During a recent trip to Taiwan as part of the Upstream Collective, missiologist Ed Stetzer asked the question “Why are so many missional Christians uninvolved in God’s global mission?”

These are the 5 reasons he gives:

1. In rediscovering God's mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions.
2. In responding to God's mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything "mission."
3. In relating God's mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.
4. In refocusing on God's mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news.
5. In reiterating God's mission, many lose the context of the church's global mission and needed global presence.

Read the whole post, including Stetzer’s proposed solutions, on his blog here:

• Five Reasons Missional Churches Don’t Go Global – and How to Fix It

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Missional cultural engagement is a challenge. How far does one go to engage culture? According to missiologist Ed Stetzer, that is the nature of contextualization. In his recent post Ancestor Worship and Taiwanese Christians, Stetzer gives some helpful guidelines on contextualization as well as this short video of a Taiwanese believer explaining the difficulty of contextualization in his culture of ancestor worship.

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Planting Churches Fulfills the Great Commission

In Acts, God's means of changing the world is through the planting of churches. It is no coincidence that right after God gave his apostles the Great Commission in Acts 1:8, the first thing he did was to plant a church (Acts 2:42-47). The church was to be the operational means of fulfilling the Great Commission.

When a local church was placed in a community, the gospel would be preached from house to house and in the streets, and the generosity, joy, and worship of a local body of believers caused "great fear and awe" to be on everyone, favor to be had with the community, and God to "add to the number daily those that were being saved." Thus, everywhere the apostles went, they planted churches. They didn't simply do preaching, miracle crusades, or community ministry. They planted churches that would do preaching, perform miracles, and serve the community. As Tim Keller said, the apostles' strategy was very simple: go to the most strategic cities in the world and plant churches. The church is the one institution of the New Testament.

To the Ends of the Earth

What we sometimes overlook is that the scope of God's commission, from the beginning, was to "the ends of the earth." When God sent the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, the apostles spoke in tongues of every language, a clear sign that the gospel should go to every people of every nation on earth. This gospel was not to be centralized in one city or one culture. God would be glorified by his gospel taking root in every culture.

However in Acts 2-7, despite God's clear command and signs to go to all the nations, the apostles do not budge from Jerusalem. So in Acts 8:1, God sent persecution on the church, and believers scattered throughout the region. The parallel language of Acts 1:8 and 8:1 is not coincidental. If the apostles weren't going to obey God's commission to go to the world, God would make them. In a truly bizarre move, God even beams one of the apostles, Star Trek style, into a place where he can engage a foreigner with the gospel.

On one hand it is refreshing to me that the apostles were not too dissimilar to us, preferring to stay in their own city and culture, and to build a megachurch there. On the other hand, it is a little alarming that God is so determined for his people to plant churches internationally that he will bust them up if he has to and beam a few of them overseas if they won't obey. While the beaming sounds kind of cool, the busting up does not. So we have decided, from the beginning, to plant churches internationally.

To be continued

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Is your church doing mission for its own glory or God’s? Want a cunning test to help you answer? Check out how much energy and passion (evidenced by money, prayer, interest) is invested in situations in other parts of the world for which you will get no credit. If it is not proportional to what is invested at home, then serious questions should be asked. If our passion is God’s honor and the fame of the Lord Jesus then we won’t be satisfied until the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Hab.2:14; Is. 11:9).

This will mean we get involved in planting churches all over the place and supporting other churches to plant churches, even when we don’t get a mention. It will mean sacrificially giving away our best people so that unreached areas of the world will be reached for Christ. World mission isn’t the preserve of the mission agencies; it’s the privilege and responsibility of every local congregation of believers (a.k.a. church).

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Nice Guys

Holy Joe. Ned Flanders. That annoying guy from the movie Bull Durham who leads a Bible Study in the clubhouse before games (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, rent the movie) and ends up marrying the local tramp—interestingly enough, kind of like Hosea! This is usually what the church expects of Christian men who are serving in the military. Your typical descriptions include:

• Neutered.
• Non-threatening.
• Doormat.
• Wuss.
• Polite.

But all it takes is spending some time in Scripture to recognize, scattered throughout our Bible, warriors whom God absolutely loves. One of His names is Jehovah Sabaoth—Lord of Hosts, commander of the angelic host and the armies of God.

Abraham—at an age when he’s supposed to be collecting social security—leads an elite team of commandos to rescue his inbred cousin Lot. Phinehas the priest takes a spear and impales an Israelite and his “from the wrong part of town” girlfriend, and God blesses him for it! David decides to go above and beyond the 100-foreskin requirement to marry Saul’s daughter, Michal, and decides to cut 200 Philistine foreskins!

For those who believe these were acts of a primitive “god” in the Old Testament, tell that to Ananias and Sapphira as well as the “Christians” in Corinth who die after taking communion.

The final picture of war we have in our Bibles is when Christ returns, wielding a sword that comes out of His mouth, splattered with the blood of His enemies before He tosses them into the eternal lake of fire and sulfur (Revelation 19).

Jesus – my key to heaven

The opposite approach to being the Holy Joe in your unit is to be so indistinguishable as a follower of Christ that it’s difficult to argue that you actually are one.

There is constantly going to be a tension between being the Pharisee in your unit sporting your King James Bible (with the secret stash on your laptop), and being the Sadducee who is down with Jesus as your savior after you die, just not your Lord (especially of your pants and on Sundays).

As service-members, we either become sectarians who don’t go far enough into our culture, or we become syncretists who go too far. Either way, we deny the power present in the Gospel to transform anyone’s life, and ignore Jesus’ call for us to be salt and light while not being of the world.

