Editorial Comment
What I’m covering in this editorial:
- De-Westernization, or where do we go with the scary subject of our last issue? That’s the mammoth challenge of expecting new non-Western forms of Biblical faith within Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism which will likely not call themselves Christian.
- What about the “Supplement” to the last issue?
- A marvelous but confusing global map of the world’s peoples—an explanation!
- Many have asked about my wife’s medical condition.
- What happened at our 20th Anniversary Celebration?
- Two books. One about Darwinism and design in nature. One about Jesus—which ties in amazingly with Item #1.
- The upcoming conference on the 146 “Gateway People Clusters” —a true, global first. Too bad we couldn’t have seen the need for this 100 years ago.
Dear Reader,
After the blockbuster issue raised in our last bulletin, should we now go on to something else? But, what in the world could follow that subject?
Wouldn't that be like trying to ignore an elephant in the living room? We can't escape it! That issue is still with us. It is the one subject we cannot brush off or sidestep.
What issue do I speak of? Well, in part, the idea of odd or even heretical movements becoming significant as the global Westernized Christian movement is rapidly stalling before the three major remaining blocs: Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Can heresies have silver linings, becoming orthodoxies tomorrow? Is this going to happen whether we recognize it or not?
Remember the Catholic leaders in Luther's day who devoutly hoped for so many years that Protestantism would fade out of the picture? Well, Protestantism is still a heresy to many Roman Catholics! (And vice versa.)
Here is a thought: Christian spin-offs with real, Biblical vitality don't go away merely by being labeled heresies. But they can change.
Can we live with heresies--or at least unorthodox theologies and emphases--even large, vigorous movements which may even spurn relations with us and our precious Western way of adapting the Bible?
But, just a minute. I don't want to ignore the list of items which I will cover in this editorial--as you see in the box in the next column. I have already started item number one:
Item #1. De-Westernization
What response are we getting from the last issue? One letter only is negative. It misreads the article, "Is an Explosion of Faith Coming to India?" to imply that when a Hindu worshiper reduces the number of household idols he or she then can be considered Christian. The letter asks me to recant that position. Since I cannot imagine even taking such a position, I don't think "recant" is the right word. Furthermore, I did not even write the article.
At the opposite extreme are two letters from world famous missiologists. C. Peter Wagner's warm letter says,
I'm typing this in Japan, stopping over on my way to Thailand. On the plane I read the Sept/Oct issue of Mission Frontiers which you modestly say is the most important issue of Mission Frontiers ever published. I agree! The information in that one issue rivals the information contained in any one missiological textbook I know of (possibly excluding McGavran's Understanding Church Growth) in potential implications for completing the Great Commission….
This matter is worth giving it time. If there is anything I can do to help move this innovation through the early adopter stage (where most of the flack will come) let me know.
Roger Greenway wrote:
I found the article, "Is an Explosion of Faith Coming to India?" in the Sept/Oct Issue to be fascinating. Let me explain why.
In 1960 I was flying on a DC-3 from Sri Lanka, where my wife and I were missionaries, to Madras, India. I was seated next to an American who was doing research on the subject of the "secret Christians" of India. He said that the amount of data he had uncovered far exceeded his expectations…
He claimed that the number of secret believers exceeded the number of church members…
They were people like "Rajan" in the article. They accepted the supremacy of Christ and the authority of the Bible, and met in small, secret groups for prayer and fellowship…
If back there in 1960 the researcher was even partially correct in his estimates…how many (secret believers) exist today? In the providence of God, the title of the article may be closer to the truth than we realize.
Other letters have enriched our understanding, and are mentioned in the Supplement (next item).
Item #2. The De-Westernization Supplement
This material adds a lot of excitement to the text of the last issue. Have you noticed how often we need to refer our readers to some additional sources, depending on their special interest. It is truly impossible to give depth to every subject we take up. But we want to give strings readers can pull to get additional insights. More and more this bulletin will be a strategic "index" readers can employ to explore further things of special interest to them. This is why we now have the full-page response form as an extra cover page.
