I recently read a book on hip-hop culture called Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-hop Planet. Patrick Neate’s belief is that hip-hop, like almost nothing else, has the potential to affect real social change:

“There is… one thing I know with absolute certainty, both because I have experienced it and because all the statistics say so. Worldwide - and these days you have to talk worldwide - the gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, mainstream and excluded is widening by the day and hip-hop is one of the few cultural forms that successfully bridges that gap on a global stage. Hip-hop has long talked about the possibilities for, depending on who you listen to, change, revolution or real social justice. Where once you might have been able to dismiss this as polemic, it now smells like prophecy. The time is now” (p. 265).

I found these words of particular interest, because the author and I both agree that bridging the gaps in this world is something we ought to be working for, and while Neate and I part ways when it comes to what (or Who) it is that has the potential to bridge these gaps, I really appreciated his mantra: “Act locally; connect globally; think glocally.”

Glocalization is a bit of a buzzword these days among trendy cultural critics, and it surfaces time and again in this book. As Peate leads us on this global exploration of hip-hop culture in some of the world’s great cities (NYC, Tokyo, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Rio), I was seeing a parallel.

The writer laments the fact that so often hip-hop heads don’t live up to their potential, which explains why hip-hop hasn’t changed the world for the better like it is capable of doing. And the whole time I am wondering what it would look like if the Church, this global community of Christ-followers, God’s instrument of transformation in this broken world, were to take this hip-hop writer’s mantra to heart, to “act locally, connect globally, and think glocally.”

Missional theology says that wherever we are, we are on mission with God, joining him in what he is already doing. What he is doing here is really important. It’s huge. It is something to get excited about, to commit yourself to being a part of. But here is not the only place he is at work. He is also there, and there, and there. And because his mission here is not really separate from his mission there, because it is all part of the redemptive story he is telling through his people, it only makes sense to connect. We connect with those down the street, we connect with those on the other side of the world, and we connect with anyone in between who is taking seriously Jesus’ teaching to make disciples, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to love those who do evil to us.

There may have been a time when connecting like this was unheard of, and for some, due to all sorts of things, it may still be. Believers from a remote tribe in Kenya, for instance, may not be able to connect with other believers in Poland or Peru or Puerto Rico. But you and I in this age of technology and travel, in which a guy sitting in a hotel lobby in Phnom Penh, Cambodia at eight in the morning can be chatting with a bunch of friends in a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania at eight the evening before (and for all of this to be happening via wireless internet in real time), we have no excuse not to get a lot more creative in connecting globally.

As we act locally - as we get on board with what God has us here to be and do - and as we connect with those who are also acting faithfully wherever they are, we truly start to think in a glocal way. We see that this world is interconnected, that the Church in Algeria and Afghanistan and America is one Church, and that when we do or do not do something, they feel it. We’re in this together. We see that the coffee we drink, before it was packaged and shipped north and sold to us by a corporation via a grocery store, was grown on a plantation in Guatemala by real people. We start to notice that the tags on all of our clothes seem to point to extremely poor parts of the world, and we wonder who made the shirt we wore to work today. We read a news story about a car bombing in the Middle East and where we once might have skipped ahead to read about Paris Hilton going to jail, we stop and consider what life must be like for all of those caught up in the conflict in Iraq, and particularly for our brothers and sisters in Christ who are not fighting but are being killed and having their lives torn apart nonetheless. We begin to realize these people have hopes and dreams, or at least they did at some point, and it hits us that people’s hopes and dreams matter. And then we consider the American Dream and whether the rest of the world can afford it, which is a kind of question that can get us into a lot of trouble.

All of this leads us to prayer.

We ask God to do something, anything, to mend this world, and to heal us. We ask him to strengthen his Church. We ask him to work miracles. We pray big prayers. We pray that he would bring peace to Iraq and that he would work in the hearts of leaders to stop the genocide in Sudan and we pray that he would work in the hearts of Christians everywhere, starting in my very own heart, to sanctify us, to set us apart, so that we can be of some use in this world. We’ve heard the stories from the frontlines and we have our own stories to tell. We know that the fields are ripe for harvest. So we ask God to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to heal the sick. We ask him to raise up the workers and to send them out.

And having cultivated a lifestyle of acting locally, connecting globally, and thinking glocally, many of us will find that God is leading us to go act locally somewhere else.

But where?

I think Frederick Buechner puts it best, so I’ll end with this: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”