Four Ways to See the Nations at Our Doorstep

A few years ago, I traveled to Kansas to lead a Strangers No More training for a youth group from a small rural town. We spent the day in Wichita — a few hours of cross-cultural training, visits to immigrant-owned grocery stores, lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant, some time at the local mosque. The students listened well. They asked questions. They began to see their state through a kingdom lens. It was, by any measure, a good day.

But the moment I remember most came on my drive back to South Dakota, at a gas station in McPherson, Kansas, a town of about 8,000. Inside, behind the counter, stood a man with olive skin and a heavy accent that suggested he wasn’t born in the U.S. I asked where he was from.

“India,” he said.

I asked, "So if you are from India, you speak both English and Hindi, but you also probably speak a third language as well, is that right?"

Surprised by my interest, he smiled and said, "Yes, I also speak Gujarati."

While he rang up the sale, I pulled out my phone and opened the Jesus Film app. On the map of India, more than 170 languages appeared. I tapped one that looked right and turned the screen toward him. “Is this it?” He nodded. Ten seconds later, the film began playing in Gujarati, a language spoken by nearly 62 million people. His face broke into a wide grin. He nodded again, slower this time. “Yes,” he said. “That is my language.”

Globalization is real. More than 300 million people today live outside the country of their birth, a population that, if gathered in one place, would rank among the largest nations on earth, representing nearly 4 percent of the world. Most have moved because the world is broken: war, economic collapse, famine, environmental disaster, violence. Christians rightly pray for justice and peace and work toward wise and compassionate policy. Nations have the responsibility to order their borders and laws.

But Christians must also ask a deeper question: What if God is at work in this movement?

In Athens, the Apostle Paul declared that God “made from one man every nation of mankind … having determined allotted times and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27). Migration does not catch heaven off guard. God is not wringing his hands, wondering what is going on. He is, as he has always been, on the move — and he invites his church to move with him.
In what follows, I want to explore four distinct but interwoven ways of thinking about the nations — particularly the nations now living among us:

• An Eternal Reality
• A Discipleship Possibility
• A Biblical Responsibility
• A Missional Opportunity

An Eternal Reality
Scripture leaves little ambiguity about God’s heart for the nations. From the promise to Abraham that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3), to the prophet Habakkuk’s vision that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14), the arc of the Bible bends toward a global chorus of worship.
In Revelation, the Apostle John sees “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). Heaven will be a multicultural, multi-linguistic declaration of the goodness and glory of God.

And this diversity is not incidental; it is revelatory. An Egyptian slave woman gives us one of Scripture’s most intimate names for God — El Roi, “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). At Pentecost, when the Spirit descends on the waiting disciples, God does not default to Greek, the trade language of the empire. Instead, he speaks through “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia … Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome … Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:9–11). The miracle is not merely comprehension; it is particularity. God addresses people in the language of the heart.

The Somali shopkeeper downtown. The Latino roofer around the corner. The Indian doctor guiding your mother through a cancer diagnosis. They are not demographic trends. They are image-bearers. Some will be our eternal brothers and sisters. We will worship together. We will learn from one another. Each culture reflects a distinct facet of God’s character and creativity.

As debates about immigration swell across headlines and campaign platforms, Christians must remember this: the people being discussed are not abstractions. They are future worshipers. They are, perhaps, future friends. They are part of an eternal reality that stretches far beyond our present anxieties and into the unending, multilingual praise of God.

A Discipleship Possibility
What do a Ukrainian, a Congolese, a Bhutanese and an Oromo refugee have in common? Each is a friend who arrived in my city seeking refuge and each has deepened my faith in Christ. In a cultural moment when the church is increasingly sidelined in a post-Christian society, we have much to learn from brothers and sisters who have carried their faith across borders.

When I once asked my Ukrainian friend how he learned to endure persecution, he did not offer a theory but a memory: as a boy, he gathered with other believers nearly every night of the week for hours of prayer, worship and Scripture, meeting quietly and at cost. An Oromo pastor, frustrated with his congregation in the United States, stopped himself mid-complaint to apologize. Back home, he explained, believers would pray together through the night and he was discouraged that he could not persuade them to gather for more than four hours of prayer here.

My Bhutanese friend told me about the beatings he endured from his uncle in front of their entire village in a Nepali refugee camp after choosing to follow Christ. And a Congolese pastor, a survivor of genocide, once urged me to travel with him to Kenya to train fellow Congolese refugees living in the slums of Nairobi. His charge to them was unsparing: if they did not share the good news of Jesus with their Somali neighbors — also refugees — they would be complicit in spiritual genocide. It was a sobering exhortation, especially from a man who was a survivor of physical genocide.

