First let’s deal with the fact; over the last fifty years the church has grown at an amazing rate around the world. Places in Africa and Asia which were once considered unevangelised mission fields now have significant Christian populations. Not only that, but there are new mission movements developing in these places. It is important to remember that despite this massive growth of the church, there are still many places where there are almost no Christians.
So now on to the hypothesis. It is my suspicion that despite the growth of the Church in many parts of the world, the geographical spread of missionaries sent out from the UK has not changed in the last fifty years.
If you put the fact and the hypothesis together you end up with the situation (which I believe we are in) that the British church now concentrates on sending missionaries to places which have been reached by the Gospel, rather than to places where there are very few Christians. This is not a deliberate or planned situation, it has simply crept up on us while the world church has changed, but we have continued to do more or less the same thing.
I need to make a couple of observations at this point. Firstly, I believe that it is perfectly legitimate to send missionaries to support churches in other parts of the world; I just don’t believe that this should be the main focus of our mission work (which I contend it is). Secondly, I know that there are some agencies which do concentrate on sending people to places where there are very few Christians – I just don’t believe that there are enough agencies like this, or that they get the profile they need.
Of course, the big problem with this post is that my hypothesis is unproven. In the absence of any hard evidence either for or against it, I’m pretty sure that it is correct, but it would be good to have proof. So, I’d like to finish this short post with a plea for some help. Does anyone know of a source for information on the geographical distribution of British missionaries over the last one hundred years?
Somewhere along the line, this short blog post turned into a slightly longer article on Christian Today.
61 replies on “A Fact and A Hypothesis”
Fascinating hypothesis. I look forward to your findings.
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I crunched some stats from Operation World showing you are correct. See http://www.syzygy.org.uk/is-it-time-to-move-on/ for details. However I don’t think it’s just lethargy. The places we send people are easy, safe(ish) and have accessible languages. Risk averse agencies operating in a litigious world are reluctant to take the risks of sending people to places where they will probably get killed.
A couple of things; OW stats may be the best we have, but I’m not convinced that they are accurate. I’d love to know of something more scholarly and solid. I agree that fear of litigation may be an issue (though in work with mission agency board, I’ve not heard this expressed), but I think inertia is a far bigger one!
Tim, good point, Didn’t David Platt say recently that the reason these places are unreached is because all the easy places are already taken?
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http://globalfrontiermissions.org/gfm-101-missions-course/state-of-the-world-the-task-remaining/
The link doesn’t work? Does it have figures for the deployment of UK missionaries?
It should link now – but that’s US figures from Gordon Conwell and Frontier Ventures US Center for World Mission Studies. I would expect to see similar stats from the UK.
I’d be very interested to find UK stats – where are we sending people – As you know OMF, are highlighting the Task Unfinished – we’re trying locally and globally to work out how to highlight the focus shift that needs to take place. I’ll ask around our people. Would Justin Long have come across any UK based figures? Do Global Connections have a go-to person for research?
I’m not sure how well US and UK figures do correlate because of the differing colonial histories of the two countries. They will be similar, but there will also be some significant differences, too.
I suspect that I am the Global Connections go-to person. However, my experience of trying to get good information out of mission agencies doesn’t encourage me to take this on as a project. Tim, has highlighted the figures from Operation World, but I don’t know how robust they are and they don’t provide a snapshot from, say, 50 years ago.
I’ll check out Tim Herbert’s Syzygy Missions Support Network link, also, on the US side, there are some umbrella movements (Issachar Initiative (www.FinishingTheTask.com) and http://dayfortheunreached.org/#orgs who are trying to highlight these areas.
I’m allergic to anyone who talks about mission as a ‘task’ and even more allergic to anyone who talks about ‘finishing’!
I get why ‘task’ and ‘finishing’ makes you a little itchy but take an antihistamine and check out the site. “In 2006, FTT identified 639 unreached, unengaged people groups with populations above 100,000. Since then, church planting is now reported in over 568 of these original people groups.”
I don’t suppose most of those involved would consider mission ‘done’ once work is started but inspired by the idea that there are places where few others have gone high profile and low profile organizations have been training and equipping people to go both from the traditional big senders and cross culturally within countries.
Eddie Arthur – that sounds like a project that a few agencies would be interested in (probably OMF OMF International – UK – I work for the International Team but based from the UK office). I guess the problem is extracting information for research like this from agencies who primarily send to reached places?
How would you frame the challenge?
Eddie Arthur I don’t think they’re robust, and of course they’re already out of date, but they’re probably the best UK figures. However I agree with you, I hear of more mission workers going to Zambia/Uganda etc than e.g. Tajikistan and that’s not only because of the security of going to a CAN.
