INTERNATIONAL CHURCHES: Detour or Another Tool?
STATEMENT
An international church should endeavor to be growing in health, pursuing local relationships, and equipping indigenous leaders with the explicit goal of planting and strengthening other local churches.
Article Written by Mark CollinsI was a typical new missionary, high on zeal and low on knowledge. I had been trained for cultural immersion and language acquisition. I was ready to dive deep with the people I wanted to reach. I had spent years preparing for what I hoped would result in people coming to know Christ and churches being established in a very needy place in the 10/40 Window. The last thing I wanted to do when I arrived was spend time with people who looked like me, talked like me, and did church like me. After all, I was a missionary!
Upon my arrival, long-termers encouraged my isolationist desires. Security was a paramount concern in our location. They told me that going to an international church would compromise our efforts: I would be besieged with questions about my work, it would become immediately obvious what I was doing, and they might go blab about it to all the wrong people. Even if none of this happened, I would surely get sucked into all sorts of ministry that would take me away from the very work I had come to do. Better just to stay away!
It didn’t take long for dissonance to settle in my mind about this approach. What we ended up doing on Sunday mornings was a very loose approximation of church: ten to fifteen missionaries gathered in someone’s home to listen to an audio sermon, discuss, and eat—encouraging, yes, but not exactly church. There was an ingrown feel to our group, and yet no sense of responsibility to the group, no recognized spiritual leadership, no vision for what we were trying to do. To make matters worse, I was teaching local believers the necessity of doing things I wasn’t doing myself. I would have gladly joined these local brothers in their church, but their security wouldn’t allow it. So what could be done?
It took me about a decade on the field to reverse course from what I initially thought or had been told. The change came because of a biblical conviction—that every Christian should aim to be part of a biblically ordered church. The Great Commission, which had sent me to the mission field, contained the answer—as a disciple of Jesus, I wasn’t just supposed to be teaching others to obey what Jesus had commanded; I was supposed to obey it myself. This meant gathering with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It meant baptizing and taking the Lord’s Supper with God’s people. It meant raising up elders and deacons to take the offices assigned by the Scriptures. It simply wasn’t right for missionaries to exempt themselves from this. They should either join an existing church in the local language if possible, in a trade language if necessary or plant and grow a new one. This is a matter of Christian responsibility. It is also a reminder that we shouldn’t ask other people to do what we aren’t doing ourselves.
So, we started an English-speaking church in our living room. As expected, and as I’d been warned, this church did indeed take up a great deal of valuable time. I had counted on that. What I hadn’t counted on was how strategic this move would become for our ministry to local believers. Here are four ways:
All of a sudden, the things I was teaching local pastors were things I was dealing with myself as a pastor. They often had to start a church from scratch; now, I was starting a church from scratch. They were illegal and dealt with government harassment; now I was too. They had trouble figuring out how to run leaders meetings, now I did too. Many of them had to juggle church ministry and a “day job,” in a sense, so did I (though both of my jobs were in ministry).
God brought people from fifteen different countries to our church, and some were converted through our church. Silly though it was, I simply hadn’t been willing to factor in the intrinsic value of ministering to people outside of my “target audience.”
Many of the people who joined our church over the next several years were locals with a high degree of English proficiency. Sometimes, after a season in our church, they would transition into indigenous churches where they could do much good.
Now that I was a pastor of a church, I could build peer relationships with other local pastors. This led to the creation of a family of churches, a network that could partner for further gospel outreach.
I don’t share my experience to say this will be other people’s experience. I share it because many underestimate how an international church can be strategically used in a given location. Sending churches and missionaries are wise to consider how an international church can be leveraged to form beachheads and long-term bases of stability for gospel work in a region. When done well, they are not a detour from planting healthy indigenous churches.
What Should International Churches Do to Plant Healthy Indigenous Churches?
First, an international church needs to understand its mission. Whether an Arabic-speaking church in the south of Spain, a Chinese-speaking church in Kuala Lumpur, or an English-speaking church in Tokyo—churches need to understand the full scope of their calling by the Lord Jesus. They are called to make disciples of all nations. This doesn’t mean any one church can reach all nations at once, but factors of geography and opportunity should make them eager to reach whomever they can. Surely, the people around them will be high on their list.
Second, action must closely follow the mission. International churches can pursue effective ministry to those around them in at least four ways: growing in health, pursuing local relationships, equipping indigenous leaders, and planting churches.
Growing in health: Every church should desire to grow deeper in Christ, investing in its own members while also looking outward. We cannot strive for health in other places if we are not providing a vision of corporate spiritual health. This should take the form of clarity on the gospel and how a credible profession of faith marks out the boundaries of the people of God. We practice membership and church discipline to make the people of God visible, to guard the gospel, and to grow in maturity. We raise up qualified leaders: elders who give their time to prayer and the ministry of the Word, deacons who serve the practical needs of the flock. These “church basics” are essential and have an outsized importance in a missionary environment, where they are quite rare in indigenous churches.
Pursuing local relationships: An international church is a small subset within a larger indigenous population. As language and proximity allow, international church leaders should actively try to meet and get to know local leaders in the area to build trust and friendship. If other gospel-believing churches exist in the area, there should be a natural desire to lock arms with each other. We see the “oughtness” of this sort of relationship-building in 3 John 8 in the call to support gospel workers so we can be “fellow workers for the truth.” Relationship building is essential, whether through a shared language, the use of translation, or in the pursuit of local language proficiency. Over time, these relationships should lead to a desire to strengthen one another’s ministries. It will also take the form of ministry initiatives as like-minded churches partner together in feasible and helpful ways.
Equipping indigenous leaders: An international church in an unreached region has the strategic opportunity to help raise up indigenous church leaders. This is mainly due to the more significant resources often available to the international church. This could mean inviting local leaders to observe congregational or elders’ meetings. It could mean providing theological training by supporting a local seminary, translating resources, or running internship programs. Elders in an international church may be able to identify future leaders and invest in them specifically. Partnering with other churches to host conferences and trainings is often low-hanging fruit.
Planting churches: This may seem like the hardest one to do, and it will often take some time to pull off. However, an international church can be involved in indigenous church planting with patience. This could come from efforts to train bilingual local leaders who can be trained in the mother church. It could come from working through a like-minded, elder-qualified missionary proficient in the local language. Some international churches have been able to incubate an indigenous group within their church with the hopes of sending them out to plant. By far, the ideal situation is forming a local association with existing indigenous churches that can pool money and leadership to plant new churches.
The model I am proposing here is certainly not the only one every missionary should follow. In many places, missionaries can be a part of the church they are trying to plant from the very beginning. This has many advantages from the perspective of language learning, culture adjustment, and the effective handing over of leadership to locals. International churches can fill a strategic void where this is not the case. They can be a great help and support to missionaries in their efforts. Many who may not be equipped to plant indigenous churches may find themselves thriving in an international church. They can model what a church is and partner with local leaders and churches to help them thrive. The idea of partnership in the gospel should make us eager to add this to how we think about trying to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. I wish I had been open to it sooner!
