Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission

Transcription

1 Chapter 1 Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission Clicking through the Slides Capturing this snapshot of mission around the world involves asking a few basic questions. Really, several pictures are related but different kind of like a View-Master. If you are too young to remember the chunky red viewing toy with the slot-machine-like arm on the side to make it work, let us give you a brief tutorial. You take a plastic disc (a few usually came with the viewer), and insert it into the top of the View-Master. Along the entire outside edge of these discs were small film windows. As you pull down the plastic arm while looking through the lenses, you click through the slides and see each picture up close. Each slide related to the others on the disc. (Our favorites were the superhero discs; Spider-Man never looked so cool in a frozen pose.) Though related, the pictures were dif- 9 Transform.indb 9

2 TransforMission ferent, because together they often told a story a story bigger than one frame could contain. In similar fashion, trying to get a respectable grasp on the state of global mission is a much more expansive task than a chapter will allow. In truth, its complexity and gravity prevents it from being fully outlined or distilled in a series of volumes. Our more reasonable hope here is to click through the View-Master with you, looking at just a few slides. The pictures we view will constitute an exploration of, not an exhaustive answer to, these questions: Where are lives being changed through mission? What types of ministry are taking place? Who are these missionaries? Even at this elemental level, God may begin using these statistics, stories, and details of dynamic movements to shape where and how you and your students connect to His mission. We pray that He would shape your vision for mobilizing students as you look at these images. Slide One: Where in the World Recent estimates are indicative of what is going on in the Church and worldwide mission and where these activities are taking place: There are over 700 million Great Commission Christians defined primarily as persons believing in and committed to Christ s Great Commission and the worldwide mission of the Church. Estimates show that Christian believers make up almost a third of the world population, or just over 2,000,000,000 persons. The annual increase is 58.4 million newly evangelized for the first time (160,000 a day). The world population is expanding by 79.4 million per year (287,530 per day). Those unevangelized comprised [sic] 74.6% of the world population in 1800, but by 2007 they... [were] 28% of the global population. If the actual numbers of the unevangelized are evaluated, the picture is somewhat different. There were 674,350,000 in 1800, whereas the projection of those unevangelized in 2025 will be 10 Transform.indb 10

3 Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission 2,156,012,000. These people will comprise [sic] 27.3% of the estimated world population. 1 The Church has grown exponentially over the past two centuries, but the need to walk in faithfulness to the Great Commission has never been more crucial. Believers who are called to this global faithfulness are not confined to one discrete world region. Figure 1.1 indicates where the members of the Church, worldwide, call home. Figure 1.1: The Global Church Population by World Area As these estimates indicate, the mass of the Church has largely moved south. This shift has prompted some missiologists to conclude that initiatives and trend-setting moves will be generated principally from the Southern Church in the years to come. 2 It will take future snapshots to determine the breadth of this effect. Among People Groups In the meantime, trends in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres show that missionaries maintain ways to identify populations that they might engage with the gospel. Over time this classification process has taken different shapes. In recent decades missionaries have established ministries based on the identification of people groups, distinct cultural 1 T. Johnson, Status of Global Mission 2007: An Annual Update, Lausanne World Pulse, n.p. [cited 19 November 2008]. Online: ?pg=all. 2 S. Escobar, The New Global Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), Transform.indb 11

4 TransforMission and/or sociological groupings of which the global populace is composed. 3 The 1982 Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization provided a definition of a people group : For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance. 4 Unreached People Profile Hui of China Population 12,695,000 Hui in China Identity The Hui are an official minority of China. Language The Hui speak standard Mandarin; although, in some locations, Persian and Arabic words have been added to their vocabulary. History By the middle of the seventh century, Arab and Persian traders and merchants traveled to China in search of riches. In addition, in the thirteenth century the Mongols turned people into mobile armies during their Central Asian conquests and sent them to China. Religion Almost all Hui are Sunni Muslims. They worship in thousands of mosques throughout China. Christianity Although there are a small number of scattered Hui believers in China, the Hui are probably the largest people group in the world without a single known Christian fellowship group. The Joshua Project 3 S. Wilson, Peoples, People Groups, in Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, ed. A. S. Moreau (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), The Joshua Project, What Is a People Group?, Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization, n.p. [cited 10 November 2008]. Online: 12 Transform.indb 12

