Today I would like to share with you about my third prayer for this year, diaspora mission, with regards to fields of study/occupation and planting a multicultural church. For the past ten years, the field of missions has been shifting from reaching uncontacted people groups to city-focused diaspora missions. According to a UN report, by the year 2050, 70% of the global population will be in cities. Additionally, as episodes like the recent war in Ukraine continue to occur, refugees will also flock to cities and London is among their most preferred.
Taking these things into account, you could say that cities are the largest mission field. Going forward, mission fields will not be small villages in Africa or tropical jungles, but large cities like London. Churches that have passion for missions and missionary organisations are also located in cities. God commanded us to go forth and spread the gospel to all peoples, but those peoples are gathered together in cities and the churches who carry the call to spread the gospel are in cities, too.
When thinking about the people who need to be evangelised to and the churches that will do the evangelizing, the most important word is “diaspora”. The majority of churches who are experiencing revival right now are diaspora churches and there are more diaspora people attending church in England than English people. With that in mind, the leaders of missions today are diaspora churches like our own.
However, most diaspora churches are not officially registered. For example, the number of Korean churches in England and what there circumstances are is not known by English churches. This is the same for other ethnic churches. Therefore, someone needs to go out and meet with these church leaders and discern what God is doing in the world. If those churchgoers were born in London or if they came to England when they were young and assimilated into the local culture, they, along with the second generation immigrants of all nations could evangelise into areas outside of London. The result would be that the whole world could be evangelised to through city missions.
In order to come up with a more detailed plan for diaspora missions, I have been meeting with a few pastors since the beginning of the year. First of all, it was decided that this group’s name would be Diaspora Mission Solidarity and we are currently drafting the vision and strategy. We are planning on analysing data about the people groups that live in the 32 boroughs of London and gathering pastors who will be able to join us in our vision. If we are successful, we hope to meet with a diaspora church pastor in each borough and share our vision with them and all meet together in one place at one time.
We aren’t pushing to become an organisation that looks good from the outside, but are instead following the Holy Spirit and steadily obeying. If God allows it, we wish to work to work together with churches from every peoples group to help each other and plant churches so that there is no people group without a church, and take this vision to other cities around the world. Please pray for this in your private prayers and when you pray with others. Let’s watch God’s great works happen together.
