Last month’s Baptist Assembly in Plymouth was an inspiring occasion. Happily the hundreds of responses that we have received since the Assembly confirm that that wasn’t merely the view of those of us who planned it! It was good to reflect on the One Mission which binds us together in this global village. We laughed at the absurdity of dividing up God’s mission into neat categories of home and abroad. People move around the world with such speed and ease that we need to see the world as one and to use all our insights, skills and resources to reach it for Christ’s sake.

BMS World Mission has huge experience in reaching out to people of very different cultures. But the fact is that this country is now a place of many cultures and we desperately need the wisdom of BMS as we engage with them. The cultures that we confront may be shaped by ethnicity, age, wealth, lifestyle or religion but if we fail to understand the culture we stand very little chance of getting across the message of God’s love in Christ.

At times I fear that our churches can live in little cultural bubbles. Everyone inside the church bubble understands the language and its ways of working, but to anyone from outside the church everything is a pure mystery. I fear that many people visit our churches and draw the conclusion that what we are talking about in our worship is completely irrelevant to them. They conclude that it is not for people like them. This is so tragic that it demands action.

Churches have tended to be very building-centred. We have constantly told people how welcome they would be to enter our buildings. Happily some will. But we need to face the clear fact that the overwhelming majority will never choose to enter our church buildings. Nice as our buildings may be (I’m in a generous mood!) they will rarely win architectural prizes or be places of magnetic appeal. I conclude from this that we need to be really radical – so radical that we start walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Jesus didn’t wait for people to attend the temple or the synagogue but went out to meet them. He preached in the fields or from a boat or in people’s homes. If he had based his ministry in the synagogue or temple we can assume that he would never have had any encounters with tax collectors, lepers or prostitutes. They would always have given him a very wide berth.

The conclusion is clear ... we need to be far more ready to start where people are. That was Jesus way and 2,000 years later it needs to be ours. Many churches are doing precisely this, and we celebrate the ministry of chaplains and individual Christians who, day by day, go out to meet people where they are. But rather than seeing these initiatives as exceptional we need to see them at the core of our life together. In that way we will be faithful disciples of the radical Jesus who never allowed buildings and institutions to get in the way of sharing God’s love.