Sunday, Nov. 19
Not too terribly long ago, I made my way up to a First Baptist Church in a county seat town in NW Georgia to deliver the Sunday morning message. As it turned out, the congregation had made a fatal error by inviting me to preach two Sundays in a row. As I drove into town, I nearly ran off the road when I looked up on a hill at a little brick ranch house and saw a sign in front of the house that said “Laotian Manohtam Buddhist Temple.” I scratched my head in wonder and amazement and drove on down to the church. Upon ascending into the pulpit on that Sunday morning, I said to the congregation, “I notice you have a Buddhist temple here in town. I’m assuming you’ve been out to welcome the Buddhists to town.”
Well, you can imagine the response to that. Folks just stared at me.
I responded, “Well, I tell you what I’m gonna do. On my way home this afternoon, I’m going to pull up to the temple and meet the monks and tell them that the First Baptist Church is going to be coming out to welcome them to town.”
After church, I made my way to the temple, knocked on the door, shared a coke with the monks and told them about the good people of the FBC—and the next Sunday morning, I crawled back up into the pulpit and reported on my success.
To their credit, the women of that congregation baked up some chocolate chip cookies and took them out to the monks. They got to know them as friends and, when I visited the congregation several months later, they reported to me that they now were having conversations with the monks when they came into town to run errands.
We live in a strange new world. We’ve got Buddhist and Taoist and Hindu temples in towns with names like Carrollton and Rockmart, and Rome. We can have a Big Mac on Tiananmen Square and dine on Pad Thai noodles from Thailand on Broad Street in Rome, Georgia.
This rather sobering fact is becoming increasingly clear to us at just the moment that we as the American church are witnessing the increasing pluralism of our own culture and in which the Christian faith has to compete with the rise of dynamic new and old religions within our own context. It is also becoming clear to us at just the moment that the globe is shrinking and that the opportunity to bless the nations and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus in word and deed around the world is virtually assured. I witnessed first hand the first step in this shrinking during my parents first term as missionaries in the Philippines in the mid-1960s. In 1964 it took my family 21 days to travel to the Philippines by boat and in 1968 it took us 21 hours to return to the US by plane.
Now look at where we are just a few decades later. I stood in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on my first trip to China in 1996 and discovered that I could hit a McDonald’s and a Dunking Donuts with a rock. I don’t think that is what Mao Tse-tung had in mind. And now, all over Asia, you will find 7-11s, Walmarts, Pizza Huts, cellphones, internet cafes, blue jeans, baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. And all over the US you can find temples and meditation centers and Asian supermarkets and soccer, kimchi, mango ice cream, and Kias. I was driving from Atlanta to Athens the other day and called Delta to book a ticket for my daughter to fly home from Tulane University in New Orleans. The Delta agent was in Mumbai in India—we had a nice conversation about what time it was in our respective hemispheres. A few seconds later my cellphone beeped acknowledging receipt of the confirmation email that plopped down into my inbox from the other side of the world.
So what does all of this have to do with global missions in the 21st century? It has everything to do with it, for it reminds us that we live in a pluralistic world no matter where we live—and that we have to be ready as the church of Jesus Christ to engage that pluralistic world with the gospel.
I’m rather apprehensive about it, to be honest with you, because it is occurring to me that you and I are now living in the century of the local church when it comes to Christian mission in the world. I’m a church historian and as I look back across the history of the evangelical church, I realize that we have jumped tracks just about every century over the last 400 years when it comes to global mission. The 18th century was the century of the individual missionary like William Carey who begged and pleaded and cajoled the church toward global engagement. And I believe that the 19th century was the great century of the missionary society. And the twentieth century was the century of the great denominations. And now we live in the century of the local church—this truly is the century of the church. The church is the place where God is at work in the world now.
This reality excites me and frightens me all at the same time—I’m not sure the American church is ready for it and, yet, I know that the best way to bring the love of Christ to the world is through the full engagement of local congregations in global mission. From all outward appearances, the work of professional missionaries sent by denominational agencies in the twentieth century was unbelievably successful. And yet, the percentage of the world that was Christian in 1900 was 34% and the percentage of the world that is Christian in 2006 stands at exactly 34%. I think this stagnant lack of percentage growth can be traced directly to the fact that local congregations were not themselves fully engaged in global mission except indirectly through denominational agencies. So it excites me that local congregations now have a passion for global mission.
At the same time, I am frightened by the prospect. Too many American Christians and American congregations are not prepared for the kind of engagement that is required. Not long ago when I was still at Shorter College, I took a group of ministry studies majors to the Sri Venkateswara Hindu temple in Riverdale, Georgia. One particular student did not want to go.
“You have to go,” I responded. “It’s a course requirement.”