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In all of this, one truth has become increasingly clear: the Western church has much to learn about faithful presence on the margins. For many immigrant congregations, Christianity is not a cultural inheritance but a costly allegiance. They know what it means to worship without social capital, to gather without applause, to follow Christ without the reinforcement of the surrounding culture. In a society that is steadily shedding its Christian memory, they are not disoriented; they are prepared.

Perhaps, then, the immigrant church is not merely a community to be served but a community sent to disciple us, to teach us how to live again as “aliens and strangers,” to recover a winsome, resilient faith, and to shine with quiet confidence in a darkening age.

A Biblical Responsibility
Scripture leaves little ambiguity about God’s concern for the vulnerable — the widow, the orphan, the poor and the foreigner. Nations will craft their own immigration laws. In a democratic society, Christians will disagree about border security, asylum policy and the enforcement of statutes. Faithful believers, seeking to vote their conscience, will arrive at different prudential conclusions in a pluralistic public square.

But while policy may be complex, the posture of the heart is not.

God speaks with striking clarity about his regard for the foreigner. Again and again, Israel is commanded not merely to tolerate the stranger but to love him. In Leviticus, the instruction is unmistakable: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:33-34).

Similar commands echo throughout the Old Testament more than 30 times and their logic is simple: you were foreigners in Egypt. Israel’s own story of displacement was meant to shape its moral imagination. Their collective memory was to form their compassionate mercy. Having known vulnerability, they were not to exploit it in others.

From Genesis to the Prophets, God reveals a particular concern for the immigrant and the refugee, for those navigating life without power, familiarity or protection. That concern does not dissolve in the New Testament; it deepens.

For Christians, then, the question is not merely political but spiritual. Are our instincts aligned with the heart of the Father? This does not preclude serious debate about immigration policy or national responsibility. Democracies require such debate. But whatever conclusions we reach, certain boundaries must remain firm. We cannot traffic in demeaning rhetoric. We cannot tolerate the casual belittling of image-bearers, regardless of their legal status.

And when immigrants are treated with contempt or violence, silence is not neutrality; it is surrender. The church is called to be a prophetic  witness, to speak with conviction and with compassion. If we abandon that calling here, we risk forfeiting our moral clarity everywhere.

Missional Opportunity
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible unfolds as a story of mission. The Great Commission in Matthew 28 stands near its climax, but the arc begins much earlier. Humanity’s first calling was expansive: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The prophets widened the horizon further. Isaiah envisions a servant who will not only restore Israel but become “a light for the Gentiles … that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). Even the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar, chastened by what he witnessed, acknowledged a God whose power extended beyond borders and languages (Daniel 3:29).

Theologian Christopher J. H. Wright captures this thread succinctly: “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world.” In other words, mission is not a program of the church; it is the reason for its existence.

If, as Acts 17 suggests, God “marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands,” then migration is not merely a geopolitical phenomenon. It may also be a providential one. The arrival of immigrant communities, including those with little exposure to Christianity, can be seen not only as a policy question but as a missional moment.

Today, by some counts, more than 7,000 people groups remain “unreached”—that is, without a self-sustaining community of believers able to share the faith within their own culture. While most of these groups are concentrated in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, representatives of hundreds now live in Western cities. They are neighbors and colleagues, classmates and researchers, service workers and entrepreneurs powering places like Silicon Valley.

If God’s purpose is that people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” would know him, and if the nations are now present in our own communities, then the question is no longer whether mission matters. It is how we will respond. The opportunity before the church is both practical and profound: to learn, to welcome, and to bear witness, to invite new neighbors not only into our homes, but into the life of Christ.

Conclusion
I began this article with the story of a Gujarati shopkeeper in a small town in central Kansas. The Gujarati people are mostly found in India, where their population numbers over 61 million. According to Joshua Project, more than 600,000 live in the United States. The sad reality is that less than 1 percent of the Gujarati people are Christians. That day, the man behind the counter was hearing his native language for the first time in a film about Jesus. Few resources exist in Gujarati, and for him, even this small encounter was remarkable.

Then he asked me a simple question: “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am a follower of Jesus.”

He smiled, reached beneath the counter, and pulled out a magazine. “Another Christian was here a few days ago and gave me this,” he said, holding up a pamphlet — a tract from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The world’s unreached peoples are here, arriving in our cities and towns — our Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. They are seeking friendship and hope. And if we do not reach them, someone else will. Perhaps it will be the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormons, the radical atheist or the New Age spiritualist, the casual hedonist or the relentless allure of the American dream. Satan is cunning, strategic, and relentless; he will do whatever he can to keep these hearts from hearing the truth of Christ and to distract us from God’s mission.

But one thing remains true: the Kingdom of God is not in trouble.

The God of the universe is not pacing the heavens, wondering what to do with Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. He is at work, bringing them, and their stories, their hopes, their questions, to our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our streets.
The pressing question is not whether God will act. He already is.

​The question we must wrestle with is this: How will we respond?

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