Would this be better as a Skype call? We might make more progress>
?
Tony Waghorn Try this for starters on ‘finishing’ language https://www.kouya.net/?p=6331
Molly Wall, Jason Mandryk, can you help Eddie?
I don’t have the time to get into a research project like this. I think it would make an excellent MA dissertation (or even a doctorate), but getting the data out of agencies would be like pulling teeth.
Eddie Arthur I’m sorry – I haven’t been to a Theological College – digesting that comment may take some time!
try this instead, Tony. Less eruidite, but it makes a similar point: https://www.kouya.net/?p=1506
Eddie Arthur But what level data would be ‘good enough’ to make progress (in the church, idividuals thinking), and is it a combination of data, missio dei thinking & ? that will help.
I can handle less erudite.
There are over a hundred sending agencies in the UK, not to mention church streams which send missionaries without reference to an agency or GC. To be robust, we’d need to have figures from a significant number these groups. We’d also need to be sure that those responding included some of the larger sending groups – and often those groups are not the people you expect.
In OMF’s thinking is that “the main challenge is not
getting the numbers right, but a call to holiness so that we may be fit for God’s purpose.”
Absolutely! The numbers are the easy bit!
We are doing this (and partnering to focus) under the banner of “The Task Unfinished” so sorry, but we do have history with that song! I hope that the rest of the material that goes alongside the headline will deepen understanding for personal prayer and renewal towards disciple making.
Eddie Arthur The other key question which you infer in another post, is; What are those workers are doing in those countries? Working in already strong churches, pioneering, partnering, training leaders, encouraging indigenous mission?
Actually, I would have thought the network Eddie’s working with would be the one to have this data. Workamong data is hard to come by these days!
I feel very strongly there’s a need for an open data movement in the missionary community: this kind of missiological data needs to be published in forms that allow and facilitate reuse and research. I remember buying a statistical report about the state of mission in Japan, and having to copy the numbers by hand from tables in a password-protected PDF. And world mission statistics are not much better: curating information from GMI / OpWorld / Joshua Project / etc. is like pulling teeth – not statistician friendly at all!
Eddie Arthur I took your reservations on board (as Patrick Fung has shown concern too) in a recent publicity piece. I hope it raises awareness of what needs to be done, along with prayerful dependence on God.
First, I don’t think your hypothesis is either surprising or new. Since when has the Western world sent more people to unreached groups rather than to reached groups? Not for as long as I’ve been around, I don’t think! This has been a sore point and a weakness of the Western church for a long time.
Second, the “unreached first” approach may not be quite as bad as it looks. Given that the worldwide church has grown, that many of the newer churches are arguably culturally and linguistically much closer to the unreached areas than the Western church is, and that many of these newer churches are very missions-oriented, it stands to reason that the Western church in fact should focus on training and equipping the worldwide church for evangelism and discipleship, rather than focus on doing it ourselves as we have in the past. I don’t see reaching the unreached as a zero sum game where the Western church has to grab as many as it can, but a collaborative effort where churches around the world contribute whatever talents God has given them.
Though you are old, Ruedi, you are not that old! Any significant change in the deployment of missionaries would predate your career, but we don’t have the data to prove it one way or another.
I am sympathetic, but not wholly convinced about your second paragraph. I think that there are times when distant outsiders do make better advocates for the Gospel than people who are relatively local. I also wonder to what extent British missionaries working with the ‘reached’ are training people for cross-cultural ministry.
I’d have to go through some old, long left behind cupboards, but I do remember that when we started out 35 years ago, “reaching the unreached” and the unreached “10/40 window” were big buzz words. And they came with all kinds of statistics documenting the abysmal track record of the western church in that regard.
There are lots of anecdotal statistics and things in the US are pretty well documented, but I’m not aware of anything robust and diachronic that describes the situation from a UK standpoint (and that’s where I work, these days).
One BIG problem I foresee is finding data to support the argument that missions are sending to non-evangelised areas mainly because these are extremely sensitive areas. If the countries get wind of the fact missionaries are in their countries, then visas will get withdrawn and possibly workers will get imprisoned. The mission I work with cannot promote the work they are doing because of the sensitivity of countries they are working in. If missions are working in evangelised areas then it will probably be fine to publicise the data. Unfortunately I think this hypothesis will be unproven.
As a worker overseas, I am impressed with many (not all) of the mission organisations and the many unsung heroes working in extremely difficult situations for the sake of the gospel.
