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  • Justin Long 9:00 am on November 16, 2018 Permalink |  

    Another view of people groups 

    Looking at the Joshua Project’s catalog of people groups, here’s two different views.

    The first is by JP’s own internal levels. These are based on % Evangelical (Ev) and % Christian of all kinds (C).

    • Level 1 (Unreached, Ev<=2%, C<=5%): 7,075 groups = 3.1 billion (41% of world)
    • Level 2 (Minimally reached, Ev<=2%, C>5%,<=50%): 1,213 groups = 294 million (3.8% of world)
    • Level 3 (Superficially reached, Ev<=2%, C>=50%): 1,774 groups = 534 million (7.0% of world)
    • Level 4 (Partially reached, Ev 2% to 10%): 3,726 groups = 1.9 billion (25% of world)
    • Level 5 (Significantly reached, Ev >10%): 3,224 groups = 1.7 billion (22% of world)

    Careful note: these are the populations of the groups at the stage. Within each of these levels are varying numbers of believers. For example, I estimate based on JP data that Level 1 (Unreached) contains some 16 million Christians and 5 million evangelicals. But, as we might expect, the vast majority of believers and evangelicals are found at Levels 4 and 5.

    Now, by contrast, I’m experimenting with a different approach these days, based in part on some of Hans Rosling’s (posthumously published) work in Factfulness. Using 5 stages based on % Christian of all kinds:

    • Stage 0 (0.0% Christian, none known): 4,107 groups = 755 million (9% of world)
    • Stage 1 (<2% Christian): 2,295 groups = 2.1 billion people (28% of world)
    • Stage 2 (2% to <8% Christian): 1,194 groups = 374 million (4.9% of world)
    • Stage 3 (8% to <32% Christian): 1,742 groups = 1.7 billion (22.5% of world)
    • Stage 4 (32% to <90% Christian): 4,917 groups = 1.6 billion (21.6% of world)
    • Stage 5 (90% and up): 2,757 groups = 963 million (12.6% of world)

    I use this latter appraoch because it’s somewhat simpler and relies on a doubling of the percentages, which lends itself well to tracking exponential growth.

    It is interesting to me that in either approach, there is a ‘dip’ between the ‘very unreached’ (Level 1 for JP, and Stage 0/1 for my system) and the ‘more reached’ (level 4/5 for JP, and Stage 3 and up for me).

    In the JP system, Level 2 (Ev<2%, C>5%) is the smallest, with a population of 294 million. In mine, Stage 2 (2% to 8% C) is the smallest by far, with a population of 374 million.

    What to make of this? One theory of mine: once a people group has the gospel, it tends to progress rapidly to higher levels of % Christian. Another theory: we put a lot of work into groups that have the gospel, to ‘bring them up’ to higher levels of % Christian, while Stage 0/1 languish.

     

  • Justin Long 10:27 am on November 2, 2018 Permalink |  

    Counting Movements 4: goal posts 

    In the last two posts, we talked about counting small movements and small portions of movements, as well as counting larger representative chunks of movements. One way of attempting to verify these counts is to use a different lens, where we look at the geographic and ethnographic contexts of the movement. The way I usually do this is to think in terms of a playing field and goal posts.

    Here’s a hypothetical scenario: someone tells me there is a movement happening in the United States. My next question is going to be: where in the United States? It’s a big country, but there are 50 states. My source now tells me that the movement is mostly in Texas and a little bit in Oklahoma.

    I now have “two goal posts”: I know the movement must be bigger than 1 person, and must be smaller than the combined populations of Texas (28.3 million) and Oklahoma (3.9 million). The next step is to start moving these goal posts closer to each other.

    Are they in particular counties? Perhaps they are in the Dallas Metroplex (7 million) and blending over into southern Oklahoma (Bryant county (46,000). The maximum size of the movement is, therefore, likely not more than 7 million.

    I can then begin asking questions about where in the Metroplex the movement is, and move the goal posts yet further. Some places have geographic organizations: provinces, districts, sub-districts, villages. Each of these have different order of magnitudes in terms of population. We can begin asking local experts questions like: “So, how widely distributed are churches in these movements? One per district? One per sub-district? One in every village?” These kinds of questions can get us to rough percentages of the populations.

