Mission is not about crossing the sea but about seeing the cross.

When Jesus sent out the twelve, and the others who were with them, he sent them first to Jerusalem; it was only after their home town was saturated with the gospel that they were to go on to Judea, Samaria, and finally towards the Ends of the Earth. Even when Paul took the gospel into Asia and then Europe he always began at home in the sense that he went first to the synagogue. It is among the people of our own kind that we have the greatest credibility, and the greatest success rate. We don’t have to learn the language, or the culture, we don’t even have to learn technique; we just have to share the story of how God saved a wretch like me to others who are a lot like me.

Evangelism has been described as one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. Our countrymen have similar needs to our own, particularly in their expression of the need for salvation. All people need Christ’s saving grace, salvation to become the likeness of Christ, but it is the people next door who need salvation from the same stuff we do: materialism, pressure to perform, the issues of postmodern, and twenty-first century British life.

Before I returned to England from Australia in 2002 I completed a unit on World Christianity and Missions at Bible school, during which I identified an unreached people group which met all the criteria of the curriculum: that group was the antipodean community of London. Here was a group which did not have an indigenous church, indeed it seemed to me it did not have a single missionary focussed upon them as distinct from the wider London community. Aussies and Kiwis (and Saffas) in London are not Londoners, but neither are they really Aussies or Kiwis (or Saffas) like the ones at home. This group has a general demographic; under 28 years of age, unmarried, nomadic workers and travellers, open-minded, easygoing. Not like their countrymen who stayed at home, and not like the natives of Great Britain around them; these are a culture apart. Who will minister to them? Quite simply it needs to be those who are like them, not the English or the churches of England; not the Australian or New Zealander coming from “home”, not even the English returning from “gap year”; the London Crowd need to hear the timeless gospel from the Church within the London Crowd itself. But is there such a Church?

There is a people coming: Hillsong Church London, whilst not specifically a mission to the antipodeans is indeed reaching them, and is an indigenous church of same. The London Antipodeans are a reached people-group, the southern crowd run this church, and minister out of it for the benefit of the kingdom of God in all Europe, especially that within the M25.

By focussing on their own doorstep they are reaching the world.