out and much more opening up. When we discover a group from our tribe of Evangelicals has immigrated to our area from another country, we welcome them into the fellowship and see how we can help them. You know the kind of help, a place to meet or some salary support if they have a pastor as a new church. More often it is only a pastor that has moved and not a group of Christians so we fund him as a church planter to start a church. We have developed a culture of welcoming all peoples into our fellowship. Don’t get me wrong this is good thing a very good thing.
I am glad to see that has happened but is that really reaching out? It is more like accidental missions. It is response mode rather than being intentional. Is it taking the gospel to all peoples? What if we developed a culture of really reaching out to the peoples God has brought to our country? How about even when there are no Christians or none like us? What if all or many of our churches were looking for peoples that do not yet know Christ to reach out to? What if churches choose to be centers of cross-cultural missions, how great would that be? What kind of changes would our members, our churches, and our denominational bodies have to make? How would that change who we are? That would require our members to become missionaries and our structures to train them in cross-cultural missions at a minimum.
We have started in my corner of the world. We are starting to implement something I have dreamed about for years. We have been calling it All Peoples Initiative. We have done the research to find the hundreds of people groups around us here in New York and northern New Jersey. Now we are in the process of training churches and believers to engage those people groups cross-culturally. So if you think this sounds exciting pray for us, or better yet come join us. Thoughts?
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