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March - April 1998 The Editorial MF Behind the Scenes
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Mission Leaders Agree on the Strategy In March 1982 a group of mission leaders came together in Chicago for a meeting sponsored by the Lausanne Strategy Working Group. It was designed to help bring clarity and definition to the remaining missionary task. At no time before or since this meeting has as large or as representative a group gathered for two days to focus specifically upon the necessary definitions for a strategy to reach the unreached peoples. Two basic definitions came from this meeting: 1. A People Group is “a significantly large grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one another because of their shared language, religion, ethnicity, residence, occupation, class or caste, situation, etc., or combinations of these.” For evangelistic purposes it is “the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” 2. An Unreached People Group is “a people group within which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians able to evangelize this people group.” Don’t be confused by the fact that for certain purposes missionaries also think in terms of both larger and smaller kinds of groups. Larger: “The Han Chinese” refers to Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukien, Swaton, etc., sub-peoples, whose spoken language may be as different from each other as German and Italian. Smaller: Within every people group as defined above, there are no doubt smaller groups that for the purposes of initial evangelism may be highly strategic, such as vocational groups, age groups, etcetera.
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