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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.

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I want to tell you about a conversation I had in Myanmar.

I was sitting with a group of pastors from ethnic minority communities in Myanmar, Chin, Karen, Kachin. For these communities, being Christian isn’t just a personal faith decision. It’s part of who you are as a people. Faith, ethnic identity, and survival are woven together in ways most Australian Christians have never had to think about.

These pastors lead congregations that have lived under persecution for generations. Their people know what it means to be shamed by the state. Displaced from their land, stripped of dignity by a majority culture that has never recognised their worth. Honour isn’t abstract for them. It’s what their communities have been fighting to hold onto for decades.

I asked one of them what part of the gospel hit hardest in his context. He pointed to Luke 15. Not the younger son’s repentance. Not even the father’s forgiveness. The moment the father saw his son and ran.

He said: in our culture, when someone has shamed the family – left, squandered, rejected their people – the community closes. You don’t run toward that person. You make them earn their way back. But this father saw him from a distance and ran. He didn’t wait for the explanation. He didn’t make him prove himself. He covered him before the village could get to him first.

For a community that has spent generations being told they are worth less – by governments, by dominant cultures, by systems built to exclude them – The father running is not a warm feeling, it is the whole gospel. God moves toward the shamed before they’ve had a chance to explain themselves.

I’ve taught that passage in Australia many times. I’d never felt its full weight until that room.

The Gospel Is Bigger Than We’ve Been Preaching It

Western Christianity runs almost entirely on one framework. Sin is breaking God’s law, Christ paid the penalty, we are forgiven and justified. It’s true. It’s biblical. But it’s one lens. And for most of the world, it’s not the primary one.

Jayson Georges, Roland Muller, and Jackson Wu have each written on this from different angles. The Bible speaks across three primary cultural lenses: guilt and innocence, shame and honour, and fear and power. Western Christianity defaulted almost entirely to the first and exported it as if it were the whole picture. It wasn’t.

Shame and honour cultures. Most of Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific. The question isn’t am I guilty – it’s am I shamed? Have I dishonoured my family, my name, my people? Christ entered the ultimate public humiliation. Crucifixion was engineered to destroy honour, not just end life. He wore our shame so we could wear his honour. Seated with him at the right hand of the Father (Hebrews 12:2).

Fear and power cultures. Parts of Africa, animistic contexts across Asia and the Pacific. The world is alive with spiritual forces. Ancestors. Curses. Powers that can harm or protect. The primary question isn’t guilt or shame. It’s who has authority?

One of our students in Africa told me he used to dance for the devil. He painted his face, and wore the bones of animals. He danced before the shaman. In West African traditional religion, the shaman is the intermediary between the living and the spirit world. The dancer before him isn’t a performer. He’s functioning in a spiritually significant role, embodying or invoking a spirit, becoming a vessel. The face paint is ritual preparation. A boundary crossing from ordinary person to something else entirely.

Coming to Christ meant leaving all of that. And leaving is not a simple thing. Initiation into these societies involves oaths, spiritual covenants, community identity. Leaving is considered betrayal. In some cases it carries real social consequences and threats. There’s a phrase in the culture around these societies: ifa mo. Do not speak it. He told me anyway.

What he said when he described his life now wasn’t complicated. He said the fear was gone. He’d carried it his whole life. And then one day it wasn’t there anymore.

That’s Colossians 2:15. Christ disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them. For a man who spent years as a vessel for those powers, that’s not a doctrine. It’s his testimony. .

What This Means for Your Suburb

That pastor in Myanmar wasn’t doing creative theology. He was reading Luke 15 in his cultural mother tongue. That student in Africa wasn’t describing a psychological shift. He was describing a power encounter with the living Christ. Same Jesus. Different mother tongue. Both completely real.

The communities in our cities who process the world through shame and honour, or through spiritual power, are often sitting just outside the reach of our church plants. Not because they’re resistant to Jesus. Because the Jesus we’re presenting doesn’t speak to the deepest questions they’re actually asking.

A Filipino woman in Parramatta carrying the weight of family shame isn’t primarily asking how to get her legal record cleared before God. She’s asking can I be restored? Can I belong again? Is there honour on the other side of this? The gospel answers every one of those questions. 

