For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked F. Lionel Young III (PhD, University of Stirling), Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide and Executive Vice President for Global Action, to explain the benefits of learning from the global church.
I sat with a group of Indian, Nepalese, and Bhutanese pastors at an outpost seminary in Jaigaon, a bustling border town in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal. The iconic gates of the Kingdom of Bhutan were just a short walk from my hotel room. I witnessed merchants and travelers flowing constantly in and out of the city; people from Nepal, Bhutan, and India crossed borders and mingled with ease in a place where American missionaries are unwelcome. We were talking about something remarkable: the spread of the gospel in Bhutan, a hermit country that is predominantly Buddhist, where open evangelism is forbidden by royal decree.
There are no megachurch ministries or celebrity preachers in Bhutan, and the gates are closed to Western missionaries — yet the church is growing and vibrant. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, there were virtually no Christians in Bhutan in 1900 and fewer than one thousand by 1970. Today, Bhutan is home to more than twenty thousand Christians who are on a mission to spread the gospel throughout their country of eight hundred thousand people.1 The “foreign” missionaries are Nepalese and Indian evangelicals, working together with Bhutanese pastors and evangelists. I had to know more — and so the group arranged for me to cross the border as an academic for the day.
We joined up with a few Bhutanese pastors in a cozy café inside the gates and enjoyed some Himalayan-grown coffee. I had read about the growth of Christianity in this land, but I wanted to hear firsthand accounts. One experienced pastor summarized it well: “We love our country and we love our king — but our first loyalty is to King Jesus. We do what he taught us. We are wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” The group joined in a chorus of joyful laughter, and they told me stories of how they invite friends, neighbors, and coworkers to their homes — often on Sundays — where they read the Scriptures, explain their meaning, share the gospel, and break bread together. One leader also shared his strategy for equipping more Bhutanese church planters to reach the entire kingdom with the gospel.2
It sounded very much to me like the early church. And it reminded me of how much we need the global church to finish the uncompleted task of bringing the gospel to the whole world. In this essay, I want to offer four reasons why every church needs the global church, offering examples along the way from some of the literature on world Christianity. But first, I want to clarify that the early church needed the global church, and I want to celebrate the renewed engagement with global Christianity in our own day.
The Early Global Church
When the Spirit came blowing in on Pentecost and translated the gospel into the languages and dialects of “every nation under heaven,” the global church was born (Acts 2:5). “Residents” of the East (Parthians), the Arabian Peninsula (Arabs), Africa (Egypt and Libya), the Mediterranean (Cretans), Western Asia (Pontus and Asia), and Europe (Rome) believed the gospel and were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Their new lives were marked by gladness in fellowship and overflowed in praise to God (Acts 2:8–11, 37–41, 46–47). In the decades that followed, the church would continue its expansive growth in the diverse regions of the world. As Paul noted in his salutation to the Gentile Christians in Colossae (some 750 miles from Jerusalem), the gospel was “bearing fruit and increasing” throughout the whole world (Colossians 1:6).
The New Testament papers should not be read as though the earth were flat in the first century. The earliest Christians had to work out their theology in the milieu of global and cultural diversity. The first Christian communities spread out throughout the world, but they also functioned in some ways like later Reformed movements, as ecclesolia in ecclesia — “little church[es] within the church.”3 Titus appointed and supervised the work of “elders in every town” (Titus 1:5), Paul traveled widely (and wrote extensively) to guide “all the churches” he was serving (2 Corinthians 11:28), James wrote to Christians scattered among the nations