5 Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission This description is helpful because of its emphasis on the twin priorities of seeing the gospel and the Church established among these nations. Among the Unreached Peoples The stark reality is that not all of these groups have equal access to the good news. The Joshua Project, which focuses on the study of people groups and mission, defines an unreached people group as a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group. 5 The situation for the least-reached looks like this: There are approximately 16,453 ethno-linguistic groups in the world. Of these groups, 6,853 are still unreached. The total number of individuals in these groups is 2.67 billion, which makes up 40.2% of the world s population. The single largest unreached group is the Japanese, who are 120,000,000 in number. There are 3,324 Muslim people groups, who are 1,300,000,000 in number. There are 2,714 Hindu people groups, who are 900,000,000 in number. There are 573 Buddhist people groups, who are 375,000,000 in number. Of the 7,216 groups in the 10/40 Window, there are 5,399 which are unreached. These 5,399 groups make up 74.8% of the unreached groups. They include 2.32 billion people. 6 The challenges of governments limiting access, cultural understanding/research, language acquisition, and Bible translation into the various groups languages all make reaching these people both complex and overwhelming. In the area of Scripture translation alone, there are 4,400 languages that have no portion of Scripture available to them. While there are 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 13 Transform.indb 13

6 TransforMission current translation efforts for 1,600 of these, for the other 2,800 languages no one is working on Bible translations. 7 Slide Two: What in the World Bible translation is just one of the many forms that the work of a twenty-first-century missionary might take. Andrew Walls has identified Five Marks of Mission, which are not intended to be exhaustive but do encompass major areas of this cross-cultural ministry: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom. To teach, baptize, and nurture new believers. To respond to human need by loving service. To seek to transform unjust structures of society. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. 8 These expansive veins of mission contain so many ministry types that one agency president indicated that at one time his organization had listed 100 different categories for missionary assignment. 9 The diverse roles that today s agencies and churches are looking to incorporate into their strategy include missionary platforms that are sometimes explicitly tied to churches and ministries as well as some that are more indirectly linked. Gritty issues like poverty, modern slavery, human trafficking, genocide, the AIDS epidemic, hostile governments, and refugee crises are all facing the Church. These realities remind us that we are called to make mission Christ centered and gospel oriented. This requires engaging the whole person, in the totality of his circumstances, with the eternal hope of our great God and His transforming gospel. 10 Many agencies, churches, and individual believers are clearly envisioning and endorsing multiple ways to do just that. 7 Ibid. 8 A. Walls and C. Ross, eds., Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), xiv. 9 J. Rankin, To the Ends of the Earth (Nashville: B&H, 2006), D. Carson, Conclusion: Ongoing Imperative for World Mission, in The Great Commission, ed. M. Klauber and S. Manetsch (Nashville: B&H, 2008), Transform.indb 14

7 Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission Slide Three: Who in the World Since there are so many different manners of involvement, there must also be a diverse group of people who are answering the call to serve. Our picture would be incomplete if we did not take a brief look at these people who are investing in cross-cultural relationships, places, and ministries. The Missionary Force Of the total foreign missionary force, 249,000 are men and 209,000 are women. 11 These include not only missionaries from North America and Europe but also scores of those serving through Third World mission organizations. There are estimated to be hundreds of such sending vehicles across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 12 The ages of these missionaries vary, with many beginning their service as young adults. 13 These new recruits are, generally, recent graduates from colleges, universities, graduate schools, or seminaries that have been equipped for ministry and are seeking to use this preparation in crosscultural settings. There is also a trend among some agencies and churches toward identifying opportunities that enable older adults to use their career skills overseas. The Finishers Project, for example, makes mobilizing the boomer generation an objective. 14 Connecting Motive and Mission There are also scores of different motives pushing students, recent graduates, and older adults to plug into mission. Some of these motivations are related to certain brands of mission philosophy. For example, some may have a deep drive to free child slaves in India that causes them to join International Justice Mission, while others may long to see churches planted among tribal peoples in Papua New Guinea, which leads them to connect with ministries like New Tribe Mission or To Every Tribe Ministries. Ministries like these, as well as many others, facilitate opportunities for individuals looking to act on specific ministry passions. 11 Johnson, Status of Global Mission J. Reapsome, The Next Generation of Innovators, in Innovation in Mission, ed. J. Reapsome and J. Hirst (Atlanta: Authentic, 2007), S. Shadrach, The Fuel and the Flame (Atlanta: Authentic, 2003), See Vision in Finishers Project, n.p. [cited 18 November 2008]. Online: 15 Transform.indb 15

