Every Church Needs the Global Church: Four Gifts of a Worldwide Body – F. Lionel Young III

ABSTRACT: From the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit blew into the upper room, the church has been a global people. It can be easy for Western Christians, however, to forget that they need the global church just as much as the global church needs them. Listening to fellow believers from around the world can help Western Christians assess their own theological formulations with a critical eye, better understand Scripture, more faithfully engage in mission, and learn what faithfulness under persecution might look like. Adopting a posture of mutual edification helps the Western church to receive these good gifts from global brothers and sisters.

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 (James 1:1), the churches in Italy and Greece collected offerings for the churches in the East (Romans 15:25–28), the apostles and elders convened in Jerusalem to render “judgment” for believers “in every city” (Acts 15:19–21), and John wrote a letter “to the seven churches that are in Asia” urging them to persevere to the end (Revelation 1:4). Christian communities spread throughout the world challenged, supported, and encouraged each other in the apostolic period.

Such global interactions were transformative. Peter’s encounter with Cornelius in the very Roman city of Caesarea by the sea changed him, as well as the mostly Jewish church in Jerusalem. Luke’s detailed portrayal of the events in Acts 10:1–11:18 leaves readers with the impression that the entire episode was as much about the mindset shift in Peter and “the brothers who were throughout Judea” (Acts 11:1) as it was about the conversion of Cornelius and the Gentiles.4 Cross-cultural encounters undermined ethnocentric worldviews in the early church.

Furthermore, an appeal to the global church chastened parochial pride. Paul appealed to “all the churches of the saints” when confronting the independent-minded Christians in Corinth, telling them in no uncertain terms that they were out of line — even arrogant (1 Corinthians 14:33). He reprimanded them for placing too great an emphasis on their local way of doing things: “Was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” (1 Corinthians 14:36).

Likewise, the faithfulness of suffering Christians in the global church encouraged perseverance. Peter pointed to the steadfast suffering of Christians “throughout the world” and told those who were suffering to stand firm: “Resist [Satan], firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (1 Peter 5:9).

And conversations across cultural boundaries produced greater theological clarity and helped extend the reach of the gospel. The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 was one of the most important global gatherings. In what may be the critical first-century turning point, the early church decided, with the help of the Holy Spirit and after listening to each other, that it must not put a cultural straitjacket on the gospel for the rest of mankind (Acts 15:17, 28).5

In short, the early church needed the global church.

Rediscovering the Global Church

The twentieth century brought renewed engagement with the global church by Western evangelicals. There are likely several reasons for this. First, missionaries, though often ignored (or scorned) in the scholarly literature, have played a vital role in facilitating global exchange. The American historian David Hollinger, although not a Christian, has written with remarkable insight about how foreign missionaries from the United States contributed to changes within their own culture.6

Second, academics have played no small role in helping Christians become more connected to the global church. The Oxford-educated intellectual Andrew F. Walls (1928–2021) was so transformed by his experiences teaching church history in Sierra Leone and Nigeria between 1957 and 1966 that he effectively turned the world of scholarship upside down. Walls, a warmhearted Methodist lay preacher, is remembered as a historian with pastoral aims, gaining a reputation for teaching in a way that set students “on fire” and sent them out to serve the global church.7 He is best known for helping a new generation of scholars focus their research interests on what he then called “Christianity in the non-Western world.” The study of Christian mission(s) remained vitally important to Walls. Throughout his fifty-year career, he helped academics examine the growth and development of the church in situ — with a particular focus on the neglected aspects of the global church.8

Third, increased levels of migration (people moving in and out of cultures) as well as rising levels of global travel have contributed to what researchers are calling “acculturation,” with emerging scholarly consensus showing that intercultural engagement brings about mutual transformation in persons and groups.9 Mark Twain’s oft-repeated line that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrowmindedness” has been shown to be more than a satirical quip.10 Research on short-term mission trips suggests that, although they may be helpful in host contexts, the most enduring effects are often found in the participants themselves.11 When people encounter believers from other cultures, the experience changes them. My African friend Oscar Muriu challenges Americans who come on short-term trips to arrive with the aim of learning because, as he put it so humorously, “After you leave, we repaint many of the walls you painted!”12

Four Gifts of the Global Church

In the rest of this article, I will explore four ways that attending to the global church serves to strengthen the whole church.