The gospel doesn’t change. Jesus is Lord. He died. He rose. He’s the only way to the Father. None of that moves.

But Scripture speaks to every human being, in every culture, in every century. That’s not just contextualisation. That’s just the Bible doing what it has always done.

How much of it are you actually preaching? And who in your suburb is waiting to hear the part you’ve been leaving out?

Next: Part 3 — What to actually do. Practical steps for planters building churches in multicultural Australia.

There’s a conversation happening in global Christianity that most Australian church planters aren’t part of. Not because they don’t care. Because nobody told them the room had moved.

What the Data Actually Shows

In 1910, the Global North – Europe, North America, Australia – was home to four times as many Christians as the Global South. Christianity felt like a Western religion because, statistically, it was.

That flipped around 1980. Most of us missed it.

By 2025, 69% of all Christians on earth live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Projected to reach 78% by 2050 (Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 2025). Africa is now the most Christian continent on earth. Over 750 million believers. Growing at 2.59% per year. Europe’s church is contracting. North America too.

Philip Jenkins mapped this in 2002 in The Next Christendom. He argued the Global South would eventually send missionaries back to re-evangelise a secularising West. Most Western church leaders treated it as an interesting theory.

It isn’t a theory anymore. It’s Tuesday.

This Isn’t Abstract

I grew up across Southeast Asia – Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong. My father was a missionary. I spent my twenties on the Thai-Burma border doing crisis response, leading teams into some of the most spiritually alive, resource-poor communities I’ve ever encountered.

That shaped everything about how I see the church.

For the last decade I’ve been CEO of Online Bible College, the ministry my father founded in 1998. We serve 70,000 students across 190 countries. Tuition-free. Because Matthew 10:8 says freely give, and we take that seriously.

I’ve sat with pastors in Yangon leading hundreds of students on a budget that wouldn’t cover a single semester at an Australian seminary. The faith in those communities doesn’t look like it’s trying to survive. It’s multiplying.

That same faith is now in your city.

Australian Christian affiliation dropped from 61% to 44% in a single decade (ABS Census, 2021). Weekly attendance is 4.6% of the population. We lost 800 congregations between 2016 and 2021 (NCLS, 2024). Those numbers are real.

But step outside the census and walk your suburb. The communities driving the fastest Christian growth on earth – Nigerian, Filipino, Korean, Indian, Sri Lankan, Pacific Islander – aren’t a mission field you need to fly to. They’re in Blacktown, Parramatta, Dandenong, and Marsden Park. Already gathered. Often already planting.

The mission force and the mission field are in the same postcode.

The Question We’re Not Asking

Most Australian planting models were built for an Anglo, post-Christian context. That context still exists. But it describes a shrinking proportion of the people around our church plants – and it assumes a single cultural framework for how people hear the gospel.

That’s the problem.

Missiologists Jayson Georges, Roland Muller, and Jackson Wu have each argued that the gospel speaks across three primary cultural frameworks: guilt and innocence, shame and honour, and fear and power. Western Christianity has defaulted almost entirely to the first. Most of our Global South neighbours process identity, sin, and salvation through the second or third.

I’ve seen it firsthand. A student in Myanmar hears the cross as the Father absorbing ultimate public shame so his son doesn’t have to walk the gauntlet alone. That’s not a lesser gospel. That’s Luke 15 read by someone who actually lives in an honour culture.

If our plants only speak one language, we’ll keep building churches a huge portion of our city can’t hear. Not because they’re resistant. Because we’re not speaking to them.

And there’s a posture question worth naming. For generations the assumption has been that we resource them. But the spiritual vitality of the global church now largely lives with the communities we’ve historically positioned ourselves above. The pastor from Lagos planting in Blacktown isn’t a recipient of our mission strategy. In many cases, he’s ahead of it.

The decline story about the Australian church is real. But it’s incomplete.

The global church isn’t shrinking. It’s moving. And it’s moved right into our neighbourhoods.

The only question is whether we’ll plant for the city we imagine – or the city we’re actually in.

Next: Part 2 – We’ve Been Preaching One Third of the Gospel.