    While these rough percentages and populations won’t be very precise censuses, they should be within the same order of magnitude as what’s being reported elsewhere.

    We can further use this to begin comparing the generally known % Christian of each of these places with what we are learning about the movements. I am presently using four categories (Stage 1, <2%; Stage 2, 2% to <8%; Stage 3, 8% to <32%; Stage 4, >32%). Places in each of these four categories are generally similar to each other the world over. Movements can be “less visible” in some places, but if a movement were to “tip” a place from one stage to another, it would be slightly more visible because that place would start to take on the characteristics of the next stage (e.g. if it was at Stage 2 and tipped to Stage 3, we would start to see some of the frictions of that tipping, even if the movement weren’t as visible because it was still a very small movement).

    Asking these kinds of geographic questions can help us understand the movement better. Some movements “sound” big to us, and we think, “why can’t I see that?” But, if such a movement is geographically dispersed over a large area, or over numerous people groups, it will in fact be far less visible because it’s only a small percentage of certain areas. Parts of the Bhojpuri movement in India – one of the largest in the world – are well over 10 million in size — but they are often less visible because they are dispersed, and 10 million within Northern India is still a very small percentage. (Plus, of course, much of this movement is underground.)

     

  • Justin Long 10:58 am on October 30, 2018 Permalink |  

    Counting Movements 3: pots, bushes, Sycamore 

    Our yard is home to several different kinds of growing things, ranging from weeds to trees. For the purpose of this post, let me use three things by way of analogy: potted plants, bushes, and the big Sycamore tree in the front yard.

    First are the numerous potted plants that my daughter is pouring time and attention to. She has a large cherry tomato plant, two pepper plants, and two small trees – a blood orange tree, and a lemon tree. All are in pots. (Actually, the tomato plant is dead; last night she replaced it with flowers.) The pepper plants, oddly enough, bore very little fruit during the summer, but as temperatures cooled off in the fall, they started producing–we’ve gotten a number of peppers off both of them. The lemon and the blood orange tree are both in their “childhood.”

    Plants in pots are very controlled. They either (a) bear fruit for a season, and then die, or (b) are nurtured along until they are hardy enough to transplant into the ground. If and when bad conditions come (storms, freezing temperatures), we can move them off the deck and into the garage (or even into the house). We can preserve them through things that would normally kill them–but the very thing that helps them live also means they can’t spread wild over the yard.

    Some churches can treat their small groups like “potted plants”; some movements are treated likewise by the organizations and leaders that wnt to see them grow. They are kept in very controlled environments. If they bear fruit, it’s for a season, and perhaps the fruit is used to start new plants elsewhere (or to add to the “mother church”). Some groups are just for preserving fruit (“community groups” in a lot of Western churches). We watch over them, fret over them, observe each little individual branch, watch for worms and blight, prune them, pluck the fruit and the bad leaves, and so on. They get a lot of our attention, monitoring, and measuring–but the level of care required of every group means they can’t “run wild in the yard.”

    Our backyard is also home to some runaway hedges. In the front, we’ve been pretty good about them. Once or twice a year we go through them with a power hedge trimmer and cut all the extraneous branches off. We don’t let them run amok: we carve them down to nice, solid, dense little rectangles. We gather up all the branches and toss them away. But the hedges in the back – well, there’s a small group of them that I didn’t bother to trim one year, and they grew and grew. The next year, they were “too big for me to trim back”–so they grew and grew some more. Now they are essentially small trees. If I tried to trim them down, I’d probably kill them – so I just leave them. They shade the house, so they’re fine where they are.

    Some collections of small groups in some movements are like these hedges. Left alone, they’re not going to “run rampant” all over the yard like dandelions. They’re going to grow to a typical and certain size, and they’re probably not going to get much bigger than that. Some movements have called these “palm trees.” They count leaders, assuming each network started by a leader will be like these hedges–they will grow to a certain size (whether it be 100, 1,000, or 10,000 believers) over a certain time period. Knowing what leaders “do,” they They concentrate more on raising up leaders than on the specific numbers. Numbers change constantly, anyway, until these “palm trees” or “hedges” reach a certain threshold and level off. This leads to round numbers that are in the right order of magnitude and a leader-focused strategy.

