The Challenge of Missions In Our Backyard

For most Christian believers in our nation, when we approach them with the subject of missions, they think in a group of missionaries traveling to a distant land, sandy dunes, people suffering from hunger and diseases, or perhaps an inhospitable rain forest surrounded by people half naked. Well, that is not necessary the whole picture at the dawn of the 21st century. The fact of the matter is that missions has become more complicated today. With the United States of America and Europe becoming more secularized, the global migration of people of all ethnias into our country, and the Islamic revival this nation is beginning to experience, it is necessary for the church to have a clear strategy of evangelization locally and abroad.

The United States of America is a nation of immigrants, and as such, during the 19th and 20th centuries we had an avalanche of people coming to this land from Germany, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and many other parts of Europe and Latin America. However, from the decade of the 1990's until the present time the migration into this country has been incrementally from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Therefore, the culture and identity of this country is evolving dramatically. Take for instance the Latino population here in America, we have become the largest minority in the nation. Furthermore, if you travel not just to major metropolitan areas like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, but in places like Postville, Iowa, the flood of immigrants coming into this land are taking even areas we never though foreigners will be calling home.

To this challenge, the question that comes to my mind is, what we are doing as the church of Jesus Christ in order to engage in a conversation with peoples from diferent nationalities in our own communities? This is the challenge of missions in our own backyard. It saddens me to see how many denominations take as an answer to a dying church because of changes in the demographics of a particular neighborhood close the doors and put in the front yard of the church building a "For Sale" sign. I strongly believe, we have been called to open churches, not to close them. Therefore, we must be kingdom minded at the time of a transition such as this in any church. In other words, if the neighborhood changes from a primarly caucasian into Korean, we should find a way to establish a Korean ministry and support it wholeheartly even if they do not belong to our own denomination. We are talking about souls, not just plain and simple numbers.

So, it is my prayer, that the church in this nation would open their eyes for a moment and see what kind of harvest they have around them. It might be a Iraqi harvest, or a Mexican harvest, a Somali harvest, or a Romanian harvest, becuae nonetheless it is a harvest. I pray that we discover in our heart the willingness to invest our lives not just to travel or finance others to take the gospel abroad, but to reach out our neighbors from other nationalities with different customs, faiths, habits, and languages. I pray, each and everyone of us will be intentional in our reaching out for the lost; in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.