To properly love Jesus and the guys we serve with, we need to meet them in their culture. We don’t pound our Bibles on their heads, pass out a Chick tract, and call it a day. Neither do we watch porn with them, have a few too many, and hit up the strip club on Friday night.

Death

Only fortunate soldiers are in units that are not part of a memorial service while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is at these times that questions arise, such as “why him and not me,” “what is the meaning in all this,” “I don’t get it.”

As Christians, we should be the most fearless warriors in the service because of the many promises our God has given us. Such passages as Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28 anchor our faith in Christ and His plans for our good.

Both these passages came to mind as the truck being driven by my friend Shane, his TC (truck commander) SSG Martin, and gunner SPC Zylman passed over a copper wire laid across an Iraqi road, setting ablaze a 1500-pound bomb. The blast killed SPC Zylman, while badly injuring both Shane and SSG Martin.

A lot of time was spent with guys afterwards talking about how a good God could allow something like this event (and, oh, how there are so many) to go down. All three soldiers were highly respected men. I was asked by other guys who weren’t cutting it as soldiers why God would choose to injure these guys and let dirt bags live to breathe another breath. I regularly find myself feeling the same way about some folks, while quickly forgetting about the grace that I so undeservedly have received from Christ.

What kind of theological system do you use when an RPG round whizzes through the window in your Humvee only to sever the head of the guy you are sitting next to? What do you do with a Blackhawk helicopter going down during a routine mission, killing all thirteen soldiers on board? How do you break down being more than a conqueror (Romans 8:37) on that one?

The Buddhist ultimate fighter

Some of the best conversation I had while I was in Iraq came from the hour-long talks I would have with my good bud Tye. He is a professing Buddhist who enjoyed walking around our small COP (combat outpost) shooting wild dogs in the head, while tossing up 315 on the bench press. Not exactly your typical pacifist. We would actually speak about the possibility of literally ripping someone’s head off their body, which was regularly discussed regarding some leadership. I’m still praying for that guy as he goes through Special Forces training to become a Green Beret, and that the seed that was spread during those nights over coffee bring about some awesome fruit.

One of the reasons this guy would spend hours talking to me about Jesus and the sovereignty of God was because there was mutual respect. He knew I was unbending when it came to such things as recognizing Jesus as God and being faithful to my wife, while at the same time doing my job well and fulfilling my responsibilities as a non-commissioned officer.

Bottom Line

I’ve been blessed by God to be able to hear professions of faith from the mouths of guys I’ve served with and talked about Jesus with. I want to wrap this up by pointing to Scripture as our model of how to be warriors, pointing to Christ and loving others.

In both passages about the qualifications for elders and deacons (1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1), Paul begins the list with the qualification of “being above reproach.” In 1 Timothy 3:7, he says we must be “well-thought-of by outsiders.” And in Titus 2:7, Paul says that we need to be a “model of good works.”

This starts by being in the Word as much as possible with a set plan, because places like Iraq and Afghanistan usually don’t accommodate your average “quiet” time.

Here’s the classic: "Holy Joe"

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1. WORLD CITY-CENTERS ARE GROWING IN POWER AND CONNECTEDNESS
   
   1. Globalization is making major world cities more powerful than ever. Why?
      • The mobility of capital means national governments are now virtually powerless to control the flow of money in and out of their own economies, thus greatly decreasing their influence in general. The cities are the seats of multi-national corporations and international economic, social, and technological networks. 2) The technology/ communication revolution means that national governments are powerless also to control what their people watch or learn. As a result, it is the culture/values set of world-class cities that is now being transmitted around the globe to every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. NY and LA are now far more influential in forming the culture of, say, teenagers in rural Indiana or rural Mexico than are the national or local governments or civic institutions. Sum: This is the first overall major erosion of nation-state power in 800 years.

1. Characteristics of Global City-Center Culture
   Can we speak of the marks of city-center culture, if there is not only such diversity of ethnicities but even diversities of worldviews? Yes. City-center culture is a "salad bowl" with two dominant ingredients—modern and postmodern worldviews—interacting and blending in different ways.
   1. The city center is a culture of expertise. People who live in city centers are usually highly skilled and highly educated. Ministry implications: a) Artistic quality is very important. Amateurish art and music will not go over well, especially with the high percentage of center-city residents who are themselves artists. And the postmodern "turn" emphasizes the visual, graphics and embodiment. b) Communication needs to be very high in quality and be highly intelligent. There is a surprising amount of anti-intellectualism within the evangelical world. People have noticed for years that campus fellowships at Ivy League schools are very anti-intellectual and pietistic (A-I-P). In general, however, such A-I-P will not reach the people who tend to "make it" and stay put in city centers.
      

B. Ministry Marks of Effective City-Center Churches

1. Contextualize the gospel so traditional, modern and postmoderns "get it" and are challenged. The basic worldview of a person or a culture is an answer to the question: What is really wrong with the world (or people or life) and how can it be fixed? Every culture has a worldview story. The job of the missionary is to enter sympathetically into the worldview story of the culture yet challenge and retell the culture's story so they see their story will only have a happy ending through Jesus.
   

3. Create a "missional" mindset that shapes Christians and includes non-Christians together.

In Acts 2 and I Cor. 14:23ff we see nonbelievers attracted and challenged by worship. We learn 1) nonbelievers are expected in worship, 2) nonbelievers must find worship challenging and comprehensible, not comfortable. In city centers where there are a mixture of worldviews, it is crucial to include both Christians and non-Christians in the same service—even in many of the other meetings and ministries of the church. It's not best to segregate them (ala Willow Creek) or exclude them (as the typical conservative church does.) Why?

Matt 5:13-16 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty again? It is good for nothing anymore, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a lamp, and put it under the peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven."