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I promised to give a couple of examples of how partnerships between churches might provide a context for long-term sustainability of mission. 

If we send 'lone ranger' missionaries abroad, their ministry is likely to be hindered by their aloneness.  Christian community is necessary for Christians, and it is a powerful witness to non-Christians.  Thus pastoral care and learning how to contextualize the gospel in a new culture are best done not from a distance, but within local churches at the coal-face.  Moreover, if local believers take ownership of the mission, they will continue to replicate it long after the missionary leaves.  (You can read an extraordinary example here.)

In this second of three posts, I want to look at how we can redress the individualism in our current practice of global mission.  One remedy might be to develop real partnerships between local churches in different parts of the world.

A possible obstacle to this is our traditional tendency in the West to be paternalistic — we are the experts and we are going to show Christians elsewhere how it's done. 

All mission is local — it just depends on where you are.  So the same principles that we use to do mission in our local area can be used for global mission.  On one level, this observation seems too obvious to make, but our culture’s tendency to lionize missionaries abroad shows that many of us think of them as somehow a cut above ‘regular’ Christians.  In this first post in a series of three, I'll outline two ways we apply different standards to local and global mission: (1) the way we train missionaries, and (2) how we send them.

What do you think of the city? When most groups do a word association on 'the city', they throw up a mix of positive and negative images. But what is God's vision for the city?

Here's a quote from Organic Church (p 211-212) by Neil Cole. It's a story that made me cry when I first read it.

I came across the great quote from B.B. Warfield in John's Piper book, Don't Waste Your Life:

Now dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving ... 'though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor' ...

Objection 1. 'My money is my own.' Answer: Christ might have said, 'My blood is my own, my life is my own' ... then where should we have been?

I was recently asked in an email, "If you were parachuted into a city, an organisation were paying you and you wanted to start a church, what would you do?"

Hmm. Here's what I replied...