Item #3. The Brilliant New Global Map Explained
Seventy thousand copies of a marvelous, brilliantly colored global map of the world's peoples (not countries) is now out and around. It is the collaboration of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and Global Mapping International. However, it is being made available through the cooperation of dozens of organizations, including ours.
Thus, for the first time in high quality color you can see plotted out the "peoples" of the world, not just the "countries"--10,657
peoples classified by John Gilbert of the Southern Baptist board into five different types of groups or peoples. (12,869 peoples, adding 2,206 additional peoples--as yet unclassified as to A, B, C, D, E status--are available on disk for $2--see cover response page where you can order both the map and the disk.)
Even without the map, the breakdown you see in the box is a helpful way to look at the different peoples of the world.
[Note, incidentally, that all of our literature, Mission Frontiers, Perspectives Study Guide, mobilization materials, etc. use a different meaning for A, B, C, D, as referring to world population, not peoples:
A = believers--10% of world
B = nominal Christians--20%
C = exposed non-Christians--30%
D = (living within unreached peoples)--40%.
No problem since our scale refers to individuals not peoples.]
For those who already possess this map, a much more detailed explanation is available at no charge (see cover response page). Those ordering the map from us will receive the explanation automatically.
Item #4. My Wife's Health
Hundreds have written letters and we want to express our deep gratitude for them and for the avalanche of prayer. She has had two major operations in the last month and is in the hospital (22Nov) still very weak. Unrelated, but far more serious is the diagnosis of "multiple myeloma" which is a very rare form of cancer (less than 1 of 10,000 cases of cancer) for which there is no known cure.
Please continue to pray.
Item #5. Our 20th Anniversary Celebration
This occurred right in the middle of all the turmoil about my wife's health (she sent faint greetings from her hospital bed in an informal video clip). We had a marvelous time and turnout, looking back over the past and into the future. For those many who sent greetings and regrets and anyone else interested, we have available a four-hour condensation on a single extended-play cassette. See cover response form. A picture story will be in the next issue of Mission Frontiers.
Item #6. Two Books
A. The Jesus I Never Knew
This is a superb display of what it takes to be a missionary--first you must de-contextualize your own form of the faith. Philip Yancey, in some ways a child of the '60s, invested thousands of hours in study and open and frank discussion with people in a wide span of social strata. He is both humble and audacious with many an arresting phrase coupled with disarming personal honesty. He laments the superficiality of much of Christendom and yet holds on tight to the unshakeable meaning behind it all.
However, the main reason I bring this book to your attention is not merely because I have been stirred and blessed by it--as I have just started reading it--but because it is an outstanding example of what Christianity looks like to someone who is trying earnestly to struggle free from the wrapping paper of his own culture in order to see things in a truly fresh light.
This is what missionaries have to do--or their words will fall on deaf ears. Yancey is writing to a generation that, for a tortured moment at least, tried to reinvent civilization and throw off the assumptions of their given tradition, and in trying to do so proved the near impossibility of anything like complete de-contextualization.
In fact it was so difficult merely to throw out one's own culture that many of the flower children settled for American Indian patterns of dress and spirituality. The '60s were an astounding period of culture rejection accompanied by a wholesale, country-wide trek into the wilderness of world religions which has not left us--what with Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist temples arising all across America from day to day. We can't hide from this.
No, missionary contextualization (or de-Westernization) is crucial even if we are going to reach our own new generations. This book is a striking example of what it is going to take.
B. Darwin's Black Box
This is the second book I have not finished reading--but which I am already so excited about that I have to recommend it to you.
