In June 2008, I was sent to London by a Korean church as a missionary. Because of this background, though I lead a Korean church, I really wanted our church to grow as a mission-oriented church, whereby all members of the congregation would be involved in mission in one way or another. From autumn of the year I arrived, I designated the last Sunday of each year as Mission Sunday. The sermon for that week was related to mission; any offerings collected that week were sent directly to India, even though the church at the time was receiving financial support from Korea. A few years later, we started singing praises in English on Mission Sunday as well, which helped our congregation become more used to praising God in English.
In terms of the sermon, initially I took the approach of preaching about bible verses related to mission and using those to share how we can end world mission in this generation. It was just a once a month, but over 15 years, I’ve been able to share most of the main bible verses on mission. While I started out talking about the direction and strategy of world mission, over time my focus shifted to the heart, i.e. building a desire to participate in this world mission. There are many seminars and forums on evangelising Europe, but I came to realise that evangelism was at the start of it all. So I wanted to gain more experience on evangelising, and started to preach more about evangelism.
Over time, I came to realise that quite a few people in our church were new to the Christian faith, or had returned after a long period of being away from God. So rather than preaching ‘about’ evangelism, I decided to evangelise directly through the sermons by sharing the gospel. I also did this by choosing topics that many non-believers showed an interested in during Saturday evangelism. Our faith is not one-sided or irrational; as such, I wanted to explain the Christian faith in a logical and compelling way that showed God’s character, to help those people who wanted to believe. And since the gospel is power, I wanted to help the believers in our congregation to remember how they had been saved, and help them prepare for conversations with and questions from non-believers that surrounded them.
As we continue to observe Mission Sunday, I feel that our efforts on world mission are becoming more focused. We are planning to take practical steps to further our goal of reaching out to all the nations that are represented in London through city mission or diaspora mission. Next year, I would like to invite leaders of other foreign churches and share our vision of city mission and start to co-operate. The final goal is to gather the next generation in one place and build them up to lead such mission efforts.
The other thing is to establish a Multicultural Church in central London, in which the entire service would be run in English. At the moment, two out of 34 of our cell groups are English cells – I hope that this number will continue to grow so that we can start to build a Multicultural Church. For this we are looking for a English-speaking pastor, and with prayer, are starting to put together a Praise Team and cell group leaders who would be able to lead in English. We are also bolstering our efforts on mission towards unreached, unengaged people groups – including by planning a short term mission trip to India as well. Just as our congregation contributed to building up our church, I believe that we will be able to come together in our calling towards world mission.