“I saw a bunch of those Hindu temples in Vietnam,” he argued.
“No, you didn’t,” I responded. “You saw Buddhist temples in Vietnam. Hinduism and Buddhism are different—kinda like Judaism and Christianity are different. It’s time you learned the difference.”
“Oh,” he said. And he went. The priest helped us to understand puja, the daily sacrifice, by walking us through the ritual and he gave us a hospitality gift of an apple.
My student said, “Dr. Nash, did we just worship an idol.”
“I didn’t,” I responded. “Did you?”
“Oh, Lord, no!” he said emphatically.
And then, as we left, he stopped at the shrine to Hanuman the Monkey God that guards the entrance to the temple. And he tossed his apple through the gate at the monkey statue and he said, “If that monkey can walk over and get that apple, then he can have it.”
And then I sent him into a further tailspin on the way home when I said to him, “You know, Bill, in all of my years of bringing students to that Hindu temple, you’re the first one to ever leave a sacrifice for one of the gods.”
We’re in need of transformation—and that transformation is going to be painful because of what it means. It means that, for the church, global mission begins right where God has placed us and within the pluralistic world that we find all around us. We’ve got to bless the nations that live around us before we can bless the nations that live way out there. We must overcome our fear of otherness and difference and engage in loving relationship with people who are radically different from us. Every Christian is now a missionary (Samuel Escobar—The New Global Mission). And I think that this is going to be the hardest challenge for you to communicate as you engage in equipping the church for mission and ministry in the world.
Not only must churches be ready to engage otherness and difference in the world, but congregations also must be intentional and proactive in their own mission engagement. I’m out to ban a couple of words and phrases from the vocabulary of the church. Those words are volunteers and mission trips. “Volunteer” is a great modern word—it means “to do something for free.” It communicates the fact that we are doing something that we don’t really have to do. And we are far beyond the point that we can afford for congregations to ask the following question: “Hey, where should we go on our mission trip this year?” The world is full of hurting, marginalized and unevangelized peoples who deserve an intentional, caring, corporate and relational response to the huge spiritual and material needs that exist in their lives. God does not need volunteers who think that they are doing something extra that they don’t really need to do to go on mission trips for a week or two out of the year, particularly in the century in which God is depending upon local congregations to be the Christian center of global engagement. God needs deeply committed Christian people who understand that their calling is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and to bless the nations through lifelong commitment in love and service.
I want to be in on the ground floor of that exciting new venture. And I want to make sure that the Baptist movement to which I have given my life and my heart is well positioned to engage along with God and the local church in that work. I want to be part of helping local congregations toward that engagement in ways that are missiologically and theologically sound and that move us toward healthy and hopeful relationships with every corner of the globe. I want us as a Baptist movement to have a corporate witness in the world as well as a witness as individual congregations. I want us all to participate alongside each other in a movement wide missional response to the world that engages otherness and difference with love and respect borne out of our desire to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and bless the nations.
I catch glimpses of it now and then—just brief moments in which I realize just how possible it is despite all the hindrances that stand in our way. I just spent a couple of days in Miami and, on Thursday of last week, found myself in Homestead, Florida at Open House Ministries, a ministry to the families of poverty stricken Hispanic farmers in the area. I played some basketball with the children—got beaten at a couple of games of pool and air hockey—and then I sat back to take in a Youth for Christ worship service that I thought was meant for the kids and not really for me.
About halfway through the service, a teenager from one of those families went up to the microphone to speak. She asked for the entire group of about thirty teenagers to consider supporting a young child through World Vision in the nation of Sri Lanka. “We need to raise thirty dollars a month,” she said. “So all you have to do is to bring one dollar each every month and we can make it happen.”
They showed pictures of this beautiful Sri Lankan girl up on the screen. And I looked around the room at the various nations that had gathered there—kids from the US (white and black), from Haiti and Mexico and Guatemala and Cuba and who knows were else. I thought about the neighborhoods through which I had just taken a prayer walk and about the poverty out of which they all came.
And then I heard her say, “You know, this little girl doesn’t even have running water in her house and sometimes she doesn’t get enough food to satisfy her hunger. We have so much more than she does—so let’s all be sure to bring our dollar.”
And I thought about the blessing that these children were bringing to a nation far, far away from here. And I thought of the blessing that I was receiving from them in just that moment. I thought about how differences and otherness were melting away in the place—and how these children were modeling for me what it meant to be the church of Jesus Christ and to follow along in his footsteps.
This is what it must mean to be the church of Jesus Christ in the twenty-first century—God’s missional church moving out with intention and purpose into the world—blessing the nations and following in the footsteps of Jesus—overcoming the difference and otherness that separates us—and making us one in Christ Jesus. It is the missional age of the church and we best be ready for all that will be demanded of us in it.
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