Every local church should be unique, wherever it is.

 One of the things I hear regularly travelling is the moan that people have come in from outside and tried to make the local church a copy and paste expression of a church somewhere else. No doubt when well meaning Western Missionaries went to Africa and taught them the British hymnal they were thinking about truth and discipleship, but not contextually. No doubt when some well meaning Americans bought a white piano and pulpit for a rural church in Eastern Europe they were generously thinking about others enjoying what they enjoyed in church, but to the older sister who played the mandolin every week, the goats and chickens who looked on,  it seemed a bit incongruous, an alien conjunction. 

When we think through the nature of international and local churches biblically, how God has worked (throughout biblical redemption and in missional history), some basic things jump out at us. 

1. No local church can reach the world on its own. The gospel imperative demands that we work with people who are not like us, to reach people who are not like us. God has ordained a way in which we cannot impose our ideas (cultures) or rule (mini-kingdoms) over and above what He has put in place for the furtherance of His. This is awesome and brings glory to Christ. All one in Christ means diversity in unity not monochrome homogeneity. 

2. Every local church is to be an appropriate expression of grace and Christ to that culture. This means leadership needs nuanced training. Music and worship needs locally appropriate expression. Preaching needs locally appropriate application. Resources for reading and discipleship need to attend to the way of life and application appropriate for the challenges (opposition and persecution)  and people in that place. God is so good. In scripture He makes provision for all the above and gives so overflowingly to make it a joy. In fact He gives and gives again. Openhandedness and the gospel go together. When we open our lens to the wideness of His, we realise that His plans and purposes are higher than ours, more colourful, more diverse, more glorious. 

I say this out of respect for so many well meaning Westerners who love Christ, love the local church and have served long and hard. In truth, I think we are very, very slow to be flexible for God in these things. We are not the only ones of course, Asian believers can want the world to be Asian, Eastern Europeans want the world to be like them etc. I guess though, our consideration is what we are responsible to steward. 

When I have small moments of flexibility to fit in with the cross cultural opportunities that God so graciously gives me, other church  leaders and believers deride me as "a disrupter", an unruly unaccountable rebel because I do not necessarily go with the status quo from our sending context. My boxes and semantics are a bit more flexible, my openness to what God might be doing. Different is not always ungodly. In fact I've discovered different expressions of church community in their relational richness often do it better than my sending country, more authentic, biblical, real, more full of Him and His grace. 

 In reality, this has become a great encouragement to me when others spot that I am not sticking to my sending culture.

 I believe the Lord Jesus was and is the missionary, field worker, pastor, evangelist, discipler we copy. In every sense cross cultural, all nations ministry means that there will be disruption and flexibility according to The Spirit's direction. By definition of the one we follow we are to leave the glory we have known, the home, the comfort the safety and we go to lost sheep in broken culture to see it redeemed. My concern are those who limit the gospel and His kingdom to their own domain and culture, and what this says about God's presence, spiritual liberty and freedom.  Going nowhere in inflexibility is often hand in hand with reaching out to no-one. I've seen it play out so sadly, that the narrowing of a church (according to one culture or leader's preferences) brings the death of a local church within one or two generations. You cannot be a "gospel" church, local or international, without a wide angled lens disrupting your comfort and self built kingdom. Serve His, there is nothing better, and heaven will display it in perfection.