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For roughly forty years, the term integral mission has been in popular use throughout Latin America to describe the multi-faceted, holistic approach to ministry that was the hallmark of the early church, is the mainstay of many churches and ministries in Latin America but is largely a foreign concept to evangelical Christians in North America. Of late, however, the movement has been gaining a hearing and even a foothold among some North American churches and ministries. It is our goal to see its propagation gain momentum. To that end we are initiating the publication of a monthly e-newsletter. In these issues you will find:
If you are new to Integral Mission, below you will find a few housekeeping details. Otherwise, please enjoy issue#4! In Jesus, Jim Martin Housekeeping If you have friends to whom you would like to recommend Integral Mission, please feel free to forward this issue to them. Or, you can always find the current issue of our newsletter here and send them a link. (You can also recommend our website to them by clicking here.) If you would like to be sure to not recieve another issue, please use the link at the very bottom of this email to unsubscribe. |
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Solidarity for Kingdom Mission in the Americas
The isolation and affluence with which many North American Christians live has blinded us to the way most other followers of Jesus live around the world today, has reduced the mission of the church to something mostly unrecognizable to Christians world-wide, and has eroded the North American church’s view of the Gospel itself. What this has left is an anemic, privatized version of a faith that in the words of Tom Sine, an American author and futurist, is little more than “the American Dream with a little Jesus overlay”. At first, this may seem a harsh critique. But as we open our eyes to what God is doing in his church worldwide, we have to begin to wonder why churches in the United States begin to feel so inwardly focused and irrelevant to society and the rest of the global community by comparison. The kind of transformational life and vitality that so many of us long for seems so often to escape North American Christ-followers. Many churches in the United States (especially mainline protestant “evangelical” churches) have become proficient in proclaiming and living an excessively privatized gospel. To the extent that this “gospel” engages the surrounding culture at all, it often so through an extremely narrow “values” agenda that rings more like discord than good news. Though there are many reasons for this, and many contributing factors, this essay begins with this statement, this negative critique, as an assumption... |
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all material © 2006 Integral Mission |
Many followers of Jesus in the United States long for more than what they are currently experiencing in the community of the church. In fact, many are regularly seeking new experiences of worship or teaching or healing that will bring the kind of life and connection they sense they are missing. The unfortunate result of this search is that increasing numbers of United States churches have turned their focus further inward, examining the structure of their liturgy, the quality of their worship, the extent of their “sacrifice” of devotion, etc. This reflection is good and worthwhile, but it is often done as if the members of the church all live in a vacuum – as if the society and world outside the doors of the church do not exist. It seems that the working belief is that each person’s personal submission to Jesus as Lord of the Universe is simply to accomplish salvation for each individual soul. Discipleship, in this environment, simply means leading individual Christians to develop a heart that is internally “right” with God as well as growing in personal obedience which is manifested in their own life and relationships. In many churches and therefore in many Christians’ minds, this is what salvation, righteousness, and community have come to mean.