    Finally, our front yard is home to a towering Sycamore tree. This thing is huge. It’s far and away taller than our house. If you’re going to trim it, ideally you bring in a locally-owned tree-trimming company–guys that are braver than me, who will scale the tree with power tools and trim the right branches. If the tree ever toppled, it would destroy the house. (Thankfully I think the odds of that are pretty slim.) It’s a beautiful sight to behold: an awesome reminder of what things can grow into, given enough time.

    These trees remind me of what church planting movements, too, can grow into–given enough time. Most movements in the world today are just a few years old. Some are not much more than tomato bushes or potted trees. Others are like the hedges: they’re a bit taller than the house, but nowhere near a massive sycamore. A few are enormous, in the millions of members, with decades of experience.

    Sycamores, it’s true, don’t “fill up the yard” like grass. But they do dominate a space, and for the purposes of our analogy sycamores do one thing that potted plants and hedges don’t: they put out seeds, that float on the wind. Admittedly, my family and I are not especially enamored with the seeds from our front yard: these little bits of puff-and-fluff get into everything. But it is amazing to consider: thousands of sycamore trees are found within each these little puff that each sycamore puts out. Sycamores are sycamore-starters. And that’s what the biggest, most established movements are.

    Once these movements get to a certain size, it becomes almost impossible to measure the exact scope of the movement. How would you count the leaves on a sycamore tree? You could, but it might be more productive to count the number of sycamore trees in a forest or the average number of seeds a sycamore puts out. That would give you a stronger sense of what’s coming.

     

  • Justin Long 11:22 am on October 29, 2018 Permalink |  

    Counting Movements 2: grandparents to grandchildren 

    When movements are very small – that is, they are five generations or smaller in size – they can be fairly easy to count. You can even track the generations on a big piece of paper or a computer spreadsheet.

    A simplistic diagram might look like:

    Now, in reality, if I saw a movement that diagrammed out like this, I’d be suspicious – it’s “too perfect.” Movements are messy, and are very rarely (and only randomly) exactly like this. But this illustrates the point: a set of churches can be diagrammed on a page. Globally, the average is about 15 to 18 per group; so we could round to 20 and say this diagram represents between 250 and 300 people.

    We can know a lot about this group: the names of the leaders of the groups, the locations of the groups, when they meet, and so on. It’s not likely we’d know all the people in the group–once you get past 150, it’s not easy to hold that kind of information in one’s head–but it is possible to track this on a regular basis.

    This kind of graph can also be the ‘nucleus’ of a larger movement: that is, movements are made up of smaller “4 generation” collections. We can track these “families” within larger extended families; any single individual within the “family” can easily describe his family using five relationships:

    These are “spiritual” relationships (which is why I only identify one parent and grandparent–although obviously your “spiritual parents” might be a couple etc). The point here is that you can articulate who mentors you, and who mentors them – and you can articulate who you mentor and who they mentor. Doing so places you in a “five” generation stream, and brings all of the generations into view. (Some of these relationships will obviously parallel “demographic” or “birth” relationships; some will be purely spiritual.)

    This is one easy way to begin “counting” within a movement. It also brings in an element of “self-assessment”: Anyone who looks “up” and “down” in a demographic family would be able to know where the spiritually mature and spiritually immature are. The same can be said in a spiritual family. And, it begins to introduce the idea of leaving a legacy and generations that are outside your view: great-grandparents won’t always know all of the great-grandchildren; we have to leave the future to God.

    For most movements, this form of “counting” would be enough – many movements are within the scope of this size. In the next post, I’ll look at how we can begin to count tomato plants, bushes and Redwood forests.

     

  • Justin Long 11:53 am on October 25, 2018 Permalink |  

    Counting Movements 1: how we count believers and churches in many denominations 

    One of the questions we have to address in documenting (and even assessing, auditing, evaluating, etc.) movements is how to count the number of people in them.