8 TransforMission There is, however, an essential drive toward biblical service that should undergird the motives of even these worthy causes. The principal motive for mission should be that God s glory be seen, that He be worshipped, and that these things take place among every people group on the earth. Preaching to a missionary society in colonial America more than 200 years ago, Jonathan Edwards argued that the glory of God, a regard to his honor and praise in the spread of the gospel, ought to be the governing motive in all missionary exertions and the animating principle in the breast of missionaries. 15 Sifting all that is done through this evaluative filter can clarify what we are intending as our outcome in mission. Length of Term This desire to further God s glory was a driving force behind William Carey s decision to leave everything and go. Carey went to India with no expectation of returning home frequently, partly because at that time the ability to travel back and forth with ease did not exist. Modern travel has changed that forever. Even many career missionaries who go overseas for a lifetime come back on home assignment at regular intervals and in some cases speak to family and friends almost daily, using video communication programs that are now readily available. This means that definitions of, and options for, timeframes deployed to the field have changed. Long-term, or career, missionary service usually applies to any period of two or more years in length. Any term that is between three months and two years is generally labeled mid-term, although some organizations and missiologists categorize these as short-term. 16 Short-term trips can be characterized as any trip that is three months or less. These designations are only basic guidelines because deployment terms and expectations are established by each agency or church. 17 Some organizations and churches use these different levels as progressive steps to what they hope will be longer seasons of service. As conceived, the tiered approach will get someone involved in mission at the entry level and, progressively, facilitate movement through the next steps. Advocates of this approach believe that such exposure helps the new missionary to see firsthand what life is like on the mission field and enables 15 J. Edwards, To the Glory of God, in Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity, ed. N. Thomas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995), R. Blue, Evangelism and Missions (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), R. Peterson, Innovation in Short-Term Mission, in Innovation in Short-Term Mission, ed. J. Reapsome and J. Hirst (Atlanta: Authentic, 2006), Transform.indb 16

9 Holding the View-Master: The Where, What, and Who of Global Mission the sending agency or church to determine if the missionary demonstrates the ability to be successful during longer periods of deployment. Some organizations, however, mobilize exclusively for short-term mission. Many of these agencies coordinate opportunities for students and adults from local churches. The intention, many times, is to grant participants baseline exposure to mission while encouraging greater global awareness and involvement as a result. Looking at Their Pictures Looking at these slides of the present can help us be realistic about who we are, what we are to be, and where we want to go. The people inhabiting this global environment will change before we can even finish this sentence; they will grow in number in some places and decline in others. The places and peoples will be different tomorrow than they are today due to progress, revolution, and sometimes devastation. If we are going to get students involved in this mission now, we need to anticipate these changes, by first gaining a sense of their foundation in mission, and then implementing designs that will challenge them to missional attitudes, thoughts, and informed actions. Discussion Questions Describe the state of the Church today in terms of its reach. Detail the spread of the gospel throughout the earth. What are some of the various types of ministry opportunities that exist on the mission field? What should the Christian s motive be for participating in missions? When reading the statistics in the chapter, were you surprised in any way? If so, by what? Were you moved to reconsider your present and future involvement in missions? 17 Transform.indb 17