Part of being missional is acquiring a new perspective on global mission
by Jim Schrag
Executive Director
Mennonite Church USA

Many relationships have been formed, crossing national boundaries. -Jim Schrag

If we know where to look, we can see the effects of globalism all around us. In Newton, Kan., a railroad town, we see mile-long trains with open flatcars piled two high with seagoing containers bearing Chinese markings. They are shipped from California ports and contain consumer goods for points east. Places like Wal-Mart are where marketplace globalism touches our lives.

Just as the local discount store is our delivery point from a network of global commerce, our congregations have become both the delivery and embarkation point that connect us as individual church members with a network we used to call “world mission.” We still cherish the visits of missionaries to our congregations, regaling us with stories, illustrated by artifacts of exotic cultures. But our sophistication — brought by the Internet, cell phones, e-mail and satellite TV — has an impact on our understanding of global mission. Everything seems at much closer reach, just like taking things off the shelves at our local store — things made in China, but for our use, not for the Chinese.

Part of being missional is acquiring a new perspective on global mission. An effect of globalism, combined with our new missional call to “be sent” and not just “to send,” is acquiring the feeling that it is now possible to make a difference in mission by our own devices, as individual church members or as a congregation. Many congregation-to-congregation relationships have been formed, crossing national boundaries. We acquire a new comfort with our “connections” to mission almost as easily as we have accepted going to the local store to pick something from the shelf that was made in China, for us.

But does bringing mission to where we live make us missional? Is not being missional the result of a miraculous spiritual transformation within each one of us? Do we not acquire new ears to hear and new eyes to see that alter many of our tried-and-true assumptions? Does not our behavior change toward those we once thought of as objects of mission to cherishing them as partners in mission?

Or are we seeing all this through rose-colored glasses, given the vast disparity of material resources that still exists between congregations of the South, compared to ours in the North? And if the forces of 21st-century economic globalism do not even out the disparity of wealth around the world, but rather widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, what must we do at both an individual and local level and through our “networks of mission” to acquire what we need to be missional under such conditions?

I have more questions than answers about such things. But I am encouraged by the seminary student who entered a classroom where he found “Christ is the answer!” scrawled on the blackboard. Under that, he wrote, “Yes, but what is the question?” What question is your congregation asking about your connection to global mission that will aid your transformation to be missional?