    Movements are another form of a group of churches–a network or denomination. Movements have some unique characteristics, chiefly around rapid growth. Most would probably never want to be called a denomination, but the term is not entirely without validity.


    The word denomination originated somewhere around the 14th century and comes from the two roots de (“completely”) and nominare (“to name”). A denomination from the mid 15th century was “a class name” or “collective designation of things”; which rapidly became (a) a religious sect (“Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, etc”) and (b) a monetary classification ($20 dollar bills or $100 bills, etc).


    Christian denominations are made up of churches, which are in turn made up of people. How do we count the number of churches and people? It’s not as simple as going from church to church and counting up the number of people “in the church.”


    To begin with, which people within the church count?

    1. Some churches count Sunday morning attendance (“We have about 1,000 people in Sunday morning worship”). The flaw with this method: there can be non-believers in the service, so you’re not getting an exact number of Christians.

    2. Some churches count baptized church members. The challenge with this, in a denomination as a whole, is that some people are baptized and then, for one reason or another, leave the denomination.

    a) they may no longer go to church. It might be a case of backsliding, or it might be a case of advancing age, or it might be a case of a health crisis or some other stage in their life.

    b) they might transfer to a different church, or transfer to a different city, state or country, but not be struck from the membership rolls.

    3. Some churches only count adults, while others count both adults and children. This can lead to a significant difference when comparing two denominations.

    Further, the numbers of members are constantly in flux. New people are being born. New converts are being baptized. Children are becoming adults. Some people die. You can have a more or less “exact” number as of some specific day in some specific year, and 24 hours later that number could very well have changed.

    Some denominations have a specific methodology for taking a count, and they ask their churches to turn in that number as of a specific date of the year. Other denominations have a much more haphazard approach. But the discussion above illustrates why we should never consider “number” so obtained to be very exact, and why we should always be aware of the methodology of counting when comparing one denomination to another. I’m not saying the “numbers” are invalid: we just need to know how they are obtained and what they mean. Some denominations will have to have their numbers adjusted to make for an “apples to apples” comparison (e.g. churches that count only adults will have to be adjusted to compare to churches that count both adults and children).

    Obviously, there are theological implications of these points. As an illustration of such discussions, check this article (I just Googled quickly for it; I’m sure other denominations have other examples).

    The task is yet more complex. Denominations have to count the number of churches, and these, too, change over time. Churches are planted, and churches die. In some cases churches can leave one denomination and join another; in other cases, churches can be disfellowshipped from one part of a denomination, yet remain part of a larger denominational network (e.g. a Southern Baptist church could be disfellowshipped from a State convention, yet retain its name, and remain part of the National denomination). So simply asking ‘how many churches are in the denomination’ is not always a straight-forward thing.

    In movements, this whole process is far more difficult than in many Western denominations, because:

    1. Movements are aggressively growing through outreach. What is the line where a person moves from being a seeker to being a believer? Especially in contexts where baptism might be postponed for a while? In some countries, some groups have a theology that insists only a certain type of minister can baptize people, and this mean that hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of believers are still waiting for baptism. In some movements, there are long periods of time where people are discipled, and their commitment seen before baptism is “offered”; are these people believers even though they have not yet been baptized? Movements have to deal internally with these theological issues.

    2. In many places, there are significant family issues that affect counting. In most Western environments, if the “father” becomes a believer, that doesn’t mean the wife or the children are automatically counted. In other environments, if a Christian woman with children (e.g. perhaps a widow) marries a Muslim man, her children (and often her) are automatically counted as now “Muslim.” If the head of house becomes a Christian, what happens to families? These are thorny issues that impact counts.

    3. Many movements feature “seeker groups” that eventually become “house churches.” What is the line where a “group” becomes a “church”? When do they get counted? Different movements will deal with this in different ways.

    4. Given the enormous numbers of groups/churches being planted through viral reproduction, how do they get counted? When a movement consists of just 4 generations, it’s usually easy to know how many groups there are. When a movement reaches 6th generation or higher, it becomes exponentially more difficult.

