Not long ago I posted an entry under the title of May I Rant a Bit in which I raised some questions about the ‘unreached people groups’ paradigm in missions. Today I came across an article, “Metrics of Missions: Measuring Faithfulness and Fruitfulness” by Justin Long (The Mission Exchange 2010:3:4-5). The following quotes are related to how we set our priorities in mission, and come under the heading “Measuring Obedience” in the article.
“Yes, the whole church is to bring the whole gospel to the whole world, as effectively as possible. Yet no organization can do this on its own, and we shouldn’t expect them to. Every organization has some level of specialization: a specific task or calling. I call this an organization’s “plausible promise,” and no statistic, no piece of research, no factoid will tell you what it should be.
What makes orphans any more worthy of ministry than seniors? or atheists in Europe any less deserving than Muslims in North Africa? I argue people in Europe have more opportunity to hear, but that shouldn’t determine the plausible promise of a specific ministry. It can only be determined by listening for God’s voice and obeying it.”
For more on this subject, see the last issue of Mission Frontiers. The entire issue focuses on the current validty of the ’unreached people groups’ concept, partly in reaction to some questions raised by the late Paul Hiebert. (As an aside, I was fortunate to have Dr. Hiebert on my doctoral dissertation committee more than twenty years ago).
So, if every mission organization is concerned primarily about a specialty then it is possible to walk by the sick, the hungry, the hurting on our way to announcing the Kingdom of God in our own narrowly defined specialization?
The glaring weakness to the unreached people group approach has been that the most zealous have been able to ignore a world of need while engineering the latest statistics to show what the church should be doing now. While many of us have found the emphasis on unreached peoples a helpful paradigm, it is time to come back toward a more holistic approach. Yes, reaching the unreached is still the priority but not to the exclusion of the other ministry needs that come into focus along the way.
If we are to be biblical Christians then we must follow the example of Jesus in all areas of ministry. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. That was and is the primary goal of the work of the church. But he also commanded the church to “teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” While doing social action type ministries is not an excuse for ignoring the unreached, neither is a focus on unreached an excuse for ignoring the glaring human needs that exist in our world today.
We need to do away with the totally false, and bordering on heresy, of social action vs. evangelism.
We need a careful exegesis of Rev. 7:9 to determine the true meaning in the context of the Revelation of John.
Question: The church is commissioned to think globally regardless when the Lord returns. The phrase in Rev. 7:9 is a stress on the global community but not necessairly saved from every single nation that has ever existed since the first century. What does John intend?