1. The global church can expose our theological weaknesses.

Since the very first days of the church in the first century, correction has been a vitally important part of the Christian tradition. It is no less important today. Kevin Vanhoozer has reminded us, “While God’s word is infallible, human interpretations are not.”13 This may be even more important to remember in the evangelical tradition, where certitude has sometimes displaced humility. As the Egyptian evangelical Anne E. Zaki noted during the opening keynote at the 2024 Lausanne in Seoul, South Korea, “It’s time we restored the lost art of church discussions,” referring specifically to the need for more conversations in the global evangelical church. “What if,” she pointedly asked, “Paul had never confronted Peter at Antioch?”14

The global church can help expose areas where we may be theologically weak. A notable twentieth-century example is the cross-cultural relationships that developed between the British churchman John Stott (1921–2011), the Ecuadorian theologian René Padilla (1932–2012), and the American evangelist Billy Graham (1918–2018). When Stott gave his opening remarks at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, he observed, “I believe some ecumenical thinking is mistaken. But then, frankly, I believe some of our evangelical formulations are mistaken also.”15 Stott believed correction was needed in evangelical formulations precisely because he had begun spending a lot of time with believers in the global church. He was starting to see that many Western evangelicals had failed to take seriously biblical imperatives related to poverty, wealth, and what he later called “social responsibility.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Stott and Padilla began forming what would become a close friendship during their travels together in Latin America. Padilla could see from his cultural context that many Western evangelicals were missing something. He publicly challenged evangelicals at the First Latin American Congress for Evangelization in 1969 (planned by the Billy Graham Association) that the Bible calls Christians to evangelism as well as other good works, and that these efforts need to be held together in the church.16 In their travels together, Padilla challenged the Cambridge-educated Stott to reread his Bible in order to reconsider the call of the prophets to “bring justice to the fatherless” and “plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:17), as well as the teaching of Jesus to feed the hungry and visit those who are sick or in prison (Matthew 25:31–46). The salt must not lose its saltiness (Matthew 5:13); believers have a responsibility to “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” by their “good works” (Titus 2:6–10).

Stott listened. So did Billy Graham. Graham was also greatly influenced by his global travels and his friendship with Stott, whom he later called “one of my best friends.”17 Graham’s engagement with the global church challenged many of his inherited assumptions. He personally “tore down the ropes” for segregated seating at his crusades in 1953, distanced himself from the fundamentalist label in 1955, and welcomed a broader circle of ministry partners at his 1957 New York City crusade.18 In the 1960s and 1970s, while preaching the gospel around the world, he was also listening to voices from the global South, even helping to fund their gatherings. At Lausanne in 1974, he also listened to Padilla.

In his keynote, Padilla challenged the Western church to rethink issues like racism, imperialism, consumerism, and triumphalism and to consider how they had “neglected the cries of the underprivileged.”19 He condemned what he called “the American way of life,” by which he had in mind a Christianity marked by wealth, privilege, success, and ethnocentric pride. He stated emphatically that the church must avoid the danger of turning the gospel into a cheap product.20 Graham called Padilla’s prophetic speech “one of the most brilliant contributions for the analysis of the evangelistic task today.”21 Graham and Stott remained clear-eyed on their view that evangelism must always have “a certain priority,” but they also maintained that “the gospel is the root, of which both evangelism and social responsibility are the fruits.”22 Nearly two decades earlier, the American theologian Carl F.H. Henry had described evangelicals as the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side of the road23 — but it was this iron sharpening iron in the global church that helped more evangelicals see the “hole in the gospel” and take strides toward greater social engagement.24

2. The global church can enrich our understanding of Scripture.

One basic lesson in hermeneutics is that our cultural context shapes the way we read Scripture. As Grant Osborne has put it, “The problem of interpretation begins and ends with the presence of the reader.”25 We may be eloquent in our preaching like Apollos the Alexandrian, but sometimes we need Priscilla and Aquila to explain “the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:24–26). We can remain bold and get better.

The missiologist Timothy C. Tennent has encouraged evangelicals to become more engaged in reading Scripture with the global church in an “effort to help enrich our own theological perspectives.”26 Tennent urges evangelicals to expand their “ecclesiastical cartography” while helping them remain fully evangelical.27 In his recent work Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church, the American missionary-professor Stephen T. Pardue likewise encourages evangelicals to broaden their theological horizons.28 Engagement with the global church, he argues, should do more than provide illustrative material: It can actually enrich our reading of Scripture. As he puts it, “Evangelical contextual theologies must look to Scripture as their magisterial authority, even as they increase their appreciation for the crucial ministerial role of culture for the theological task.”29 There is no hint of compromise on theological essentials for Pardue, only a deeper and richer understanding of the biblical text.

My understanding of Scripture has been deepened by my engagement with the global church. Like Timothy, I knew the holy Scriptures from infancy, but I read them within a fundamentalist framework that narrowed my vision. One can imagine how awkward I felt the first time I danced at a festive worship gathering in Nagaland! Later, though, I had to wonder how I had missed the words dance and celebrate throughout the pages of Scripture. Israelite festivals took on fresh meaning. Though my worship with Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has not improved my dancing, it has greatly increased my delight in God.30

Likewise, my providential friendships with devout followers of Jesus (many of whom are evangelicals) in universities like Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Yale challenged my inherited idea that the life of the mind was a dangerous vocation for Christians. Should we not love God with our minds? Do we not have sapiential literature in the canon, which encourages the lifelong pursuit of wisdom? Are not God’s people sometimes “destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6)? Indeed, it was the Cambridge-educated Puritans who introduced compulsory education through the “Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647.” They believed ignorance posed a threat to the faith.31

So too my long friendship with the African church leader Oscar Muriu and our many conversations around theology and history — which always include laughter — led me to read the Prophets afresh. He helped me understand with greater clarity the condemnations of land grabs by the rich, the trampling on the rights of the poor, and the many warnings about wealthy nations that arrogantly flaunt their power.32 My reading of Scripture has been greatly enriched by the global church.

