Increasing our Global Influence

by Matt Brown

The good and bad news about global Christianity
The good news is that global Christianity begins at home. The bad news is that global Christianity begins at home. Why bad? Maybe, it’s bad news because we are lazy and want to make a substantial and sweeping change, and then go home for dinner. No, you have to be like yeast. You have to work with God to know yourself, work with God to change yourself, and then work with God to serve others around you.

Where the power for global change originates
A philosophy is powered by the strength of its argument and by the acceptance of a group of shared assumptions. The Kingdom of God is powered by the Spirit of Truth, and by the fact of a common origin rooted in the image of God. Rather than compete with the Current World View (CWV), the Kingdom of God is meant to supplant the CWV, not only through the use of the established conduits of power, but also through the power that each individual believer holds within.

The use and abuse of evangelism
Many use evangelism to escape harder problems at home. Paul and the gang in Acts 16 went were The Spirit moved them to go, not where they wanted to go. We need to be honest with ourselves about our ministry goals: are they goals that we are framing based on some selfish desire or are they goals that are directed by God. That said, there are a lot of Jesus followers who think that if they are having fun, then they are doing something wrong. To these I say: “the kingdom of God is a party.” To the revelers I say: “The kingdom of God is a party that we have to be willing to die for.”

Masks vs. Grace
The CWV is an anti-gospel of perfection. It says that to have value you must be perfect. The thing that makes me want to burst with happiness is that God (the creator of the universe), does not expect that from us, and loves us anyway. The message of the Son incarnate is singular in its scope and meaning: we are fallen, we are loved, we are worth risking existence for. The CWV becomes anti-Christ when it changes the message of Jesus’ unconditional love to a cheap message of the tollbooth: come to worship, but first clean up your act. We have churches full of people who are not saved – not saved from their sins. They may be forgiven by God, but not by each other and certainly not by themselves. Many in the church are great at marathons – marathon lives at putting up false fronts, marathon lives of running from guilt, marathon lives of not ever coming close to (but endlessly circling) the Gospel of grace. To have global impact you have to move past the point of false fronts to the face of God and the image of God in yourself.