CT: Christian leaders are trying to make sense of the shift to the Global South and many of these countries are sending their missionaries to the likes of the UK and US. Do you see that trend continuing?
CW: Yes. We are now into the era of reverse migration in the great scheme of our world history. In 500 years, the populations of Europe decided to go to other places, so we had mass emigration out of Europe to the world. We didn't ask permission. We just went and planted ourselves there and did stuff, whether they wanted it or not, sometimes disastrously.
Now that tide has turned and the world is coming to Europe, so we have huge populations of migrants. When you are into an era of reverse migration, it is not surprising that that includes Christians because many of these are coming from cultures where there is now a strong and vibrant Christian church, whether Hispanic cultures, or African, or from some parts of Asia. As people from those cultures come to the West they come as Christians and whether they are coming explicitly as missionaries or not, they come here and witness. So one is as likely to hear the Gospel from a black neighbour in Tottenham as from any white Anglo-Saxon. So be it, that's the way God has organised His history!
It is true that many of the churches in Africa and Asia see Europe as a missionary-needy continent - as we are, and so there are definitely mission movements seeking to bring evangelistic church planting movements back to Britain. My only thought on that is that we would hope that they would learn from some of the mistakes that Europeans and Americans made when we went out to other cultures in missionary work and we thought that our own culture was best and we simply did everything our own way. There are forms of missionary work from Africa and Asia, Latin America that are doing the same thing.
We need to all have a sense of humility, of cultural sensitivity, of trying to learn a new culture before you witness in it. We hope that the folks who do feel called by God will be willing to experience some degree of training and cross-cultural inculturation, as much as we need it when we go somewhere else.
CT: John Stott spoke in his final address at Keswick of incarnational evangelism. What does that mean in practical terms for the work that Langham is doing?
CW: John Stott's basic point was that the word became flesh. It didn't just come as a message from heaven, it became flesh and lived among us, so the church likewise has to incarnate the message it preaches by living among people, by witnessing, by serving them.
In the long-term it has to be a patient, relational kind of work. Langham Partnership isn't directly involved in evangelism but the work we do in preaching seminars is incarnational in the sense that we don't see our role as only going into countries and running seminars. Anyone can do that and come back out again.
What we see as our purpose is to try to root indigenous movements in biblical preaching which is locally owned and led and, we hope, eventually locally financed, in which people are almost generating their own self-help movement of preachers clubs and day conferences, helping one another in the whole task of biblical preaching. That will continue long after we have come away again. So we always work with a national organisation, whether it is a church or denomination. Langham Preaching will always be in partnership with an indigenous Christian group and we will as soon as we can have the whole thing run and led by indigenous leaders. And I think by God's grace we have seen the fruit of that.
