Being a Global Christian: Global Poverty and the Church

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” Mother Teresa

So today I want to close out this short series I’ve been doing talking about the changes that we as a church are doing in missions. I know that there a lot of great churches that are already doing great work, but I’m so impressed with these new wholistic initiatives I wanted to share them with as many church leaders as possible. Because, let’s be honest, the way we do missions in a lot of American churches needs to be re-imagined.

And today’s initiative is a perfect example of why.

60% of Christians in the world live in the Global South. There’s been a huge transition over the past 100 years between the center of Christianity, but because of the socio-economic condition of many countries in the Global South, churches there control only 17% of the resources.

Chances are, most people reading this have at some point or another had compassion fatigue when it comes to issues like Global poverty. You’ve heard the statistics about how over a billion people live in extreme poverty (existing off of less than $1.25 a day) while the wealthiest 1/6 of the world consumes 72% of all consumed goods.

This kind of disparity has incredible implications, people in developed countries live almost 2x as long as people in others. Women make up 2/3 of the world’s global poor, because millions of young girls are prevented from going to school.

And this is probably not new information to you. You’ve seen the pictures, and heard every pitch that a non-profit has to give. Chances are, you’ve probably given money, sponsored a kid, and bought the fair trade coffee.

But the flip side to these statistics is that the churches that are in these areas in the Global south are often very vibrant and filled with life, reaching their communities and doing incredible work toward improving the living conditions for everyone.

Yes they lack material goods, and they don’t have access to certain kinds of political influence, but they are still in many ways flourishing.

The problem is that often in churches from the Global North, we, with all the best of intentions, notice the economic disparity and attempt some form of charity (which certainly has it’s place) But without care, it can deteriorate into robbing our brothers and sisters of their dignity and fail to recognize that the churches there may actually be doing a better job in their community than we are with ours!

So for example, I began this series by talking about our partnership with the Itu church in Brazil. For years we’ve had a relationship with this church, sponsoring their wonderful ministers as missionaries, and we plan to continue to do so. But in an average church missions budget, that would be where it would stop.

Sure, they might come to their sponsoring church every other year and guest preach, where they’d be expected to report on numbers and church growth etc. with a few anecdotal stories that would make members at the sponsoring church tear up and dig deep to give some more.

Not to be cynical, that model has done lots of good in the world, but it is incomplete, because it fails to recognize that missions is a cross cultural collaboration, and that they might be doing somethings better than us.

So over the past year, countless members of Highland (the church I serve) have travelled to Brazil to develop relationships with their leaders, and they’ve travelled here to help us reach our community. While we were there, we realized that one of the best things that is happening through their church is their wholistic ministry to the homeless population in Itu.

That’s significant for us, because our vision for ministry in Abilene is a housing first model for eliminating systemic homelessness in Abilene. We’ve given over $600,000 to future projects to develop housing for our neighbors without homes. But when we started paying attention to what our brothers & sisters down south were doing, we realized that they were way ahead of us on this.

And so our trips have been less about “let us come help you spread the Gospel” and more about “please teach us what you’ve already learned through your ministry here.”

This principle is how we are trying to approach world evangelism, fighting human trafficking, and peacemaking in the Muslim majority world, we aren’t that important as a church, but we can do something significant when we partner with others.

There’s so much more here, so if you’re interested, please check out the embedded video. But to close this series out, I want to just say how much we believe in the stuff that I’ve shared over the past few days.

We’ve committed that over the next two decades, if there is a member of our church who is called to serve as a missionary in line with this wholistic vision addressing evangelism, church planting, fighting human trafficking, or peace-making the Muslim world than we are committed to fully funding them in that calling.

We’re not a rich church. We’ve got a lot of public school teachers and working class parishioners. But by global standards we’re incredibly wealthy. And we realize that in order to do this we’ve got to live more simply, sacrifice more of our upward mobility and become more generous to stand in solidarity with our Christian brothers and sisters to the South.

But we’re going to do this because we believe that living more simply for this kind of purpose is good news for the world, for us, and for Creation itself.

And that’s what we mean when we say we want to be a Global Christian.