Going Forward with the gospel!
GLOBAL PARTNERS
by James G. Smith
Some would argue (I know I would) that a main component of a church plant is a mindset for reproduction. That is, a church should be planning from the first for the day it will launch another church. For more than six decades, BBFI missionaries have been establishing churches all over the world. Many of those churches have reproduced themselves in the same context, culture, and language. That is wonderful and exciting in the life of the first church planted, in the life of the original church planter, and in the life of the sending and supporting churches of that church planter.
However, when the “mission” church matures enough to send a cross-cultural or foreign missionary, the wonder and excitement increases substantially! Our focus this month in Global Partners is that type of missionary reproduction.
We rarely think of how the gospel affects those who hear it in their own language and cultural settings. We normally do not consider that the Great Commission was translated into Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog, Khmer, Russian, Swahili — and every other language with a Bible. We do not intend to disregard how the Great Commission will affect those in other cultures, but we too often think exclusively in English and from our vantage point as North Americans. Missionaries, however — those who have committed their lives to taking the good news internationally, interculturally, and interlinguistically — must be true to the message of missions. If the good news is for everyone, so is the responsibility of the Great Commission! Once we have heard, trusted, received, and obeyed, it is incumbent upon us to share. And as we said at the first, once the church has been established, it is a natural consequence to reproduce itself. And to Christians with a broader worldview, that would obviously entail taking the good news and the church planting mandate to other places.
That explains why, in the BBFI, we talk about autonomous (independent, self-governing), indigenous (originating in and characteristic of a particular region), and self-propagating (reproducible) church planting. It is what we do.
We hope you will be encouraged or even thrilled with the concept of going forward with the gospel!
To read the entire May 2014 Global Partners click here.