    5. Further difficulties arise as churches split (divide-to-multiply), migrate (as people migrate to different areas for work), die (stop meeting for any of a variety of reasons), etc. Tracking all of these popping and moving bubbles of activity is obviously very challenging.

    6. Another issue is security – simply collecting data on lists can be very problematic in some areas.

    Even though movements face big challenges in counting these numbers, we shouldn’t think that they are somehow more challenging or less accurate than Western churches. For the reasons noted above, it’s well known that many Western denominations have difficult counts as well. For an interesting but more academic look at some of the methodological difficulties the Southern Baptists face (and I chose this just because it showed up first on a Google search), see this research paper.

    Counting is a difficult process, but if the basic challenges are understood, they can be methodologically dealt with. Having surveyed some of the issues in this background post, I’ll be writing about some approaches to counting churches in movements over the next few blog posts.

     

  • Justin Long 10:54 am on October 24, 2018 Permalink |  

    Choosing friends 

    I’ve read many posts, articles, and even sections of books on “how to choose one’s friends.”

    Some of these echo back to themes in works like the New Agey-epitome “The Secret”: the “power of attraction” and “surround yourself with positive, uplifting people” and “avoid people who will bring you down.”

    This seems to echo Biblical themes of “seeking wise counselors” and “being with the righteous” and “being part of the fellowship of believers” – but actually, there’s a dark part to “surrounding yourself only with positive people.”

    We tend to equate “positive people” with “prosperity” – health, wealth, happiness, etc.

    If I only surround myself with happy, healthy, wealthy people, what do I do with the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, the sick, the naked, the grieving?

    Dunbar’s Number suggests we can have, at most, about 15 deep relationships (due to time constraints, cognitive load, etc). Some of those relationships are set at birth – they are family members. The remainder need to be chosen with some intentionality.

    These social groupings are important, because we tend to adopt the same patterns as those we associate with. This can be referred to as mirroring, imitation, etc. If you hang out with people who do _X_, you are more likely to do _X_ as well. (For a further example, see “A teen’s friends are a powerful influence“–there’s plenty of other examples in sociological and media literature.) While this can be a powerful force of negativity in our lives, it’s also true that it can be a powerful force for good.

    This plays out in the Gospel, too: Rodney Stark has noted that relationships with believers are the primary factor driving any single individual’s faith: we discover, develop, and then confess the belief that we see modeled in our best friends. If we can’t, then we tend to change friendships. We both seek out those who exemplify what we believe, and we become more like them as well. We walk together on the road, or we choose different paths.

    If we accept this as true, it follows that we must walk with believers – but also encourage nonbelievers to join us. It’s good to walk with people who will lift us up – and also to walk with those whom we can lift. If we surround ourselves only with people further along the road than us, how are we going to ourselves obey the 2 Timothy 2:2 injunction to pass on to faithful people what we have ourselves received; how are we going to obey the communion injunction: “What I have received, I share”; how are we going to obey the Matthew 28 injunction to make disciples?

    2 Timothy 2:2 implies that we will be walking with those we receive from, and those we give to. It runs counter to the idea of only surrounding ourselves with people who lift us up. Let’s not fall for the temptation to justify our desires to disassociate from people who are difficult. To those who are “further on than us,” we may be the more difficult ones – and we wouldn’t want them

     

    • Morgan Wallace 12:16 am on October 31, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This should definitely be submitted to #Relevant Magazine. So many Millennials & beyond need to be reminded of this…

  • Justin Long 9:00 am on October 22, 2018 Permalink |  

    Mission degrees and debt 

    One statistic I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to until recently (and even now I haven’t paid as much attention to it as I should be): the price of an intercultural studies degree.

    One college I just looked at: a B.A. in intercultural studies requires 120 credit hours in all, at an average of $800 to $900 per credit hour. I skimmed several different colleges and, if I’m reading this right, an average cost of $30,000 to $40,000 and up per year is not unusual.

    It can make sense to pursue a degree at those levels if you’re going to graduate and enter into a decent paying job (e.g. non-profit administration, pastoral roles, etc).

