When someone turns from self to Christ, he trades not only sin for righteousness, hell for heaven, and despair for living hope. He also trades a small life for a large life — a life as large as the world Christ came to redeem.

The transformation takes time, of course. But in the end, the Spirit-filled soul cannot rest satisfied with self, nor with the affairs of his own kin and city and nation. No, as surely as all nations will one day bow to Christ, so Christ is moving his people to care about all nations.

Have you known Christians whose life seems marked by such largeness — Christians who live for places beyond here, times beyond now, and tribes beyond mine? Their eyes seem fixed on distant frontiers where Christ has not been named (Romans 15:20). They watch, fascinated, as the promise of redemption advances to “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Their heart beats for the day when a better flood than Noah’s will prevail upon the world — when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

They are, in a word, world Christians.

What Is a World Christian?

“World Christians,” David Bryant writes, “are day-to-day disciples for whom Christ and his global cause have become the integrating, overriding priority” (In the Gap, 6). Or as D.A. Carson puts it, “they see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the heavenly kingdom” and are therefore “single-minded and sacrificial when it comes to the paramount mandate to evangelize and make disciples” (The Cross and Christian Ministry, 117). World Christians may not personally go to faraway nations (though many do), but faraway nations have gone into them. They send, pray, dream, give, support, and worship like disciples of a worldwide Lord.

And we could use more of them. Our churches today do not have too many world Christians. We do not have too many among us overzealous for cross-cultural missions. We do not have too many who regularly remind us of unreached and unengaged peoples, those for whom Jesus is a strange sound. We do not have too many who plead in our prayer meetings, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth!” (Psalm 57:5).

Personally, I can remember seasons when I was more of a world Christian than I am now. Maybe you can too. Or maybe your heart has yet to feel the thrill of Christ’s worldwide dominion. Either way, many of us need a fresh wind from that Spirit who ever blows toward the Christless corners of the earth. And perhaps we might feel that wind if we consider some early disciples who formed what we might consider the first world-Christian church: the church of Christ at Antioch. In four marks, these believers display the nature and joy of the world-Christian life.

1. World Relationships

By the eleventh chapter of Acts, the gospel has begun to spread beyond the Jews. The Spirit has fallen on Cornelius and his household in response to Peter’s preaching; God has made common Gentiles clean through faith (Acts 10:15, 44–48). But we have not yet seen a world-Christian church, a true fellowship of nations, until some “men of Cyprus and Cyrene” come to Antioch and speak not just to the Jews but “to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus” — resulting in “a great number” of Jesus-worshiping Gentiles (Acts 11:20–21).

For the first time, Jews and Gentiles ate together, prayed together, ministered together, and worshiped together in the same local assembly and on the same spiritual footing. Soon, this church in Antioch would become a missionary-sending base (Acts 13:2–3). But before they sought to spread world Christianity abroad, they lived world Christianity at home. Their world Christianity was first a matter of world relationships, world friendships, world partnerships with local neighbors.

“As surely as all nations will one day bow to Christ, so Christ is moving his people to care about all nations.”

And so with us. Some today may live in an all-but monocultural, monoethnic place (in a small rural town, perhaps), but most of us can find something of the world without going far — often without even leaving our church. Even in my own relatively small church, I’m likely to sit near someone of Haitian, Bahamian, or Russian background on any given Sunday. Perhaps the first question for our own world Christianity, then, is not whether we’re willing to cross an ocean for Christ, but whether we’ll cross an aisle for him.

Will we embrace whatever differences lie between us and seek — by welcome, warmth, hospitality, friendship — to take our fellowship deeper than formalities? Will we cultivate a love for God’s global glory by embracing Christ-centered local diversity? And will we sincerely pray that our church would look a little more like a kingdom of all peoples? World Christianity, like so many other parts of the Christian life, begins at home.

2. World Responsibility

Bryant, in another description of world Christians, speaks not only of caring about God’s global glory, but also of accepting “personal responsibility” to see that glory go forth (In the Gap, 35). World Christians hear the Great Commission as if personally addressed, as if they too were on the Galilean mountain. They live as if the words “disciple all nations” were meant for them.

The Antioch Christians’ world responsibility appears most clearly in their missionary going and sending. In two other ways, however, we see just how sincerely they took this responsibility for God’s global kingdom.

