Pictured: The Bunting Map from the Reformation era more than makes up for its comical lack of cartographic accuracy with its symbolic display of the mindset nearly 1600 years after Christ’s ascension. The Americas are relegated to an irrelevant corner at the bottom of the page. No influence or effect on the church whatsoever.
We find ourselves in a cultural moment where professing Christian bloggers throw around the term “globalist” (particularly as it contrasts with “nationalist”) as a slur meant to provoke fear and aversion in their readers. We might do well to pause, take a deep breath, and reacquaint ourselves with what the Trinity, Scripture, and our faithful forebears have said about our proper posture in the world. When the cacophony of voices leave us pre-consciously assuming that the church everywhere else in the world is derivative of the West, we are wise to gently and kindly remind one another that the Western church is, by God’s grace, a glorious product of the faithful followers of Jesus from the East. Though for the first 1600 years of the Church the Americas were, in fact, “the ends of the Earth,” they were certainly seen by God.
In time, the Father demonstrated His love for the Western Hemisphere by sending his Church, empowered by his Spirit, to bring the extraordinary news of the redeeming and adopting work of his Son as a gift for us to steward well. Stewardship, or ambassadorship (2 Cor 5:20) negates ownership. It is not our Gospel. It is God making his appeal through us. This is astoundingly good news, the good news that the Kingdom of God is in no way dependent on any earthly kingdom. Christ and his Church endure, as all others come and go and are lost to history (Dan 7:14). Israel, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Southern Europe, and Northern Europe, have all at one point served as the epicenter of Christianity for a season before the center of gravity shifted. North America has been blessed with a short season of significant influence over global Christianity and as that responsibility increasingly falls on other people in other parts of the world, we celebrate the One who, by His blood, ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Rev 5:9).
Our God is a global God. He is not a national or localized god like the gods of the Canaanites, but the One who breathed every individual and nation into existence and who rules over them all in ways that are often challenging for us to understand, let alone articulate (Rom 13:1-2; 1 Tim 6:13-15; Rev 19:15).
Psalm 22:27–28
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.
The Bible’s most memorized verse, John 3:16, reminds us that, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17, italics mine). Our globalist God articulates his love for the nations across the whole of Scripture, a concept beautifully encapsulated by Abraham Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Not just every aspect of my life, but every aspect of human existence: all humans. As a result, it is his glorious sovereign prerogative to decide where the center of gravity of his global Church will fall in any given time and his Church’s joyful responsibility to celebrate that and discover how to encourage, equip, and support his people everywhere.
Jesus enters into every people and culture lovingly confronting the elements in contrast with his Kingdom and yet managing to somehow also feel deeply familiar. It’s been said that Jesus does not arrive in any culture as a stranger. There are aspects of every culture that Jesus can affirm as evidence of his preexistent and preeminent grace. He is the ultimate answer to the specific fears and needs of every people. The fact that Jesus transcends all cultures also means he confronts certain aspects of every culture. The reality of cultural differences means that followers of Jesus in various cultures are asking different questions, struggling against different fears, and wrestling with different manifestations of idol and self-worship.
When we change our posture from expert to learner, we have an astounding opportunity to gain insight into new aspects of the character of the Father, the work of Jesus, and the power and activity of the Spirit. In addition, we open the door to a more robust understanding of what living in the deeply committed and fully dependent community of the church looks like, an understanding we would never have access to looking at Scripture and the church through our own cultural lens alone.
Cultivating the kind of heart that looks at the nations as God does, and is likely to celebrate, along with heaven, the diversity of the ransomed people of God, requires some effort on our part. It is not our factory setting. Rather than defaulting to our natural inclination to be concerned only with what impacts us and our context directly, we can seek to learn from our brothers and sisters across the globe. Read Majority World theologians and pastors and discover what the Spirit has taught them as they ask different questions than we do. If time and budget allows, travel in order to cooperate with churches in the Global South with the goal of learning from them. Do a deep dive into the resources put out by organizations like Lausanne.org, which collect the thoughts and lessons from pastors, missiologists, theologians, and missionaries all over the world. Most importantly, read the Bible through a global lens. Notice how often the Spirit calls God’s people to be a “light to the nations.” Even when God calls out a particular nation as unique, it is for the blessing of all others, not to the exclusion of all others.
As the cultural wind blows the last vestiges of the exhaust of Christendom from our atmosphere, we need not fear. Much of it wasn’t as helpful or faithful as we thought it was anyway. What was truly fruitful will continue to thrive here and across the globe. May we grow in our love for the world that the Trinity so deeply and demonstratively loves. May our Father allow us to play a role in supporting, encouraging, equipping, and unleashing our brothers and sisters in the Majority World as we learn from them and delight in the Trinity together.
Robbie Halleen (M.A.T.S., Tennent) serves as the Global Field Education Coordinator for Tennent, and has invested decades in the local and global church. Throughout that time, God has given him the extraordinary blessing of experiencing his people in over 20 countries. Delighted by the reality that one day Jesus will be worshipped by every tongue and every tribe, Robbie and his family are committed to seeing as many people as possible experience that on this side of eternity.