Going Glocal- Externally focused ministry across the street and across the globe

Have you heard the new buzz word in missions? Glocal: it’s the combination of local and global missions into one. While the word glocalization has been around in business vernacular since the 1990s, churches are now adopting the term as well as the concept that what they do across the street and around can work together to grow the Kingdom of God.

The following is an excerpt from my latest paper with Leadership Network. Visit www.leadnet.org and click on resources and downloads to read the entire paper and more examples of "glocally-minded" churches.

Word of Grace, Mesa, AZ (http://www.wordofgrace.org/) is one of the many externally focused churches sprinting into “glocal” action seeking to be agents of spiritual, social and physical change in their community and around the world. “Our vision is to see communities transformed by the grace of God. Our prayer is that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven both locally and globally,” says Karl Mueller, associate pastor with oversight of both local and global missions. With a holistic view of missions, Word of Grace has combined both local and global mission work into one ministry, with a common strategy and one budget. “We consider local and global missions to be all one effort tied together by a common set of values,” says Karl. Their values include:
Obeying God
Prayer
Empowering and equipping members for service
Long-term partnerships driven by relationships
Transforming communities through helping local churches
Providing compassionate relief in times of need

Externally focused churches, like Word of Grace, look beyond the activities inside their own walls and engage in good deeds and sharing the good news across the street and around the world. Collectively, they are learning some valuable “glocal” lessons, such as:

--Partnerships are highly valued. The spiritual, physical and emotional needs of people in the local and global environment are too much for one person, one staff, or one organization. Everything Word of Grace church does both locally and globally is through partnerships with other organizations because the needs are so great that churches alone can’t do it. “Globally, we work with Common Health Evangelism in Africa. We find this partnership very effective at helping our church meet needs and we are trying to adapt that model into North American cities. We also work with an indigenous Malawi organization and partners in Thailand,” says Karl. While all of these partners are Christian, they often vary in denominational background, which doesn’t bother Karl. “Our strategy is simply to find out what God is already doing in a community and join him there,” he says.

--Ministry still costs money. The rising cost of meeting needs requires churches to creatively fund their endeavors and to take risks as they invest in ‘glocal’ solutions. In many churches, like Word of Grace Church, the missions budget is derived from a percentage of the congregation’s overall giving. “Ten percent of the general fund is given to missions and there is also the opportunity for people to designate giving to the Global Opportunities Fund,” says Karl Mueller.

But sometimes large-scale involvement and community improvement, especially globally, can be costly. Word of Grace found a unique way to fund one of their partnering organization’s efforts in Malawi, Africa. On March 19, 2006 the church helped sponsor the Assist4Africa Celebrity Basketball Game at Wells Fargo Arena on the campus of Arizona State University. The game featured Charles Barkley and Amare Stoudamire as coaches of two teams composed of former Phoenix Suns players, as well as current Arizona Cardinals players and a number of radio, TV and sports personalities from the Phoenix area. Attended by about 5,000 people, the game raised more than $50,000 for the Partners in Malawi HIV/AIDS Clinic in Lilongwe, Malawi. “Once it is fully operational, the clinic will provide more than 3,000 HIV positive Malawians with medical care,” says Karl.

--It takes the whole church body. As churches continue to present the stories and pictures of poverty, members continually rise to the challenge and meet needs. Churches that effectively serve ‘glocally’ realize that it takes the whole church body to engage in the work of saving the lost and serving the least. They offer a variety of mission opportunities for every age and commitment level. In their local mission ministry, Word of Grace connects hundreds of volunteers to food programs, home building, refugee resettlement, tutoring children, ESL classes, HIV/AIDS programs, and care for families on prison inmates. Globally, the church engages hundreds of volunteers to go on short-term trips and support organizations, missionaries and local churches in Thailand, Indonesia, Malawi, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Turkey.

To encourage a wide variety of involvement in both local and global, Karl says they offer different stages of engagement in mission work. “Lightening trips are weekend visits to Mexico that happen every six weeks. We also offer an urban plunge experience where people go on a one-day immersion experience into the city. Global Adventures are our more traditional short-term mission trip experiences, where a dozen or so people take two weeks to work on projects and meet needs with a global partner,” he explains. The church has taken their outreach experiences even one step further by offering “Mid-Term” experiences. “This is where individuals or couples go into the mission field for 3- 36 months of service. "

--Relief is good, but development is better. They have a desire to not just meet immediate relief needs, but to engage in community transformation. That’s why Word of Grace Church partners with LifeWind International and LifeWind’s Community Health Evangelism (CHE) model for community development. “This is very asset-based work where the local community helps provide for their own solutions,” says Karl. The goal of CHE is to help local leaders bring healing to their own community through addressing physical, social and spiritual needs. The CHE model, developed by Stan Rowland and others under Campus Crusade for Christ, emphasizes building relationships with local leaders, developing trust, creating a local leadership team and providing training. “The key to CHE is the community's willingness to take responsibility for addressing its own problems,” says the LifeWind web site. CHE and Word of Grace are simply catalysts for change.

--The world is a classroom. Many churches find out that what they learn about serving and sharing the gospel in the global community can be translated into local solutions. It’s also true the other way around—local ministries can be duplicated or leveraged for global work. “There certainly is cross pollination of what we learn in one environment to another,” says Karl of Word of Grace. “Our HIV global efforts have gotten us connected and involved in the local HIV efforts.” Sending people on global trips to work with AIDS patients in Africa helped bring the topic into their church and aim people’s hearts towards the issues. Word of Grace openly admits that prior to their global AIDS work, engaging people in local AIDS ministry was more difficult. Karl shares, “Christians can be prejudice. People know if you get involved in this work in the U.S. it means getting involved in the gay community. Churches still struggle with that, but we are starting to see people step up, particularly in our young adult service. This age group is more open to working with those that are gay or lesbian. We are hoping their willingness to work with these communities will grow and catch on with other groups in the church as well,” he says.

--Offering mercy comes easier than engaging in issues of social justice but God values both. Proverbs 31:8-9 says, "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy." Word of Grace is entering into the social justice arena of ministry and has taken an innovative approach to focusing people on sometimes disturbing issues. Every month, they show a film on a local or global justice issue and encourage discussion following the film. Their list of social justice movies includes:
Hotel Rwanda (about genocide- MGM Entertainment)
Born into Brothels-Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (Think Films)
Yesterday (about the African AIDS Crisis from HBO Video)
Dreams Die Hard (documentary of slavery in the United States- www.freetheslaves.net)
Freedom and Beyond (documentary of boys from India released from captivity -www.freetheslaves.net)

Karl Mueller says, “Churches are often good on mercy, but not good of advocacy or defending the cause of the weak. With the film series, we raise awareness of justice issues both locally and globally.”