    But if you’re thinking of going into missions – and raising support – those levels are obviously a big issue. Especially if you don’t have scholarships or the financial wherewithal to pay them outright, and you are going into debt.

    This is just an opening post on the subject; I’m sure others have written about this to a greater degree. Links to articles or analysis in comments would be welcome.

     

    • tonytsheng 8:59 pm on October 23, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      We are right in the middle of this – our younger daughter is a senior in high school and wants to study international development. Not sure if she is going to go into vocational missions but we’ll see. The price of college makes me queasy.

    • Lorena Wood 1:14 pm on October 26, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Do a search on Missionfrontiers.org website of back issues. I remember Dr. Winter addressing this is the biggest reason, and second, being parents not wanting kids to go to the field as holdbacks to getting people to the field. Check out Bethany University in Bloomington MN. (Formally known as Bethany college of Missions.) They have the best, I believe program focused on graduation debt free and require on the field training. They are Unreached Focused which is where the Church needs to put all their resources (people and money) to bring back the King ASAP.

      • Justin Long 6:43 pm on October 26, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Bethany’s a great college. There are some other similar colleges around. Also, I wonder about undergraduate schools like local community colleges… where grants and the like can be had fairly easily.

    • Beverly Guy 6:17 pm on October 26, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      College debt is frequently a huge concern for those interested in serving through Christar. Last year, it started a project that raises funds toward scholarships for students intending to serve among the least-reached. (See https://www.christar.org/explore/stories/church-planting/clearing-path-getting-workers-least-reached/ and https://www.christar.org/give/projects/mobilization-recruiting/clearing-path-scholarship-fund/.)

  • Justin Long 9:00 am on October 19, 2018 Permalink |  

    There’s no work here. 

    In missions research, I often hear this phrase, especially when I’m talking with someone who’s passionate about their people group: “There’s nothing happening here.”

    It can be a difficult phrase. What does it mean? What do we mean by “nothing” and “happening” and “here”?

    When we say “nothing” do we mean:

    • there’s no movement
    • there’s no response
    • there’s no engagement or team with a strategy
    • there’s no missionary influence here at all
    • there’s no plan to do so

    When we say “happening” do we mean:

    • there’s no comprehensive strategy with ongoing results
    • there’s no fruit being borne
    • there’s not even any ongoing trips or visits into the area

    When we say “here” do we mean

    • amongst the whole of my people group
    • in the particular area where I am working
    • amongst the people I have heard from

    I have found I often know of things “happening” – but perhaps they don’t fit the criteria of “things” the person has, or perhaps they aren’t aware of it. Sometimes person A isn’t told things that persons B, C, and D are doing, even if person A is a well known mission leader or person of influence. Sometimes, what person B, C and D are doing is discounted as either unverified or invalid.

    But I am finding that, often deep under the radar, “something” is happening in many “heres” – and although I still don’t think we are on track (yet) to reach all the peoples or even engage all the peoples and places, this gives me much hope that we might be on a path toward an exponential increase in engagements.

     

  • Justin Long 10:07 am on October 18, 2018 Permalink |  

    Money on missions vs Halloween pet costumes 

    It’s that time of year again – time for a review of what we spend on Halloween vs. foreign missions.

    We spend a lot on dog food, and it’s sometimes compared to what we spend on missions (rightly or wrongly).

    Globally, we spend about $48 billion per year on missions (CSGC figure). I suspect that the US, being the largest sender of missionaries, spends the greatest percentage of that amount.

    Variously, we estimate about 1% of that amount is spent on the unreached (or ~$480 million, or better phrased as half a billion dollars). Some portion of that is obviously donated by Americans, but we don’t know precisely how much. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering alone was $142 million (2017-18), but of course not all of that was for the unreached.

    Americans will, on the other hand, spend about $480 million on Halloween costumes for their pets (new 2018 figure).

    So it does seem that we could legitimately say Americans spend more on Halloween costumes for their pets than they give to foreign missions, for whatever saying that is worth.

     

  • Justin Long 11:53 am on October 11, 2018 Permalink |  

    Every place and people group needs a worker, and a thought about monitoring 

    Romans 10 puts it succinctly:’

    For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?

