global 

Part 3 of 3: The Global Church in Your Suburb

Parts one and two made the case. The global church has moved. The gospel speaks in more cultural languages than most of our church plants are using. Now the question is practical.

What do you actually do on Monday?

Go Find Out Who Is Already There

Not a community survey. Not a demographic report. Go eat at the Nigerian restaurant on the main strip. Spend a Saturday morning at the Filipino market. Walk into the Indian grocery store and ask the owner how long he’s been in the suburb. You’ll learn more in three conversations than in three months of research.

Most church planting starts with a strategy. Strategy is not wrong. But strategy without relationship is just noise. And in a multicultural context, it’s noise directed at people who were never asked.

Many of these communities already have faith. They didn’t leave God behind when they came to Australia. They brought him with them. Your job isn’t to introduce Jesus to your suburb. It’s to find where he’s already moving and join that.

Audit What You’re Actually Preaching

Go back through your last few sermons. Your baptism prep material. The language you use when you explain the gospel to someone new. One question: which cultural framework am I working in?

If every illustration assumes individual guilt and personal forgiveness, you’re preaching in one language. That’s not a failure. Most of us were only ever taught one. But now you know there are others.

Start adding. Next time you preach the Prodigal Son, spend real time on the father running. Not as a heartwarming detail. As a theological statement. Why a man of standing in a first-century honour culture didn’t run. What it cost him publicly to do it anyway. Who he was absorbing the shame for before his son even reached the gate.

Watch what happens in a room where half your congregation comes from an honour culture. Some of them will hear that passage for the first time. They’ve read it a hundred times and never heard it.

The text hasn’t changed. You’re just letting it reach further.

Find the Leaders Already in Your Postcode

There are Global South church planters in your city who have been doing this for years without support, without networks, without anyone in the broader Australian church paying attention. Renting community halls on Sunday afternoons. Meeting in lounge rooms. Discipling people across language barriers most of us would never attempt.

Find them. Not to resource them. That posture resets the old dynamic where we’re the ones with something to give. Find them because they have something you need.

Ask what they’re seeing. Ask what’s working. Ask what took them years to figure out about reaching their community. Then listen without trying to fit their answer into your existing framework.

I’ve watched these relationships become some of the most fruitful partnerships in global ministry. Not because someone ran a program. Because two leaders sat across a table, took each other seriously, and decided to go further together than either could go alone.

Invest in Their Theological Formation

When a local leader gets solid theological training, not imported curriculum through a Western cultural filter but genuine depth they can apply in their own context, they don’t just become better preachers. They plant churches. They train others. The thing multiplies.

The shortage of theological education in the Global South is one of the most serious vulnerabilities in the fastest-growing expression of Christianity on earth. It’s a significant reason the prosperity gospel has taken hold in communities where the gospel should be thriving. Leaders who are hungry but undertrained will fill the gap with whatever sounds powerful. Often that’s not the gospel.

That same dynamic is in your city. Global South leaders planting in your suburb are often doing it without the theological formation they need. You can’t fill that gap in a mentoring conversation. But you can point them toward serious training. You can advocate for them in your denominational networks. You can make sure the resources of the Australian church reach the leaders who need them most.

At OBC we’ve been doing this for over two decades. Tuition-free, because Matthew 10:8 says freely give. If cost and geography are still gatekeeping theological training in 2025, something has gone wrong.

Cross the Street

This is the hardest shift. Most Australian church models are attractional. Build something excellent. Invite people. Hope they come. For many of our Global South neighbours that model is invisible. Not because they’re uninterested in Jesus. Because everything about the way we’ve packaged church signals: this was built for someone else.

Cross the street. Eat the food. Learn a few words in the language. Sit in their gathering before you invite them to yours. Let them see that the Jesus you follow has been moving in their communities, their countries, their families for generations. Often without any involvement from us at all.

The global church isn’t a mission project waiting for Australian leadership. It’s already here. Already gathered. Already doing the thing we say we want to do.

We just have to show up.

This is the final part of a three-part series: The Global Church in Your Suburb. To explore tuition-free theological training for leaders in your community, visit onlinebiblecollege.com.