by Malcolm McGregor, SIM International Director
1 September 2007
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SIM International Director
Malcolm McGregor |
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It is exciting to see men and women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America serving alongside colleagues from North America, Europe, and Australasia in sacrificial, cross-cultural mission all over the world! SIM is wholeheartedly committed to helping facilitate this movement, which Dr. Chris Wright has called “multidirectional mission.”
Wright finds biblical guidelines for this movement in the book of 3 John. He writes, “What held together these crisscrossing lines of missionary movement all over the international Mediterranean world? Carefully tended relationships of trust. ... Indeed, 3 John is a much-neglected missional tract for our times. We need to recapture this relational, partnering, reciprocal style of missional interchange.”1
That is precisely what we in SIM are seeking to do by our intentional involvement in multidirectional mission and our embracing of the resulting diversity. Unprecedented opportunities now exist for bringing the Gospel of Jesus to the ends of the earth, thanks to globalization, improved travel, and advances in communication technology. Women and men from every nation can help reach every nation for Christ.
As an organization whose roots are primarily Western, we are grateful to God for the many leaders in the non-western world who have vision and passion for mission. Missiologist Paul Heidebrecht estimates that the African churches that were started through SIM’s ministry “have sent and are supporting over 1,000* cross-cultural missionaries across Africa and into Asia.”2 [Editor’s note: *Current totals are closer to 2,000.]
This reflects our long-standing desire to not only be a church-planting mission but also a mission-planting mission. Today new mission-sending movements are developing globally, and SIM is strategically positioned to encourage and support this wave of new missionaries from the non-western world. We have a responsibility to the Church and an important role to play.
But facilitating new mission movements is costly and time-consuming. We’re still learning how to work through such issues as finance, training, and team-building. We feel stretched, but we firmly believe the cause of mission will be strengthened through our diversity. I hope you’ll be encouraged by these stories about SIM’s active engagement in multidirectional mission, and I hope you’ll pray for God’s wisdom to guide us as we take the next steps down this path. Please pray that ultimately God will be glorified and his Church will be mobilized “for the sake of the Name” (3 John 7).
1 Wright, Christopher J.H.; “An Upside-Down World,” Christianity Today, January 2007
2 Heidebrecht, Paul, in Innovation in Mission, Authentic Publishing, 2007, p. 162.