    Romans 10:13-14

    Every place and people group needs a proclamation of the Good News:

    • Places need distinct voices engaging with their distinct populations. Life-on-life can best (mostly, only) happen when lives are near each other. We cannot easily “one another” each other remotely. Marriages cannot be marriages if people are never near each other; long-distance relationships are difficult because of separations. In the same way, true ekklesia community is personal: it requires regular, in-person relationships.
    • Peoples need distinct voices in languages they understand because (a) the Gospel needs to be understood (I wouldn’t understand the Good News in Russian), and (b) because hearing the Good News in my heart language makes it easier for me to understand and relate to.

    Places that lack an in-place, in-language proclamation need a proclaimer.

    It is best if the proclaimer is a person who shares their language and culture. It is good if at minimum it is a near-culture person who understands the situation. But if no same-culture or near-culture proclaimer is available, then a cross-cultural worker must be sent.

    I believe we should do the hard work of finding the “nearest person” who can be sent, but if no one can be found or it’s going to take years, then we ought not shrink from sending a cross-cultural worker.

    In terms of monitoring, we can over-complicate our databases. Really, the first and most important question is: does every place have a Gospel proclamation that can reasonably be expected to get into every language and to every person within a reasonable period of time (e.g. 10 to 20 years for every individual)?

    Until we can know that about nearly every place, we don’t really need to drill into further detail about any single place.

     

    • Mark Kordic 1:51 pm on October 11, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Reaching the Unreached: First Step is to Speak their LANGUAGE.
      Thanks for summarizing the importance succinctly: “Places that lack an in-place, in-language proclamation need a proclaimer.” “Peoples need distinct voices in languages they understand because (a) the Gospel needs to be understood (I wouldn’t understand the Good News in Russian), and (b) because hearing the Good News in my heart language makes it easier for me to understand and relate to.”

      So, I’m thrilled with the historic illumiNations Bible 2018 conference in Colorado Springs this past weekend featuring 10 of the largest #BibleTranslation agencies (94% of all translation work) where UNITY & GENEROSITY collided. As YouVersion Founder Bobby Gruenewald summarized the impact as “a unified group of Bible agency leaders and an incredible group of resource partners (gathered) with the goal of taking a BIG step forward in ending Bible poverty. More specifically, we are working to see the Bible translated into EVERYone’s heart language by 2033. Think about it…after hundreds of years of people giving their lives toward this goal, we will be the generation that sees it happen…

      There is unprecedented cooperation and coordination among Bible translation agencies as well as technological advancements that make achieving this goal by 2033 possible. The people in this room are ALL IN too and made commitments THIS weekend to give over $37 MILLION to help this 2033 vision become a reality!!! I’m blown away by what God did! 🙌🏼🙌🏼 Can you believe it? This is going to happen! I’ll share more as we go so you can be a part too. #endbiblepoverty

      https://instagram.com/p/BopoLAOgQ8Y/

      #bible #bibletranslation #heartlanguage #youversion #inawe”

      WOW…Do YOU see what I see…massive acceleration in bringing GOOD NEWS of the GOSPEL to multiplied MILLIONS more people very SOON? I’ve spoken with many who were part of this event and they anticipate significant acceleration in their projects in the most difficult areas of the world.

      ILLUMINATION includes: The Seed Company, American Bible Society, Wycliffe Bible Translators USA, Pioneer Bible Translators, Every Tribe Every Nation, Deaf Bible Society, SIL International, United Bible Societies, Lutheran Bible Translators in association with Museum of the Bible.

    • David Pope 6:54 am on October 12, 2018 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Spot on, JL. As much as people need an in-place, in-language proclamation, they also need to be given the ability to develop their translation as their church emerges. The focus should be church formation and multiplication, not bible product. Bible translation should pace church development (proclamation, disciple-making, and leadership development). In the end, do we want to give the emerging church a bible or do we want to give them the power to translate their own Scriptures (quality-assured) so that they also have the ability to steward those Scriptures for decades to come? There should be a full integration of of tool development with church formation.

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