Newfrontiers, Global
This is a repost from our friend Andrew Wilson who is a Teaching Pastor at King's Church London.
Newfrontiers, Global
By Andrew Wilson | Wednesday 19 October 2022
Anyone who calls their annual conference “Global” is taking a bit of a risk. It could all too easily become a name which looks good on a logo, or in a vision statement, but simply does not reflect reality (cue all the obvious jokes about the “World Series.”) If you’re going to talk about being a global movement, as we emphatically and passionately do in Newfrontiers, you need to make sure that the people invited, the subjects discussed, the vision cast, the prayers raised and the leadership represented all reflect that vision. It is a high bar. But at last week’s conference in Cyprus, from my perspective at least, that bar was cleared with room to spare.
You can tell from the languages. In just three days, I heard people speaking (or singing) from the microphone in Albanian, Arabic, Bemba, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, French, Greek, Hindi, Igbo, Kurdish, Portuguese, Russian, Shangana, Shona, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Ukrainian and Urdu, and I know I missed at least one. I haven’t done the maths, but I would hazard a guess that four out of every five people alive today can speak at least one of those languages, and it could be more. This wasn’t just a conference that looked international. It sounded international too.
You can tell from the prayers. At most Western conferences, the central feature of the event—the bit that gets the plum slot in the programme, where the meeting overruns, the band go nuts and the delegates spend the rest of the week talking about it—is a main stage tubthumping sermon of some kind. At Global, it is one of the prayer meetings. And the focus of those prayer meetings is almost always the Majority World: famine in Kenya, persecution in South Asia and the Middle East, church planting in Mexico and West Africa, frontier mission in nations that you can’t even mention in an article like this. The miracles and testimonies we heard about from many of those places make you want to dance. The challenges and opposition we heard about make you want to cry. Plenty of us did both.
You can tell from the mealtimes. To take just one example: you’re sitting at dinner with five Russian speakers, one of whom (probably the person who works the hardest at the entire conference) is translating everything, both ways. You hear a story of a paralysed person being healed in Baku. You hear another story about the work among unreached peoples in the high Arctic, with the pastor who originally travelled there. You hear how the war in Ukraine is affecting the churches in both countries. You discover that unbeknownst to you, one of your courses has been translated into Russian through the Broadcast Network, and is being used right now to train leaders. You talk about which resources have been translated, and which ones need to be. You hear Russian jokes about English people, and laugh together. Then you have baklava.
Most strikingly, you can tell from the focus in the hosting of the meetings, the prophetic ministry, and the preaching. The typical Western preoccupations—from size, systems and processes to cultural influence, intradenominational squabbles and sexual ethics—were refreshingly absent. (Regular readers will know I care a lot about several of these things. But it’s delightful to be at conferences where they are not allowed to dominate the agenda.) The first main session saw a Zimbabwean pastor preaching on suffering. The second message, from someone who spent seven years planting a church in Istanbul, considered the diversity of the global church through the lens of Ephesians 1-4, complete with some fairly robust application for us. The third was a deeply moving message on persecution from an Indian pastor, whose (sadly unshareable) stories sounded like they had come straight out of the book of Acts. The fourth saw a young couple from London raise the intergenerational challenge for us, and the fifth was a beautiful summary of the whole conference, complete with some profound reflections on unity, difference, sameness and togetherness.
And you can tell from the reactions: from Terry Virgo, Kemi Koleoso, Mike Betts, Edward Buria, and many others. (Those names may or may not be familiar to you, but they are basically people who pray more in a day than many of us do in a week.) No doubt the fact that we have been unable to meet for three years, with all the sense of loss that brings, is part of that repsonse. But it was not just that. This was a genuinely global conference, in purpose and in unity.
For a family of churches that has been held together for years by our conviction that we are more together than apart, it was a joy, an honour and a challenge to be there. Which is just as it should be. The church is always bigger than you think.
