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"Why engage in global mission, when there are so many needs all around us in our local community?"
Most of us have been asked this question and perhaps have struggled to answer it. Our nation grapples on a daily basis with issues of diversity, multiculturalism, migration, interreligious understanding and the lure of isolationism.
Why are intercultural relationships so essential to our Christian discipleship? Global Episcopal Mission Network has gathered ten quotes from their recent conference held at Virginia Theological Seminary and from other sources that will give you food for thought as you answer this question for yourself and others.
Ten Reasons to Engage in Global Mission:
“We go into mission to meet the other, where God is present. Not because there are needy people, or to plant a church, or to teach. But we go to meet Jesus there. Thinking we are missionaries, we become disciples. We go to meet God, who is already present in the other"
"No single part of the world contains a complete understanding of God - only together do we have it..."
"It takes the whole world to know the whole gospel"
"We can never know fully who God is, we can never understand the mission of God, until and unless we are able to hear it from those in other contexts..."
“To reduce mission simply to a local or even national context is to isolate ourselves from the voice of God’s grace across difference”
"We are looking at mission as pilgrimage - seeing Christ in the other"
"The 'other' is part of our family that we do not already know"
"To know only one's own church, diocese or nation is to limit oneself to an incomplete revelation of the vast and varied witness of the full body of Christ - gifts that we all desperately need to receive from one another"
“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ...The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
“I have gifts you do not, and you have gifts I do not. We need one another to be fully human. We lose our strength if our diversity is taken away.”