I recently discovered the blog of a church in TX doing something that has been rattling around my brain in theory. Before we started this church, we were YWAMers (and of course, once a YWAMer always a YWAMer) but our dream was to start a mission base in Bellingham (some missiologists call it a “sodality” or an “apostolic band”) We were to be globally-focused and sending and going out frequently. Then we changed gears to start this church keenly focused on Bham’s unique local culture. Have we lost our global perspective?

No, we’re re-tooling it. Re-focusing, starting over fresh. That’s why this church in TX is so blogworthy, because they not only coined the phrase “glocal” but they’re living up to it pretty well. I first heard this phrase used by a friend and honestly I thought it was a little corny (sorry, much love man) – that was probably my pride of having worked in the missionary enterprise. Which is exactly the point: Is it possible for the church to be about the local culture and at the same time be missionary on a global scale, and to not just talk about global missions/community development like it’s some kind of tokenism? Because I’ve seen global involvement done wrong enough times to make me skeptical – the dependency issues, the power-plays, the smug self-pats on the back, the naive armchair advocacy, the well-meaning cluelessness – I wondered if it’s possible for a church to be truly glocal. I think this church in Texas shows us that with some careful thought it is possible to be a local + global = glocal church.

So I’ve been dreaming all this time of a church that meshes with what we wanted to do when we were with YWAM – a church that will research and adopt ethnicities on a global scale, will identify spiritual and physical problems, will favor preventative approaches and work towards measurable results, a church that gives birth to more churches and entities, sodalities, apostolic bands, social businesses, and so on. We have to be glocal – we have to be both sodality AND modality, apostolic band AND sending base, Antioch AND Paul & Barnabas – if we want to be a truly emerging church today.

Locally, I blog enough about this, so nuff said there. But I’ll leave you with a snippet from glocalnet that has buoyed my ambitions today:

I’m convinced the greatest need today of church plantings is not how to get a core group, launch a church, develop a budget, all those things that we have taught and do teach–and they are important–the greatest need of the hour and hunger in our land today in young pastors is how do we effectively engage people and churches in society.

Amen. And I leave you with the immortalized words of the great Captain Jean-Luc Picard: engage.