Christians called to mission on their doorstep

God is opening up a new opportunity to reach even more people with the Gospel of Christ the number of people living in diaspora continues to rise.

With 3% of the world’s population living outside their country of origin, missiologist TV Thomas said the church needed to look at where God was moving people and start making efforts to reach them.

He said: “There are 1.1 million Arabic Muslims living in Argentina. They need the Gospel, they need to be reached.

“A hundred and four thousand Punjabi-speaking Sikhs live in Sri Lanka. They are so far away from Punjab but they are people who need to be reached.

“We can go on listing the tonnes of people who are far away from home who need to be reached with the Gospel.

“What God is doing is in accordance to his will, his work and his word.”

Thomas said that God was moving people to give them another opportunity to seek God and Christians another opportunity to reach the unreached.

“Yes, they could have sought God in any place they came from but a global reality is this: when people move to a new place they become curious, their assumptions are re-evaluated, there is a fresh thinking of looking at the same thing in a different way.”

He continued: “The church must embrace this new global opportunity to reach people on the move. We must strategise and look at the possibilities all around us - he wants them to be in his church.”

Thomas was addressing hundreds of Christians during a multiplex at the Third Lausanne Congress on world evangelisation taking place in Cape Town this week.

Fellow missiologist Enoch Wan said Christians had to understand the new global reality and adjust their mission strategies to minister to, through and beyond the people who had moved into their communities.

In the age of the 'borderless church', Wan said Christians needed to undergo a paradigm shift and think beyond planting traditional churches to reach people in diaspora.

He told of cruise liner staff who set up a church onboard their ship and a group of Christians in one city that averted harassment from the authorities by acquiring a tour bus driver’s licence and holding their weekly services in a rented tour bus.

He added that Christains did not need to go very far to reach people from other parts of the world but find them on their own doorsteps. International students, for example, could be invited to a home Bible study during their studies and return as powerful witnesses to their home countries.

“God is moving people around and we should move along with it,” he said. “They have moved into your neighbourhood. There is no excuse for you saying ‘I don’t have a visa’ and ‘I can’t reach them’. No excuses.”

He warned, however, that Christians needed to get away from a "Western, managerial, outcomes-based approach", to evangelism based on friendship and hospitality.

"In North America, we begin with the apology 'nothing personal'. But if your ministry and theology is not personal I feel sorry for you," he said.

"Don't treat people as your target group. Don't try to market the Gospel. The Gospel doesn't need you to sell, but the Gospel needs you to be incarnationally touching their lives.

"Jesus touched many people's lives. He would not say 'sorry, nothing personal'."