You are right that getting hold of the data would be difficult for security reasons. However, there is a more fundamental problem in getting hold of any serious data about mission personnel, in that agencies tend to be too busy to respond in a meaningful way to data collection.
I would have said exactly the same bit you beat me to it.
Great question. It raises so many issues. I’s be up for a small group of us meeting up to explore this question and to think through/ plan a way forwards (whatever that might look like)
I’ll have a chat with Martin Lee and see what he says, if he want’s to make it a priority, I’m happy to make it happen.
Let me know if I can help in any way. I’ll ask around the UK leadership.
Peter gets these posts by email, so he’ll be aware of it overnight.
There may be some help in Todd Johnson & Ken Ross (eds) Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). In Part V, on Christian Mission, has a section on “Missionaries Sent and Received, 1910–2010”, and a sub-section on Europe, pp. 272-5 (roughly) with an essay by Kirsteen Kim. So, not Britain specifically, but it might be illuminating all the same.
Today’s blog post is getting a lot of attention and is getting in the way of my prep for @bangorworldwide https://t.co/cECcmvOZjE
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Eddie, I suspect your hypotheses is right, though like you I have only anecdotal, or observational data.
Looking at missions history, it’s always about going to the most easily accessible first (Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. The really sad bit is that the vast majority of Christian workers don’t even leave their home country, much less make it to the easy mission fields.
If you look at missions history, they formed all those Inland missions, after the coastal countries were reached.
Then in Africa, to still have a preponderance of work among Anglophone countries par rapport aux pays francophone (and French isn’t that hard for English speakers to learn).
Then comes the Muslim ones and Arabic speaking as well as high risk.
Like others I don’t have adequate data to allow either an affirmation or denial of the hypothesis. However, askign the right question is always important, and I am less than sure that asking a question about ‘place’ only is the most helpful in today’s world. It risks being a bit old paradigm, tied a colonial, ‘colouring in the map’ view of Gospel progress.
It seems to me that ‘social spaces’ are as important as ‘places’. The least reached communities in today’s world may be co-located in space with reached communities, but hidden behind barriers of social distance such that the members of those communities live and die without hearing of Christ.
Such a reflection has biblical warrant. The Book of Acts sets out Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the world as place-type markers of Gospel advance, but the Pentecostal punctuations in Jerusalem, Cornelius’ home and Ephesus seem to mark out the crossing of religious/social space-type barriers as another metric of Gospel advance. Both are needed.
Thoroughly agree, Keith. and I’ve addressed that issue in other blog posts. But you can only say so much in 500 or so words.
OK, but suggesting that the UK missions movement may be going in the wrong direction, demands that we are reasonably certain of our compass calibration. The detail matters. To be honest I am not as pessimistic as the blog is about what the Lord is doing through those he is calling in and from the UK. But I can’t fill out that thesis in the few words that a blog response allows 😉 .
I never said that the detail doesn’t matter. However, I would never write anything if every blog post were expected to cover every possible angle. I try and cover details in different posts; it’s both easier for the reader (most of whom aren’t mission professionals, like you) and it makes blogging a realistic possibility. It’s somewhat ironic that you say that I’m promoting an old paradigm, while at the same time failing to understand a new medium.
However, if you think I’m wrong and don’t have the space for a comment (I allow comments up to a thousand words, so I’m not entirely sure that your point is valid), I’d very happily give you space to write a longer article.
Thanks for the point (accepted even if not proven) which encourages us to do more to reach the unreached. But I agree with those who point out that we can and should be involved in mobilising and training the newer churches to reach the unreached. I am familiar with many indigenous mission agencies, denominational and interdenominational, particularly in Africa. Thank God for them, but they are very short of trainers and resources in their Schools of Mission. This is a wide open door for Western missionaries to be involved. The Seminaries and Bible colleges (plentiful among the reached) are also short of teachers and books AND surprise surprise (like ours here) are not always mission-minded. They ignore the unreached who are not their tribe. They miss the marginalised (and thus unreached) even within their communities (especially children, special needs children, students). So missions while taking opportunities to shift personnel to unreached people groups should at the same time also realise that so-called reached areas still need missionaries who will be aware of the unreached and involved in mobilising, training, resourcing and teaming up with a far bigger and far more effective task force than we could ever have if we head off alone to pastures new.
Absolutely!
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RT @kouya: A Fact and A Hypothesis: The world has changed, but I’m pretty sure that our approach to world mission hasn’t … https://t.co/u…
@kouya I suspect you may be right. Also aware our church has mission partners in places that we don’t talk about publicly for their safety..