Glocalization: Engaging A Flat World

by Dr. Bob Roberts Jr.

PRINCIPLE #3: GLOCAL CHRISTIANS FOCUS ON THE DISCIPLE NOT THE PREACHER.

The challenge to respond to this new “glocal” reality will be done in new ways, with new organizations, churches, and institutions, but with an old kind of disciple. Our focus should be on the disciple. The problem is that most discipleship in today’s churches is based on education instead of behavioral transformation and societal engagement. It gets people in groups and has them filling in blanks. That model is not producing disciples that are transforming our culture.

When the world is won to Christ, communities and individual lives are transformed, it will not be because we have recruited missionaries and preachers – but because the entire body of Christ gets up on her feet. This is the work of the pastor, the institution – to raise up the entire body of Christ and send her out – not have her come and pay us homage at a Sunday event. I’m convinced – great preaching is killing our churches in the West. We’ve trained seals to come and sit, listen, clap, give, improve themselves, but care very little about the condition of the world, let alone our own communities. We have focused on raising apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers and forgot they were never intended to be the heroes. Their role is to use their gifts to equip every single believer to live out the Gospel in all of society. The Great Commission was not given just to the missionary but to the entire body of Christ. What would it look like if the church were the missionary? How would the church be organized and engaged if it were a missionary? When churches embrace this idea the Gospel is viral and changes the world. At NorthWood, discipleship is based on what we call the T-Life model.

T-Life is the picture of a disciple’s life being transformed. A transformed life’s supreme focus is to glorify God. We believe this takes place by living out God’s Kingdom in the following three ways.

1. We experience an interactive relationship with God. It is vital for disciples to have inward encounters with God in which they worship Him, hear from Him, and respond to Him in obedience. Bible reading, prayer, private and corporate worship, and journaling are all part of a transformational walk with God.

2. A disciple regularly experiences transparent connections. As we interact with God, it is vital that we not approach glorifying God on our own, but that we intentionally interact with other Christfollowers. These “connections” will bring about transformation in us as we authentically encourage, instruct and support one another.

3. T-Life disciples are using their vocations not only to touch their communities, but also the world. Everyone using their vocations, in the various domains of society. As Chris Seiple has said, “every vocation, every location.”

The T-life model is something our members developed. Yet, as I have connected with pastors around the world, from Jakarta to Beijing, from Kazakhstan to Nairobi I have found that we are focusing on the same 3 core ideas for transformation. Never meeting one another, yet teaching and practicing the same principles, it has all of us freaked out. The Great Awakenings started with people hearing the same thing from God without meeting one another. I believe God could be preparing the ground for another Great Awakening.

PRINCIPLE #4: GLOCALIZATION WILL BE DRIVEN MORE BY MULTIPLE DECENTRALIZED MOVEMENTS RATHER THAN CENTRALIZED ORGANIZATIONS.

Just when the whole world has decentralized, western Christianity has completed her grand centralization response having been hard at work at it since WWII. The problem is that most existing institutions are like older mainframe computers – huge and slow. They are being passed over for smaller, faster, more flexible, and more collaborative structures and relationships.

The glocal movement will be a Jesus movement. The institutional church tends to look for organizations and programs to ensure success. The reality is there is no such thing. A person doesn’t accept Christ, wake up, and then say, “I’m going to start a church planting movement” the next morning. They find Christ and share him with their friends and the church emerges. Churches and organizations all will have a decentralized movement ethos. The best we can hope to do is multiply. And that is good. Movements are out of control, always growing and never able to be stopped by one person or strategy.

Let me give you a personal example of this. We had been working in Vietnam for 3 years doing the typical things churches try to do. After a trip to Hanoi, I came home and some members met us at the airport. They were excited because they were bringing Vietnamese exchange students to live with them their senior year in High School. And not just any students, but teenagers of extremely high officials in the government. I freaked! “You can’t do this. Our work there is too sensitive,” I told them. They said God told them to. I told them, “He didn’t tell me.” We finally agreed to allow them to come live with our members but I was extremely nervous about it. The Jesus movement had begun.

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