Both of these books are powerful. They are treasures. Either of them in the hands of a cross-cultural missionary is dynamite, since both of them significantly rise above human culture in what they focus upon. Together they probe the most asked questions in the world today: Who is Jesus? and What is the very reality science is studying? Each of these is a burning question in the educated spheres of the three major blocs with the least response to Christianity, that is, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Here is what this second book, by Professor Behe, does for you. Star Trek portrays spaceships so large that some of them are like small towns. In the real world we do not know of any such things, but we are beginning to recognize that the tiniest form of life--the cell-- is an enormously complex "spaceship" employing navigational propellers as well as incredibly diverse internal structure including the redoubtable DNA molecule with its millions of component atoms. Too bad that humans are the wrong size to deal with this amazing and tiny world of life.
No one would ever suppose that the intricate design of a Star Trek spaceship was produced by non-intelligent natural processes. You can't get very far into this book (indeed a page or two in the appendix will suffice) without realizing with a flush of emotion that EACH of the "1,000s of millions of cells" in a tiny baby is fully as complicated as a Star Trek space ship--and equally as unlikely to have dumbly "evolved" apart from a planning process, that is, design.
This truly remarkable book is, yep, the work of a beer drinking highly secularized author. Yet, Dennis Prager dragged Behe into his talk show, I understand, which indicates that the Spiritual significance of this fascinating mass of detail is prominent.
Really, you can so easily get absorbed in this tiny "out of sight" world that looking up from the book is a withdrawal experience. Where have I been? I had a scientific education which I have been building on ever since. No book has ever laid it out so clearly as this one-- that the real world includes a very small world of designed complexity which is in no way simpler than the larger world of objects people our size can touch and feel.
Just like Alexis de Tocqueville, who introduced his fellow Frenchman to the novel civilization of America, Behe, in his modestly named Appendix, takes you by the hand and walks you through a living cell which suddenly takes on the complexity of the more visible features of Manhattan Island--buildings, streets, vehicles, but also windows inside of which are desks, people, fax machines, telephone wires connecting every single office on the island, etc.
Indeed, I think Behe may have found the Appendix the most interesting part of the book to write. Could he condense into 22 pages the overwhelmingly triumphant insights of a half century of biochemical research? What brave probers of reality are these lab men! Frankly, if all you read is the Appendix you could conclude on your own--as Behe did--that the very basis of the Darwinian assumption is quite unthinkable. This book pops into being with an impact similar to what the child blurted out in the famous story of the King who had no clothes.
In these two books the majesty of God's creation unfolds as powerfully as I have ever seen it. If they don't give you a holy awe of "what we are dealing with in life," I am afraid nothing will. Here you have two very brainy, very hard working, very honest people, each in his own sphere patiently introducing you to ultimate reality. They themselves write with the same breathless awareness you will have as you try to follow them. While these authors have, humanly speaking, truly mastered their subjects, the fact is they have humbly allowed that reality to master them!
Item #7. Small but Significant --global conference on "Gateway People Clusters"
This conference may include as many as 400 from all over the world. The purpose this time will be to concentrate on the world's people, cluster by cluster. See page 44 for more of the details. It will be held at the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, California. It will not be open to the public, but Mission Frontiers will be glad to report results and make an informal video which will give you a sense of being there.
Six categories of Peoples (groups), 12,863 total, Five types on So. Bap. Map I. Three kinds of Unevangelized peoples (8,669 total) [Roughly, those who have not truly heard the Gospel] --Two kinds of Unreached peoples (6,322 total) [Roughly, those lacking a viable indigenous church movement] Type A 1,681 million people within 2,161 peoples (groups) (on map) called "World A Peoples" (on map) dark red Type B 1,372 million people within 4,161 peoples (groups) (on map) called "Unreached Peoples",(on map) light red --Type C 1,455 million people within 2,347 peoples (groups) (on map) called "Unevangelized Peoples",(on map) yellow II. Two kinds of Evangelized peoples (1,988 total) [Roughly, having heard but not necessarily accepted the Gospel] --Type D,1,136 million people within 1,945 peoples (groups),(on map) called "Evangelized Peoples",(on map) green --Type E,3 million people within 43 peoples (groups),(on map) called "Christian Peoples",(on map) purple III. Peoples unclassified as yet = 2,206 in number, some unreached? (+10,657 classified = 12,863 on disk).
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