Global mission: partnership in practice

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.)

These processes of developing pastoral oversight and gospel-contextualization can often begin long before someone moves his or her entire life abroad.  For example, a couple in Sheffield are thinking about becoming involved in church planting in Kurdistan.  Kurdish church culture (like English church culture) is defined by both the gospel and wider Kurdish cultural norms (language, food, dress, literature, worldview, ways of greeting and talking and so on).  The local church in England has got help from a local church in Northern Iraq to learn about some Kurdish cultural specificities.  The Kurdish church’s insights have helped the English church to build relationships and share the gospel among Kurdish people in Sheffield.  And thus, without even changing postcode, the English would-be missionaries have started to learn how to contextualize the gospel from a local church in Kurdistan.  Short-term visits to the region will allow them to glean more language and culture, as well as developing the relationship between the two churches who will together prayerfully forge the shape of the mission in Kurdistan.

Another example is Disciples Church in Durres, Albania.  Disciples Church was planted by and is in partnership with Stopsley Baptist Church (SBC) in Luton, England.  SBC was seeking to develop another partnership with some believers in Cambodia.  Clearly there was a cultural gulf between the two groups.  The English Christians realized, however, that their Albanian partners might share a greater cultural affinity with the Cambodians — for one thing, both countries knew wretched hardship and were still feeling the effects of bloody, despotic Communist regimes.  The Albanians could be a blessing directly to the Cambodians, as well as helping SBC learn how to serve better.  So they began developing a three-way partnership, which included a joint Albanian-English short-term mission to Cambodia: twelve days running a mobile hearing clinic and visiting churches in four towns and villages.  On a later visit to Cambodia, this time with just the pastor of Disciples Church, SBC reported:
 

Bunna [a Cambodian pastor] sees part of his role as helping people to become self-supporting, by growing rice or owning fish or goats.  Stopsley are partners in this, but the Durres connection is vital.  Arvid [the Albanian pastor] related really well with the Cambodians.  As an Albanian, he knows what it’s like for fledgling churches facing financial hardship and emerging from an oppressive regime.

 
One must wonder at and praise God for the work he is doing in and through a partnership composed of three such different cultures, united in the gospel of Jesus Christ.