I often tell how an encounter with the witness of Mother Teresa forever changed my life. It happened in my middle teenage years, as I was growing up in California’s Central Valley, that I found a documentary that followed her from India to locations around the world. The story of this faithful nun from Albania, caring for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, found its way through the work of faithful storytellers all the way to California, where it exploded my small view of what it might mean to follow Jesus.
That’s our hope for this Globe Issue. That we will allow God, in the extraordinary work he does through ordinary people, to challenge, inspire, and transform us. That we will allow him to explode our sometimes-small sense of what he might call us to.
John Stott once said, “We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.” And when Billy Graham laid out the vision for Christianity Today in 1955, a year before we launched, he dreamt that we might one day “have at least one hundred reporters throughout the entire world carrying all the religious news possible.”
Stott and Graham understood how important it is for the Western Church—particularly the American Church—to learn from and be inspired by the non-Western Church. These two giants in the faith continue to inspire what we do today, and, in many ways, inspire what you hold in your hands right now.
The Globe Issue is brought to you by generous partners of The One Kingdom Campaign, the first comprehensive campaign in Christianity Today’s history.
One of the campaign’s three initiatives, The Global Initiative, is elevating the stories and ideas of the global Church. It enables CT to dramatically expand our coverage to better represent what God is doing in every corner of the planet. In fact, you may have already noticed CT’s growing global team of editors, reporters, and translators. Our prayer with this Globe Issue is that your vision for the kingdom of God on Earth increases. And that your heart expands for the sisters and brothers you meet here.
We invite you to learn more about The One Kingdom Campaign at OneKingdom.ChristianityToday.com. If you would find joy in partnering with us, we would be honored to partner with you.
Dr. Timothy Dalrymple is the president and CEO of Christianity Today.
