Practical Splinters

God is certainly at work in the world, and we should be aware of that and join those efforts But whether it's short or long-term work, we need to constantly be pulled back to the fact that there are people out there who have no way of hearing the gospel of Christ.

But is the missions agency model the primary way of sharing the gospel, or is that a relatively new method?

The, the, the story of mission agencies is, is 200 years old [laughs], all right? Uh, here in the UK, it's, it's William Carey, 1792, who initiates this.

But Christians have been migrating with the gospel for the past 2,000 years.

And so that's part of what's happening with African Christianity.

It's just Christians carrying their Bibles as they wander around the world.

Ray Bakke, who is a very, uh, well-known for his writings on cities, you know, talked about it used to be to reach the people groups of the world, we would go, you know, to visit this tribe, this country, et cetera.

But now with migration of populations around the world, his line was, "God has brought the nations to the neighborhoods." So if you go to Queens in New York, there are 5,000 of everybody there.

Now, that's not true of, like, every remote Amazonian tribe or something like that, but there really are people from all over the world in these big cities today.

And so in a sense, the geography of the mission field in terms of the nations is a little more complex and heterogeneous than it used to be because you can't assume that all the people of one particular ethnic group reside in a particular geography.

Some of them may reside there.

Others may reside in London.

Others may [laughs] you know, reside in, uh, Dubai.

They might reside in New York.

And so people are all over.

So we can think about, for example, you know, reaching people in a particular country.

There may be more complex scenarios today than there were in the past.

So rather than, you know, your sort of Baptist missionary from rural Indiana learning the language and getting on a plane and going to Africa, it may be that, uh, people are reaching Africans in New York City, and then they're going back and taking it to their own people.

Or it may be the reverse of what we're thinking, that people in Africa are partnering to plant churches in places like New York.

They're actually sending, uh, evangelical and missional resources to, uh, the first world.

I'm aware of one church planting effort in London that was a partnership between a church in Nairobi, Kenya, and a church in, uh, Indiana, and they were partnering, and they were trying to reach, in part, some of the Kenyan community, uh, in London, but the idea was it was gonna be a multicultural church.

And it was designed to evangelize in a city where there's very, very low levels of religiosity.

So now some of these, you know, quote-unquote, third world countries are much more Christian than these European countries.

So as migration becomes more common and the mission field shifts westward, we need a way to prepare the next generation of Christians to share their faith naturally as they migrate around the world, particularly in Africa.

I, there is an awareness now, and there is an, there is a growing intentionality around how do we prepare our people in the continent, uh, for when they migrate, right? There's, there's a realization that actually the African population is young.