in the AD 202 Global Monitor
Global evangelization isn’t the only global campaign presently being conducted. Many secular organizations have their own global causes. By examining their successes and failures, we can learn new techniques to help us in our own Commission. The campaign against polio is a case in point.
Polio, also called infantile paralysis, is a highly infectious viral disease that chiefly affects children. In its acute form, it can cause paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformity and death. There is no known cure; however, vaccines can prevent the disease and have nearly eradicated it from developed nations. Less developed nations have not been so lucky. 300 million children (about half of all children) have received polio immunizations. In 1985 the World Health Organization began an effort to eradicate polio worldwide by the year 2000, with a projected cost of an additional $500 million. The combined international effort has since reduced the number of polio cases reported worldwide by about 80 percent. They have used a variety of methods, some of which are outlined below.
National Immunization Days. This entails nationwide campaigns to immunize children against polio. Examples of success include China (83 million children), Bangladesh (18 million), Indonesia (19 million) and Thailand (6 million). In 1995, a December 9 National Immunization Day in India saw 82 million children vaccinated. In order to achieve maximum coverage of the more than 650,000 villages in India, around 500,000 vaccination posts were set up strategically throughout the country, involving some 2 million national health workers who administered two drops of OPV to children irrespective of their previous immunization record. This campaign was repeated on January 20, and will be repeated another two times in 1996 and 1997.
Operation MECACAR. Over a period of 3 months, 18 countries in the Middle EAst, Caucasus and Central Asian Republics immunized 56 million children. During the campaign, heavy fighting was briefly halted to allow “immunization truces” in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Iran mobilized 500,000 members of its Islamic Youth Organization to carry out the vaccinations. In other countries, immunization was carried out despite having the health infrastructure almost totally destroyed by war. In Sri Lanka, heavy fighting was stopped for eight hours to permit vaccination of 1.6 million infants.
Six Steps to Free Africa. A new program will involve 25 African countries in an immunization campaign which will cover some 80 million children in 1996. Despite Africa’s widespread lack of advanced medical technologies, its predominantly rural and poor population, its low economic development and its lack of infrastructure, it is still possible to run a campaign which will eradicate a killer disease–if outsiders care enough to invest the manpower and money in the cause. An identical parallel confronts us and our readers as Great Commission Christians. Much of Africa has already been evangelized: but there are still many World A peoples in the region. Will we invest the time, money and manpower to adequately research, evaluate and engage these peoples?
What are the results? Despite these enormous programs, as many as 100,000 new cases of polio still occur each year in 67 polio endemic countries–primarily in Asia and Africa. Bangladesh, India and Pakistan together account for two-thirds of all polio cases reported annually worldwide. An additional US$500 million is needed to eradicate the disease by the turn of the century; it wilol be the second global disease after smallpox to disappear. Financial savings accruing from polio eradication are expected to exceed $1.5 billion per year.
Here are some lessons we can take to heart:
1. Global campaigns must comprehend and communicate the problem. WHO uses verifiable, thoroughly researched statistics and measurements of progress in every paragraph of every communication. This communicates to the reader the full scope of the task remaining, the progress made, and the amount of effort needed to reach the goal.
2. Global campaigns must be committed to the cause. Countries are less open to global evangelization than to immunization; still, the examples demonstrate that large populations (like those of China and India) are not insurmountable obstacles. National Immunization Days can be compared to Every Home for Christ’s Every Home Crusades, DAWN’s Saturation Evangelism strategies, and Campus Crusade’s “Jesus Film” programs. When these unite to canvass a country, the results can be enormous. If today’s present evangelistic megaplans were to join together and focus their combined resources on restricted access nations, they could find innovative approaches which could lead to similar results.
Likewise, while Muslim nations are highly unlikely to stop civil warfare in order to permit Christians to evangelize them, warfare and civil unrest–like large populations–are not insurmountable obstacles. Numerous Christian humanitarian relief organizations have demonstrated an ability to carry on full-scale work in war-torn areas like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Somalia.
3. Global campaigns must be built on cooperation. The polio campaign is marked by serious planning and cooperation by several agencies who have a common cause. Christians need similar cooperation. While we probably will not see complete cooperation within the whole Church, it is negligent on our part if our particular agency is not working in tandem with at least three others (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
If Christians everywhere were to implement these lessons we would see an exponential multiplication of effort and results. As we grew to understand these lessons better, and found new ways of implementing them, we would easily see the task finished in the next generation. Unless we embrace these lessons, world evangelization will continue to travel with its present stagnant energy, held up by numerous large and looming problems until closure around AD 2050, by which time half a billion more people on earth will have died never having heard the gospel of Christ.
UPDATE 2010: at present, closure by 2050 is an impossibility given current trends.
Comments on this entry are closed.