We are in the process of looking at the Gospel of Luke on Sunday mornings. Luke also famously wrote the book of Acts, that I intend to get to in due course. One of the first things we read in that book is what all of the stuff Luke is telling us in his gospel is leading up to. Right before the ascension, Jesus says that the disciples will receive “power when the Holy Spirit comes on” them and that they “will be [his] witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
It has been pointed out many times that this declaration is exactly how the book of Acts unfolds, but I want to highlight another aspect of this statement. The Global Methodist Church states, among other things, that “the local church is a strategic base from which Christians move out to the structures of society, providing the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs.” It elsewhere comments that “the purpose of all Global Methodist Church organizations is to strengthen and support the work of the local church.”
All of that is true and good and we should always be reminded that the plan of God for the salvation of the world is that all of this happens and and through the church. If local churches aren’t doing it or supporting it, it isn’t happening. There is a danger, though, that local churches will get so focused on their specific context that the call of Jesus is to transform the world and be witnesses “to the ends of the earth.”
Those two things are not contradictory. The only way to be a witness at the ends of the earth is to go to the ends of the earth. The only way the church, as a whole, can be faithful to the Great Commission is to go into all the world. It is to take what is local here, and turn it into something that is still local, but over there. Not everyone is called to be a missionary in the traditional sense but the only way to be what God has called us to be is to be the church here and, at least occasionally, to find ways to be the church there as well.
We can sometimes lose sight of that when parachurch organizations and denominational leadership seem to so completely embody the outward drive of the church. We can easily slip into the idea that we don’t have to have a regional, national, or international focus because someone else is always there to do it. The thing is, those other people came from somewhere. They were local somewhere. The only leaders the church has are those whom God, through the church, has raised up. There is no secret factory where God manufactures worldwide leaders. There are a bunch of little factories who do that, and it is the local church.
I appreciate that small towns in America sometimes resent it when their people become leaders on a wider stage because that means that they aren’t home, either at all or at least not as much, but what is the alternative? If places like ours don’t raise up leaders to go and bless the world, those leaders, if they ever arise, are going to come from somewhere else. God wants to use people in our area to transform the world as well as our community. Are we listening to hear God’s call, whatever it might be to?