We are living in a global world—the young generation, especially. We have a global culture. Most of us know Facebook, Michael Jackson, iPhone, Avatar, Nike. Brands are global. Movies are global. Artists are global.

But still, the place where we live is local. We have a home, friends, family. My teenagers, who live in the Paris area, probably love the same music and wear the same kind of clothes as yours do. The main difference is the place where they live. The new generation is becoming more and more glocal.

Glocal Needs to Be Our Model If we want the gospel message to be relevant for our generation, we need to be glocal in our approach. It’s not an option. If we have a global ministry but can’t measure its local impact, then we don’t have any glocal ministry at all. Let me explain.

A global ministry is a ministry touching nations. A local ministry is rooted in the life of people, touching cities and local communities. So a glocal ministry is a ministry touching nations and having a local impact. And it’s what is needed today to reach our generation.

Glocal as a Process After reading Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger’s Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples (B&H Books, 2006), I understood that there are two kinds of churches: churches with programs and churches with process.

Churches with programs want to have people attending their programs. Churches with process (called “simple churches”) want unsaved people to become disciples. I think we can apply the same principle to any Christian organization. Are we just running programs or are we developing a process to turn seekers into believers of Jesus and then disciples of Jesus?

Glocal is the process most adapted for every organization which considers evangelism as the Great Commission. Behind numbers, there are real people. If we cannot figure out that real people are becoming followers and disciples of Jesus Christ locally, we just have numbers and consider people as numbers.

Sometimes, I hear this kind of declaration: "We are broadcasting our programs in ten million homes." If we cannot turn this number into real and local people, we have missed the point entirely.

So how do we do it? In our field of Internet glocal evangelism, here is our process.

1. We attract people. To do so, we use global tools like Google or Facebook.
2. We present to these seekers the good news of Jesus Christ. For this, we use websites. A website is essentially global because a language on the Internet can be spoken in many countries. For example, when I started my first website in 1997 (a local church website), my first contact was from Brazil, although I was in France!
3. We connect people online. We connect them to people from their own country and, if possible, from their city. Every step is done through the Internet, but in the end, people are connected to local Christians.
4. We invite them to connect offline, to drink coffee together, go to a church, etc.