It's a Flat World After All - Christianity Today

I live in a small Canadian town, on a cul-de-sac with four homes. One of my neighbors is from Tanzania. Her father is a pastor, and her mother is a Muslim. Her Canadian husband lives most of the year in the Congo and speaks with an Afrikaner accent though he’s never lived in South Africa. In another house lives a young couple. He was born in Canada, she is a second generation Pakistani.

In the third home is a middle-aged couple with three children. She was born in Canada, and he to a native Canadian father and a first-generation Indian mother. Their children mix these genes in exotic combinations.

A stone’s throw from us is a Sikh Temple and three Coast Salish Native Big Houses. And I don’t live in a city. It’s a small town with an economy based on logging. Yet the world lives here.

This is the world Bob Roberts Jr. sets out to describe in Glocalization: How Followers of Christ Engage the New Flat Earth.

Today, cultures blend and intersect with an ever-quickening intensity and intricacy. Technology, particularly the internet, and affordable travel are leveling the ground between one part of the earth and another. The world is now simultaneously local and global, tribal and cosmopolitan.

Edward Lorenz famously said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas. In the new flat earth, that hurricane now affects everyone’s business.

In Glocalization, Roberts first sets out to describe this new world and provide a rationale for why the church should engage it. He synthesizes a great deal of complex cultural and historical information in short order, and the result is a hodgepodge of broad assertions. There are other books that tackle this material more faithfully, but it is the second section where the book shines.

Roberts outlines six practices the church should adopt to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves in the glocal world. All six are excellent, and by confronting some well-established missionary habits, a few have the potential to be revolutionary.

For example, Roberts calls the church to “bang on the front door first.” Rather than entering a country “closed” to the gospel incognito, he says Christians should walk straight up to that country’s authorities, explain who they are, and see where it leads. Roberts’ inspiring stories from Communist and Islamic nations reinforce his claim that no country is closed to the gospel, just to our usual methods of bringing it.

The final section lays out three values to guide the church’s engagement. Roberts’s bold and sobering call for the Western church to be willing to face death for the sake of the gospel is powerful. And in the concluding chapter he reminds the church that our mission requires utter dependence on the Holy Spirit (and this from a Southern Baptist).

Many pastors have learned ministry techniques by mimicking corporate strategies and good management. In the new flat earth, the entire church must learn to be missionaries, and this will once again require all of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, comfort, counsel, power, and fruit.

Jesus commissioned us to be his witnesses in “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Glocalization helped me recognize that the ends of the earth have never been closer.

After reading the book, I’m inspired to take the gospel into all the world, starting in my own cul-de-sac.