One of the questions commonly asked by (mainly) middle-class people, educated people who are interested in this type of work is: “I can do it even if I don’t have the experience of life. Where’s the? Culture of this community ?? My answer is (almost always) a resounding: ??Yes?! We shouldn’t disqualify people who want to plant churches in a certain cultural context just because they weren’t born there, otherwise we wouldn’t have a modern missionary movement, why would everyone stay home?or they would only have reached people like them!
In fact, what we need is to swallow our pride (and our misunderstandings) and realize that Scotland [i] is like this? like the darkest parts of Africa hundreds of years ago. There are underserved housing communities, and this is a very important point, where church after church has been closed, relocated, or left in the care of a socially conscious but theologically liberal leadership, which continues to do so. many “good deeds”, but he runs a dying institution. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that many churches in these communities bury much more than baptize and have done so for many decades. For this reason, there is simply not a generation of church leaders who are culturally native to these communities. As much as we want to see local leadership, it just isn’t there! It needs to be generated, developed and trained, and that will take a long time. When I first arrived in the Edinburgh suburb of Niddria, they had not seen a local convert for over ten years, all of the younger believers had been sent from the mother church in the city center while they were looking to revitalize themselves. ? this church, and, in fact, there was not a local believer in the building under the age of 60. They were losing hope!
- A little over five years later.
- Things are noticeably different and we’re finally starting to see progress.
- But how did we do it? To respond.
- We must understand the following “misiological” categories.
At Niddrie, I classify people as follows (for the purposes of this article, not necessarily as we normally understand it).
1. Cultural extraterrestrials. In other words, those who do not come from a poor housing community and / or have no history or experience of living in these communities.
2. Aboriginal cultivated. Those of us who grew up in these housing communities and understand the culture of the community, but who are not yet where we serve.
3. Completely native. Those who were saved in their own housing communities in need and are now committed to making it a reality with the gospel.
When I got to Niddrie, a single mother and I were working in our community’s café. We were both ‘culturally indigenous’, but there was my wife, who was completely ‘alien to culture’. There were no local converts, so we had to import our leaders, that is, ours?Human resources were composed entirely of “cultural aliens”. We needed it to generate the initial momentum. To do this, we employed a young worker and an assistant pastor, spent the first few years preparing and developing them in terms of community participation, discipline and training, and then started a “training” program. In retrospect, with very few converts, we first had to import leaders without the culture of the community. Five years later, we achieved we are seeing the fruits of our long-term goals.
Currently, in our learning program, we have two totally indigenous women actively involved in the teaching and training of disciples in the community and a Brazilian woman who has lived in Niddrie for more than four years. In our initial intensive student training program, we have four men, all of whom are “cultural natives. They are taught not only to receive, but to serve the community, and we hope that they will become full-time learners for the next 12 to 24 months. Everyone meets (or will be) meetings, studies and prayers with people from all over the community, people from all kinds of cultures. It’s my team deliberately heterogeneous?because we seek to reflect the cultural composition of those around us and build an effective model for the formation of future leaders.
The fact is that even if we are years away from the formation of elders and church leaders, we could not have progressed without the sacrifice of “cultural aliens” with their initial and constant help. These people were willing to admit their weaknesses and lack of awareness of the context, but open enough to sacrifice themselves in our community and embrace our long-term vision of producing Aboriginal leaders who will form new Aboriginal leaders to lead and establish churches throughout Scotland. (And even more!).
Thank you for praying for the work of?20chemes and for making young men and women around the world ready to join us and our vision, not only to reach out to those lost in our communities in need, but also to become disciples and empower them to become future gospel leaders and preachers in communities in need in Scotland.
[i] Editor’s note: This text was published by the author taking into account the context of the communities living in the “Schemes”, which are social housing for the needy people of Scotland, but we, from Let’s Go to the Gospel, believe that his General Education is also important to our context.
In recent years, Christians and Christian organizations have increased their interest in helping people suffering from poverty and misery, but this renewed interest in poverty reduction is doomed to failure if it has no roots in the local church, which is God’s established way of attracting the miserable. People in a transformative relationship with him. Emphasizing the priority of the gospel, Mez McConnell and Mike McKinley, both pastors of local churches in poverty-affected areas, offer biblical leadership and practical strategies for establishing, revitalizing, and cultivating churches in difficult places, their own community, and elsewhere in the world.
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