Tag Archives: global

An overlapping circle model for mission

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In my previous post, I introduced a way of seeing Acts 1:8 as a call to global Church partnership through the idea of overlapping circles. Like intersecting ripples that radiate across a pond from a rain storm, the location of one church’s “ends of the earth” might be another church’s “Judea,” and one church’s “Samaria” might be another’s “Jerusalem.”

Jesus’ plan for mission could be summarized by four concurrent strategies:

1. Local, indigenous evangelism. Local people have real advantages to being missional in their own context. Instinctively, they know the community and the language. Travel costs are reduced and they don’t need cross-cultural training. The problem is that they lack the ability to step back and notice things that would be obvious to an outsider. In other words, they have blind spots about their own language and culture. To expose those blind spots, it takes a visitor from another ring with fresh eyes showing up and asking dumb questions or breaking the culture and language down through analysis.

2. National outreach. Likewise, everyone has a pretty good grasp of the surrounding and near culture, and some of the same savings in travel and training apply here as well. Certainly local citizens need less help to understand and relate to their culture than a foreigner would. However, there are some problems. They are vulnerable to absorbing the surrounding culture without question or noticing how it’s changing them, perhaps developing nearsightedness or even nationalistic tendencies. One specific trap is that they might gloss over differences like regional biases and flavours. Missions within their own country might still require cross-cultural skills to bridge gaps to their neighbors.

3. Marginalized reconciliation. To my mind, Samaria refers to the groups anyone marginalizes or has trouble getting along with. These are the places where regional biases cross the line into prejudices, and generations of pain and even hatred may need to be unraveled. Ministry in these contexts therefore begins with truth-telling reconciliation. Only after addressing woundedness can individuals or churches be effective witnesses. The good news is that other nations and cultures can act as a neutral third party to set the table. In fact, others’ experiences can help churches with their tensions and struggles if they can learn from and honestly apply the others’ lessons to their own failures and successes.

4. Expatriate missions. In order to reach every nation, some will need to leave their home country to go overseas. This is the costliest approach to missions, but we shouldn’t underestimate the way the gospel has spread and brought transformation around the world because of the faith and risks taken by foreign missionaries. To do it well requires a great deal of understanding in order to fully contextualize the gospel and Scriptures across cultural borders without adding our own cultural ideals and historical assumptions. We go in as servants to the local community or local Church. It also requires making long-term commitments and taking the long view in expectations and metrics.

Bottom line: mission is most effective when the global Church comes together and works together—in local evangelism, national outreach, reconciliation and cross-cultural mission, but also mixing roles like prayer, funding, and other forms of resourcing—to participate together in God’s purposes to draw all people to himself.

Acts 1:8 Series

Overlapping Circles

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After considering how the disciples understood Jesus’ words in Acts 1:8, and how a global, current day Church understands those words, let me get to my point. It starts with two statements:

1. I believe Jesus was speaking to all believers, and he was laying out a pattern for mission that could be applied worldwide: You, the Church, will be my witnesses in concentric circles: wherever you consider your Jerusalem, your Judea, your Samaria and your ends of the earth. 

2. Each circle must be engaged with the humble realization that your “Jerusalem” or “Judea” is someone else’s “ends of the earth,” someone else’s “Samaria.” Our circles overlap. 

This is how I believe Jesus pictured the Church in Acts 1:8:

There are numerous implications of this metaphor.

First, the overlap. Each part of the Church has an epicenter for its missional activity but has responsibility to engage in other rings as God leads them and opens doors. In that way, every part of the world is covered, double covered and triple covered, each location or category the responsibility of multiple branches of the Church.

Second, the ripples crash into each other. These overlapping circles interact with each other and even interdepend on each other. But, as with ripples in a pond, there are secondary impacts as the ripples affect each other. Such overlap is unpredictable, bound to create additional opportunities, consequences and disruptions.

