This is the first article in a two-part series. Here, I show that in the West, our local communities are mission fields. In part 2, we’ll look at how we can examine ourselves and our suburbs to better connect with people as part of our long-term mission.
I’m reading a book on the stock market crash of 1929 (because yes, I’m a special kind of nerd). I’m fascinated by the mindset of the investors that led the world into such economic devastation, and the collective mentality of the millions of people who willingly followed them.
And when I read this line, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning:
So long as faith in tomorrow was maintained, debts could be rolled over endlessly into the future.1
This is an apt description of our mindset in the West today when it comes to spiritual reality. We have so much faith in tomorrow, so we can live on spiritual credit.
We are comfortable, resting in our ability to get ourselves out of most kinds of trouble. We have a high level of expectation about the services and facilities that we can access. We even collectively cushion our emotional lives as a culture, giving ourselves the power to cancel or live our ‘personal truth’, so we never have to feel aggrieved or offended. We have been trained into believing that our power is our truth, our emotions are the expression of the real us and our journey is our own. Anything that interferes with that journey can be unfollowed or cut from our lives.
This is not to say that our lives are without trial. We worry about bills, children, job security, illness and tragedy. But when things are going well, we have an extraordinary ability to live on spiritual credit.
When nothing challenges our world view, like the investors of the 1920s, we develop unreasonably optimistic faith in tomorrow. It’s the type of optimism that can’t foresee anything bad happening—or at least anything bad that we couldn’t manage our way out of. And our eternal life? It either doesn’t exist or it’s probably fine. That’s a problem for tomorrow. And tomorrow, as the idiom goes, never comes.
Lengthy uninterrupted booms…produce a collective delusion. Optimism becomes a drug, or a religion, or some combination of both. Propelled along by a culture of hot tips, one-of-a-kind deals, killer sales pitches, and irresistible slogans, people lose their ability to calculate risk and distinguish between good ideas and bad ones.2
We live in a world that has access to more information in five minutes than people once had in a lifetime. We want more and more in less and less time. And collectively, we will rationalise anything that threatens to burst our bubble—like the sweat shop behind our fast fashion, or the developing-world landfill where it ends up.
So how do we, as churches within our communities, help people to calculate spiritual risk when optimism is already their religion?
How can we possibly compete when people are caught in the collective delusion that living on spiritual credit will never come with a crash?
We know that we have a message of salvation and hope, but we can easily assume that people are not looking for salvation because they do not believe they need it. Their hope is in their tomorrow, through which they can endlessly roll their spiritual debt.
However, we should not assume this. If we do, we don’t trust that God has sent his Spirit before us. Our lack of expectation can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Humanly speaking, we can’t compete with the lure of spiritual credit. We might look to our suburbs and assume our gospel seeds will fall on poor soils. But everything is possible with God. These are his seeds, and his Spirit goes before us to prepare the hearts of his chosen.
But how we respond and faithfully seek to be God’s hands and feet in his mission matters.
Therefore, we should view our suburbs as a mission field, in the same way that organisations like CMS do. They send people to build relationships with people over many years through which they encounter the gospel through spoken word and living witness.
We must be intentional in building these relationships but we must do so non-transactionally. We should not meet people simply with a result or transaction in mind, like merely getting them to church or just getting them to convert. If we do, as noble as the intention might be, we would be instrumentalising the person in front of us. We don’t meet them because we think they are a means to an ends (church growth or conversion numbers). We meet them because we love them as our neighbours. That is all. The rest flows from this.
And, we have an extraordinary wealth of resources. By the grace of God, our brothers and sisters have developed tools to help us:
- For help thinking through forming non-transactional relationships: Sam Chan’s book How to Talk About Jesus (Without Being That Guy).
- The ALIVE movement provides written resources, conferences and training for individuals and churches.
- CMS Summer School every January includes missionary sessions that give amazing ideas for forming relationships over the long term whether your mission field is Cambodia, Cabramatta or Campbelltown.
A first step is to exegete your suburb. Just as we exegete Scripture, we should read our context carefully. We need to understand our suburbs deeply so that we might become all things to all people. Maybe this means setting up a play group, DivorceCare, ESL classes, or money-management training through Christians Against Poverty. Maybe there are parents that congregate at the school gates for 15 minutes after drop-off or sport field on Saturday. As a parent or player, perhaps that is a place where you can build relationships. Maybe your suburb is most active and congregates most visibly on social media. We’ll explore more practical ways to exegete communication in part 2 of this series.
As you interact, do so thoughtfully and faithfully. Avoid the transactional and self-righteous tone that can turn people away, especially on social media. Instead, tell your stories, display Christian character and talk about church, and what was good about it. It’s surprising how many people are open to going to church when it is de-mystified.
To conclude part 1: the West is gripped with the self-assurance of living on credit in a world where tomorrow never comes and the ‘market’ will never crash. But we don’t need to compete with that message. We just need to engage with our communities as mission fields, show the goodness and beauty of the gospel, and help them to see that their spiritual future is worth thinking about today.
- Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Crash, Penguin, 2025, p 10. ↩︎
- Sorkin, Inside the Crash, p 13 (my emphasis). ↩︎
Know someone in your church who would find this helpful? Please send it to them.