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April 21, 2010
Small Groups as Mission Centers (Part 2)
Your small group is already in a culturally diverse mission field!
In part 1 of this blog, I talked about how changing people’s attitude and perspective is step one in small groups becoming mission centers. Not only should small groups be the most strategic place to reach micro-cultures on their relational “turf,” but small groups have the potential to open up new local mission fields to churches in rapidly changing neighborhoods. Consider the following data from a MSNBC news story:
“The majority of residents in Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii and Washington, D.C., are some ethnicity other than non-Hispanic whites, according to Census Bureau population estimates released last week. Five other states, including New York and Georgia, could make that shift this year. Soon, more than one-third of Americans will live in states where Latinos, blacks, Asians, American Indians and other ethnic groups outnumber whites.”
Churches that have limited budgets or lack of vision for supporting overseas missions, or the inability to send short-term mission teams into other countries, may be able to support and send members “down the street” to reach out to other cultural groups that are within easy reach of the church’s “footprint.” They may be able to do this by simply offering a small group community to those of a different ethnic culture in their region, or who are far from biological family and yearn for relationships.
The good news about this approach is that it doesn’t require a resource-intensive bi-lingual worship service to be planned and scheduled. On the other hand, it does require a leader or facilitator who is able to communicate potentially in a different language, but those barriers aren’t as daunting as perhaps they once were with the increased availability of multi-lingual folks in our local congregations.
In any case, with the shift happening in this country, the opportunities for small groups to be mission centers are quite amazing. Have any of you tried starting small groups to reach out to other ethnicities?
posted by Dan Lentz on April 21, 2010 8:04 AM