Here are a few implications that come to mind for me:

  • Jesus intended expatriates and local citizens to minister together in mission. An expat Kenyan who wants to do ministry in Canada should certainly work together with local Canadians who are trying to reach their Jerusalem. Any ministry to a marginalized group should incorporate the nearby Church who loves and understands that demographic. As some have said, “Nothing about them without them.”
  • If there’s no local Church among a people group, then the overlapping circles create opportunity for partnership to cover the gap until a church is birthed who can focus on their “Jerusalem.”
  • We’d be fools to try to do mission without local and indigenous insight and partnership. When we go overseas, we must take the role of servants, putting ourselves in second place to those who understand language and culture to a degree we never will.  
  • Conversely, we would be negligent in fulfilling our part in Jesus’ mission if we took a “take-care-of-your-own” approach and simply delegated mission in every country to local people. This image forces us to consider the crash of ripples coming together in the interplay between those who provide funds or staff and those who spend the budget.
  • We would be missing Jesus’ intent if we didn’t see the value that immigrant missionaries in our country could bring to help us reach our nation.
  • If you think of the conceptual meaning of “Samaria,” which might be a group with historical tensions with our own, it’s worthwhile asking who considers us their “Samaria.” Other parts of the Church might be able to help break down those barriers and even help heal the rifts.

Ultimately, this metaphor asks who we should partner with to accomplish the mission for any location we feel drawn to or called to. Rather than working alone to impact our city, who else has a passion to reach our neighbourhood, city or province? Could we be the catalyst that makes their ministry effective?

For instance, can you imagine the power of the overlapping circles working together to reach Canada? What if the Church in Montreal or in Eeyou Istchee (a First Nations community in northern Quebec) partnered with a local Ottawa church to reach our nation’s capital? What would have to happen to enable that kind of remarkable inter-circle ministry? Who or what would stand in the way of such a partnership?

I know I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of the implications for this way of thinking. What other applications do you see?

Acts 1:8 Series

We live in the ends of the earth

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I believe Jesus’ words in Acts 1:8 were intended not just for his immediate audience, the disciples who would become apostles, but for all believers, all generations. Indeed, the Church in every generation has applied its own interpretations to these locations. Ours is a translated faith, a religion that Lamin Sanneh argues was intended to be translated from the very beginning and would continue to be translated.1

While the disciples might have been limited in their perception of the ends of the earth, I believe Jesus, the One who spoke creation into being (Col 1:15-16), was thinking of the distant shores of Papua New Guinea and the desert tribes of the Gobi, Great Victorian and Sahara. I also believe he anticipated the state of the global Church today: a decentralized Church existing in every part of the world.

It’s important to understand where we in North America fit in. If Jesus’ disciples could have comprehended Canada and the U.S. at the time, they would certainly have slotted us into the “ends of the earth” category.

Think about the implications of that for a minute. The North American Church is so used to being the center of Christianity, but we started off-center, and the center of Christianity has moved to the southern and eastern hemispheres.

Our contextualization of these verses simply exists alongside the view of other believers around the world. Where do they think of when they hear Jesus’ words? I asked that recently in a Zoom call with two dozen people from every part of the world. Here are some of the results:

What you think of as Jerusalem/JudeaWhat you think of as the ends of the earth
U.K.Outer Mongolia
NetherlandsChina
KoreaAfrica
NigeriaNorth and South Poles
U.S.North Pole
U.S.Siberia
EthiopiaAmerica
NetherlandsNew Zealand
IndiaEnd of India
U.S.Abu Dhabi
U.S.East and West coast of U.S.
CameroonAmerica
U.K.Vancouver

How many of you live in someone else’s ends of the earth? Have you ever visited a place you once viewed as the ends of the earth? The mobility we experience today is truly remarkable! The Church is a global Church, present and engaging in mission everywhere.

We’ll build from these two posts as I get to my main point in the next blog post.

Acts 1:8 Series

1 Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Eerdmans. 2003, p97.