A City within A City

I think one of the neat things about going out as a missionary is the chance to rethink what you think you already know from a different perspective.

For example, and I’m just talking out loud here, there’s this idea out there in missions circles that if you want to be effective you need to target one particular group or segment of a population.  From what I understand this has been called “the homogenous unit” principle – quoting Donald McGavran, “…people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers…”

In other words, if I understand it right according to this principle, if we would get specific to planting a church in a place like South Africa, integration wouldn’t be all that important.  It wouldn’t be all that important that the church consciously and purposefully seek to become more and more diverse in terms of culture and ethnicity.

It’s easy to bash this idea but if you slow down you can see some of the practical benefits.  It would certainly be a lot easier.

I do think though there are a lot of problems biblically with this particular concept.  I’m not going to dive into them here, but I did want to share something I heard the other day that especially stirred my thinking.  I was listening to Tim Keller and he was saying something to the effect that one of the goals of the church is to be a kind of “city within a city…” And what he meant by that is that the church is to be a model to the city of “the way things are supposed to be…”

Don’t get stuck on the word city, get the concept.

In South Africa that would mean one of the beautiful possibilities for the local church is that it would become this place that is a model to the rest of society of what it looks like for people of all kinds of different cultures to relate and integrate.   The church could set the agenda, in the right way this time.