Last week a team from North Way Christian Community went on a mission trip to Honduras. I had the opportunity to go to Honduras last summer for research on my doctoral dissertation, so I know first hand how transformational the experience must have been for the team that went on this trip. The time spent in Honduras is life changing! Today several people who went on the trip shared with me about some of the amazing things that God did through this group of people from our church while in Honduras. God moved in many ways, and lives were impacted both with the people living in Honduras and with the people from Pittsburgh who went on the trip.
I am greatly encouraged by what God is doing globally, and I am also greatly encouraged by what God is doing in Pittsburgh. I have reached out to the people who went on the Honduras trip because I really want to connect them with what God is doing in Pittsburgh as well. Sometimes in the church we notice a tension between global and local missions, but there really is no difference to God. God is on mission to redeem every part of this world all of the time locally and globally, and he has chosen the church to accomplish his mission during this particular period of history. Global outreach is valuable, and local outreach is valuable. The point is that when we join God's mission to reach people in need in this world, we grow closer to Christ.
The big secret in living the countercultural Christian lifestyle in America is that the spiritual high or "feeling" that we get when we go on mission trips and serve the poor abroad... we can experience that closeness to God or "feeling" all of the time. I mean every single day of our lives. God designed us to live in his mission to reach the world all of the time, whether it's through volunteering locally where ever God has planted us or in our vocations or with our families. The world encourages us in America to be upwardly mobile and distance ourselves from people in need with our lifestyles, but the radical nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ encourages us to be downwardly mobile and give ourselves away relationally with marginalized people. God takes the things of this world and flips them on their head, and that still applies to modern day America. As followers of Jesus, we can find great purpose and meaning in life through living missionally all of the time... locally and globally.
1 comment:
Great post! I think it is powerful how God can use a global missions experience to compel someone to get involved in missions locally. When short-term teams are debriefing before leaving El Salvador we challenge them to think of those in need right on their own doorsteps. There are drug addicts, homeless people, prostitutes, and fatherless kids in every city in the world. We love hearing that people have gone home to feed the homeless and care for those on the margins in their own cities.
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