⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Dang Annie you need some deodorant! You 'stanky!'

At these words I’m willing to bet that some of Jesus followers fell back with looks on their faces like they just bit into a sour lemon. “Samaria Lord?” They whisper.

Samaria, after all, was the armpit of Israel! Half-breed Jews who had married with the Assyrians and other foreign peoples as well as idol worshipers who combined Judaism with their own religion. A good Jerusalemite wouldn’t even travel through Samaria on their way from Judea to Galilee, even Jesus on occasion would travel around Samaria (though surely not for racist reasons)! This is why Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well is so extraordinary.

While Jesus paradigm for ‘Global Missions’ is meant literally many churches have adapted it for themselves, seeing their local city as Jerusalem, their state as their Judea, their nation as their Samaria, and overseas as the ‘uttermost.’

This is probematic. Maybe if we related to Jesus commission in Acts 1.8 as He said it we would treat the mission of ‘being witnesses’ and proclaiming the Gospel differently, understanding the need and importance of engaging our own local communities as we dream global missionaries engaging their communities.

This morning Stuart Heath over at the Crowded House Blog Room began a three part blog series entitled ‘Global Mission: It’s Local Mission, Elsewhere.’  Stuart began this first post with the quote below, which helped express some of my own frustrations with how national and international missions are perceived.

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.

I find it incomprehensible that in 2007 the missions offering for international missions for the Southern Baptist Convention was nearly $100 million more than the offering for North American Missions. Now some will say, “Consider that North America is only one continent in the scheme of global missions and, deservedly, shouldn’t receive equal amounts of offering totals.” Agreed! However, where does the vast majority of that money come from, and why do North Americans (really mostly Americans) give three to one over their own continent? Also, how does this ratio change when cost of living is analyzed? Doesn’t a dollar go much further in India than in Indiana?

This leads me to a question, is there a greater need overseas than there is here in North American and The United States? Some will quickly answer, “Yes! There are places in the world that the Gospel has never been heard.” Okay, I agree, however if we don’t adapt they way we view missions and change the way we see our own local communities as mission fields instead of just where we live North America can quickly become a place that the Gospel is no longer heard as generations pass who do not carry the good news of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus with them. By the grace of God my children will hear the Gospel because their daddy is a pastor, but will their classmates and others in their generation?

We need to continue to teach our people in our churches to be Gospel-centered in their daily lives and to see their local Starbucks not just as a place to get coffee but as a place to participate in God’s mission in the world. Paul words in Acts 17 are a clear reminder that we can be ‘local missionaries’:

²⁶ And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, ²⁷ that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,

One of the ways that I do this is to encourage our people to adopt a local business for a month. Find a Target, Starbucks, Gas Station, or favorite restaurant and make it your personal mission field for a month. Be proactive as you go there, praying for God to open doors for you to build new relationships with customers or staff, and be intentional about starting conversations as you’re there keeping your eyes and ears open for possible avenues to begin dialogue.

It seems that through the history of Christian missions we’ve neglected the places that we’ve already taken the Gospel. Like a man trying to plug a leaking damn wall with only one finger we pull out of the hole we’re in and move to the next big leak and as we do so we leave the hole we were in and cause it to begin to fail again. Look at how the Gospel has gone from Jerusalem to Antioch to the Greek and Roman worlds, eventually to Europe to North America to Asia. Yet every time the Gospel moves, whether it’s because of complacency or whatever things begin to falter where it came from. (For one of the most recent examples compare post reformation Europe to Europe today. Didn’t Calvin come from France? Luther from Germany? Spurgeon from England? How do these countries fare today?)

We must realize the need to be Gospel-centered and Missional in our own local cities and towns. And our churches and missions organizations must realize the need of enabling our people, our church planters, and our pastors in fulfilling this.

Is North America the armpit of modern missions? I have a feeling, yes…but that could just be my Friday Frustration.