As I finished Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, there was a passage that caught my eye. The creator and soul of Apple was visiting Europe and he had a “vision”. He was just starting his integrated hub philosophy for the management of videos, music, apps, books and subscription publications to run seamlessly in all your devices.
He was looking at the young people and exclaimed, “they are all the same!” It made no difference to market certain products for Romanian young people, and others for American young people. They had the same devices, they wore the same clothes, watched the same videos and listened to the same music.
Jobs is many times called a genius (I am not getting into that discussion), but it doesn’t take a genius to get to that conclusion. We just have to look around. I still don’t know how exactly, but I think this opens up immense doors of opportunity for sharing the Gospel with the world’s youth.
Already in our ministry we have had no problem sharing a certain song or evangelistic video in English (with no subtitles) with young people in Portugal. Let’s face it, there is so much more available Christian resources in English.
There is no substitute for learning the language (very well) and the culture (very well). As church planting missionaries we are not setting out just to reach the youth. But things are different than they were 50 years ago. Even in the language training stage of ministry, the missionary already shares so many cultural traits with the country he is trying to reach, just because of the unifying journey our present world is in.
Every time we hear of “One World”, or “globalization” is almost always in a negative light. We know that one day the Antichrist will take advantage of this cultural unification for his evil intents, but, while we can, shouldn’t we be aware of it and try to use it to facilitate the spreading of the Gospel message?
The Universities in Portugal are offering more and more of their classes in English because of all the foreign students that chose to attend. I believe this is true almost all over the world. We are praying about trying to put together a debate/question&answer/seminar something and take it to our universities to try to reach out to Portuguese young people. We know we will also reach many other nationalities that attend.
We live in a strange world, but this is the world we live in. Lets make the most out of it for the cause of Christ.