Is any problem too big to tackle? For example, consider:
- 200 million antipersonnel landmines in the world
- Over 1 billion unevangelized people in the world
- Over 170 million alcoholics in the world
- Over 60 million abandoned children and infants (1990)
Whether these problems are too large depends upon the available resources. They are too big for a single individual. Could 200 million people remove the landmines? Yes. Therefore, I theorize: any problem more than 5 levels of magnitude greater in size than the available resources is too big to tackle by those resources alone.
How can such problems be addressed?
1. Stop the problem from becoming worse. We can identify the chief components responsible for the growth of the problem, and attempt to get them to (1) stop causing the problem to grow and (2) start causing the problem to shrink. For example, there are a limited number of countries who actually produce and export landmines. Getting them to STOP exporting landmines is the effort of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (www.icbl.org). The number of people interested in dealing with landmines is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of countries, and this campaign has seen some success. Of course, this works for some problems but not for others. (One would have very little success getting non-Christians to make Christians of non-Christians!)
2. Manage the problem by segmenting it into chunks. For example, you might not be able to do anything about 1 billion unevangelized people, but you could do something about the few thousand unevangelized people in City X. Segmentation is useful when we want to do something TODAY – but only deals with the future as a successive number of “TODAY”s. Segmentation will take a long time to successfully deal with a problem, and it is dependent on the simultaneous success of option #1 (stopping/reducing the problem). If you can’t stop the problem, then segmenting it and managing it on a daily basis tends to institutionalize it.
3. Conquer the problem by seeding a solution that outgrows it. This is the organic approach. First, identify a solution; second, identify a way to build into the solution the means by which it reproduces itself; and third, help it to grow faster than the problem. Here’s an example, using landmines: let’s say you can create a germ that eats landmines. It does this by interacting with the landmine in such a way that it both (a) neutralizes the mine and (b) births another germ. These germs, in turn, eat landmines. The germ only lives a little while – let’s say a day. In this way you could drop the germ into an area where there are landmines, and they would eat all the landmines in the area. Then, when all the mines are gone, the germ would die out. Such a case has three key facets: (1) deals with the problem, (2) reproduces more germs able to deal with the problem, (3) dies out when the task is done (thus doesn’t eat all the landmines stored elsewhere).
Applying this to the unreached:
I have the conviction that it is possible (although not very likely) that we could evangelize and convert the entire world. I don’t think Jesus gave us the Great Commission to mark time. I sincerely believe it is possible the whole world could be converted. If this is the case, then mission should not be about the institutionalization or management of sin. It should be about stopping it through the conversion of mankind.
Therefore, we should be growing the solution–a mission force that has the same three characteristics of my landmine-eating germ: (1) reclaim the lost (dealing with the problem); (2) reproduce more entities able to reclaim the lost, by training new converts as church planters; (3) die out when the task is finished.
Or, to put it another way: evangelization, discipleship, exit strategy.
This was originally published in the Monday Morning Reality Check in 2001. It is just as relevant today!
No related posts.
