Glocalization: Engaging A Flat World

by Dr. Bob Roberts Jr.

I’m writing this on a plane somewhere over the Pacific having just left Hanoi, Vietnam. We have just met with key government, business, and education leaders. Our group has been invited to be a part of the process of changing Vietnam’s religious laws and their implementation. We recently helped to connect both a multi-million dollar corporate leader and a multi-billion dollar corporation with the President of Vietnam. A few years ago, we wrote the curriculum for special education used throughout the country. Recently, Director Kiem of PACCOM, the organization that oversees all non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) in Vietnam came to America with a delegation and visited us.

I’m not a diplomat – I’m a pastor. Our organization is not part of the U.S. government – we are a church. What is this all about? Glocalization.

Glocalization is the practical daily context we live in brought on by the concept of convergence. Convergence is everything coming together at once – faster than our ability to even know, much less understand how to apply all the knowledge that we have at our disposal. Bodies of knowledge (science, health, energy, economics, education, engineering, agriculture, astronomy, geology, anthropology, and more) have always grown. But in the past 150 years, centuries of growth and development have culminated along specific lines of knowledge. Not only have they culminated – but they have begun to overlap and partner with one another in ways previously unheard of.

In the 19th century, we saw medicine combined with engineering that led to surgery. In the 20th century, technology and biology combined to form bio-technology that is literally redefining medicine, surgery, and an entire health industry. And don’t forget the business domain – medicine is now big business. When multiple streams of knowledge and information collide the growth is exponential and even faster in the specific fields than it ever was when each field was viewed as individual and separate. Thus, we find ourselves in this warp where knowledge first doubled every 150 years, then 75 years, then 25 years, then 7 years, and now I’ve heard every 24 months knowledge is doubling.

People have written about the concept of convergence for centuries. The premise is that all knowledge is connected. This convergence is the DNA of everything. If you can find that formula and crack it – then everything else makes sense. Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician, and theologian, looked for a mathematical formula that made God and everything else fit. Edwin O. Wilson championed the philosophy of “consilience” where knowledge in all fields is connected. Fritjof Capra, physicist and author, continually writes of the hidden connections of things. It’s what Frans Johansson coined “The Medici Effect”: an explosion of remarkable ideas forming where different fields, cultures and industries intersect. And it has resulted in what Thomas Friedman calls a flat world.

Glocalization is the culmination of masses of people and multiple fields (domains) of knowledge pressing in on each other, wrapping around each other, forming a single body of knowledge that has many unique components but each linked and at the same time pressing in all of humanity on top of each other in our globe. This linkage in knowledge, communication, and transportation has put all of humanity around the dinner table. Armed with more knowledge than ever before, the ability to communicate globally and instantaneously through the internet, and the possibility of being almost anywhere in the world in 24 hours, every form of global conversation is now connected.

Since the world is now flat, the opportunity for the church to engage society for a positive difference has never been easier. Seen through the theological lens of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, glocalization is the culmination of God’s plan to connect all of humanity to redeem this world. It is not the result of technology and economics, but God’s plan all along of connecting people to see this world radically transformed by the power of Jesus Christ.

As followers of Christ, we know we are to be Christ’s ambassadors:

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (NASB)

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