First, when the church in Antioch heard about a financial need among the saints in Judea (some three hundred miles south of them), “the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief” (Acts 11:29). Distant news was not a distant care to these Christians, not when it concerned “the brothers” who had supported this church in its infancy by sending them Barnabas (Acts 11:22). Partnership in the gospel collapsed the distance and compelled them to give.

Do we, like them, care deeply about the faraway news of God’s kingdom, especially among our partners in the gospel? Do we treat missionary newsletters as more important than national headlines? And do needs there inspire prayer and generosity here because of the world responsibility we feel?

Second, Antioch not only sent missionaries (as we’ll see below), but they also took seriously the responsibility to support missionaries. If the apostle Paul had a home church, Antioch was it. From Antioch he sailed, and to Antioch he returned — not just once (Acts 14:27–28) or twice (Acts 15:35) but three times (Acts 18:22–23). It was a place he enjoyed spending “no little time” (Acts 14:28). And when he returned, he was not a no-name missionary, barely remembered by the church (“Who was that guy again?”), but a precious partner sent with fasting, sustained with prayer, and received with joy. In Antioch, Paul found a ready audience to hear “all that God had done” (Acts 14:27).

World Christians embrace God’s global mission as part of their calling, part of their personal responsibility. Like civilians in wartime, they do not treat lightly news from the front or the soldiers who come home.

3. World Readiness

When the Holy Spirit moved among the Antioch Christians and said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2), we read of no hesitation or resistance: “After fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:3). Can you imagine sending Paul and Barnabas away from your church — Paul, the mighty apostle, and Barnabas, the son of encouragement? For a whole year these men had “met with the church and taught a great many people” (Acts 11:26). But now the Spirit said, “Send them.” And so they did. Antioch was ready.

World Christianity, if embraced deeply, will disrupt some of our dearest relationships. The Spirit will send away our family and friends — indeed, he will ask us to send them away. Or he may send us ourselves, bidding us to be the ones who depart. Either way, world Christianity calls for readiness to send and be sent, even if, as Paul said of Onesimus, we feel like we’re “sending [our] very heart” (Philemon 12).

If two of your best friends, or two of your church’s best leaders, sensed a stirring to go, would you encourage them? If you sensed a stirring yourself, even if in a seemingly crucial ministry position, would you be willing to take the next step? Significantly, Luke notes that the Spirit’s commission came “while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting” (Acts 13:2). Only such a Godward posture can give us the world readiness we need. The Lord Jesus can make up for every loss we incur in his cause, whether by sending or going — and even give a hundredfold more (Matthew 19:29). But readiness for such losses will depend on keeping his fullness before our eyes.

4. World Resolve

Sometime after Paul’s first missionary journey, as he and Barnabas were ministering in Antioch again, “some men came down from Judea” with a teaching that threatened the world-Christian movement: “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1). In other words, faith in Jesus is not enough for Gentiles to be justified before God; they must also live under Jewish law.

But Antioch wouldn’t buy it. Not only did Paul and Barnabas have “no small dissension and debate” with the Judaizing teachers, but the whole church “appointed [them] to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question” (Acts 15:2–3). These believers would not give up the gospel so easily. They had been taught Christ too well. More than that, they had tasted and seen the goodness of God’s global purposes and would not build again “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14). To their relationships, responsibility, and readiness, they added world resolve.

We too have need for such resolve. Even if our world Christianity faces few theological distortions, it faces many practical distractions. We may not be tempted to force circumcision on the nations, but we are likely tempted to forget the nations — and to forget the joy that comes from living for God’s global cause. Our attention is too embattled, our pull toward the here and now too strong, our flesh too in love with the familiar for our world Christianity to remain without resolve.

Perhaps one of the most crucial steps we could take, then, is to embrace habits that keep the nations before our eyes. Read missionary biographies. Befriend believers who make the Great Commission a practical priority. Visit parts of your city filled with neighbors from other nations. Have meals with missions-minded brothers or sisters in your church. Treat missionary newsletters as precious prompts for family devotions and corporate prayer. And along the way, pray that God would make his global glory the passion of your heart.

Because when someone turns from self to Christ, he trades not only sin for righteousness, hell for heaven, and despair for living hope. He also trades a small life for a large life — a life as large as the world Christ came to redeem.