3. The global church can expand our witness in the world.

The 10/40 Window, a designation that refers to the geographic region stretching from West Africa to East Asia between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude, has been widely promoted in mission mobilization efforts since the 1990s.33 The secular academic community has taken notice, offering helpful critiques (not all of them friendly) on how the concept has reshaped the way evangelicals view the world.34 Almost everyone, however, seems to be missing something vitally important: The expression itself was birthed out of Latin America, coined by Luis Bush, the Argentina-born evangelical who was raised in Brazil and served as a pastor in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992).

Bush noticed the emerging missionary movement in Latin America that he traced back to the 1960s (though there were earlier roots). He referred to it as a “growing seed from the local nations” and a “spontaneous” work of God. In the 1980s, Bush traveled to every country in Latin America to meet with local mission-minded evangelicals.35 His efforts gave birth to a gathering of some three thousand Latin American evangelicals in Brazil in 1987, which became known as COMIBAM International (Cooperación Misionera Ibero-Americana). By 2006, COMIBAM had sent out more than ten thousand Latin American evangelical missionaries to the world.36

Missions is no longer going “from the West to the rest” — it is moving “from everyone to everywhere.”37 Today, more than 200,000 of the world’s 430,000 full-time cross-cultural missionaries (about 47 percent) are being sent from the Global South — and many are concentrating their efforts within the 10/40 Window.38 While reporting from war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt, the award-winning journalist Adriana Carranca began meeting evangelical missionaries from the Global South — and traced their story back to Bush.39

This “dramatic explosion” in missions from the Global South does not mean the Western church should stay home. As John Piper has put it so well, we should not say, “Let them shed their blood. We will just send money.”40 It means, instead, that we should go and lay down our lives together. Mission-sending can be done in genuine partnership, and going out together can look more like that missionary-sending church in Antioch, where “Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul” worked side by side as equal partners in the gospel for the glory of God (Acts 13:1). This is what Luis Bush had in mind when he used the expression “10/40 Window” on the global evangelical stage in Manila in 1989. Noting the “shift in the center of gravity in Christianity” to the South, he evoked the words of John Stott from the previous decade: “Unless the whole church is mobilized, the whole world is not likely to be reached.”41 We need the global church in order to finish the unfinished task.42

4. The global church can encourage us to persevere with faithfulness.

While finishing lunch at a cafe in Bethlehem in the West Bank, and with a short time remaining before our group returned to Jerusalem, I found myself with lingering questions for our guide. I wanted to understand more about the daily realities of a Palestinian Christian living in one of the “hard places.” I had recently reread Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers, which recounts the story of a Palestinian Christian who devoted his life to seeking peace in a land marked by conflict.43 The guide met my gaze with moistened eyes and asked quietly, “Why have you forgotten about us?” In that moment, I found myself suddenly without words. All I could offer was a gentle apology, as though I were somehow speaking for all Western Christians: “I’m sorry.”

The claims that American Christians are being persecuted for their faith remain debated. A fair assessment lies somewhere between dismissing such concerns outright and exaggerating them.44 What is not in dispute is that our plight pales in comparison to what Christians endure in many parts of the global church. Persecution is a global reality. It is estimated that some five hundred million to six hundred million Christians live in places where there is persecution, a number that does not include followers of Jesus who live in Western secular states, where there may be varied levels of cultural pressure.45 Estimates of Christian martyrs remain contested, though martyrdom is a present and pervasive reality.46 Even if the precise numbers are unclear, a wide body of research shows that Christians throughout the world are persecuted for their faith every day.47 And yet, even in the most dangerous and violent places in the world — North Korea, South Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India — Christians live out their faith and witness to their neighbors. They are “persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:9).

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. There are hundreds of thousands of Christians in the world today who do not live with the false hope that their country will become a “Christian nation” or that their lives will be marked by wealth, power, or influence. But they remain faithful, marked by the real hope and even filled with joy knowing that they will “be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which [they] are also suffering” (2 Thessalonians 1:5). The global church can encourage us to persevere, and, if we are willing to listen, they may even be able to teach Americans how not to place their hope in the kingdom of man.

We need the global church to expose our theological weaknesses, to enrich our reading of Scripture, to extend our witness to the world, and to encourage us to remain faithful to the end.

May his kingdom come.

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