AD 2025 Global Monitor No. 1

Introduction

In this issue of the Monitor, and the next three, we zero in on Christian resources for global mission, and why they need to be drastically redeployed. Each issue's page 3 will illustrate this by a new global diagram.

New Commentary

Global Christian resources are in the wrong places

If world evangelization is not achieved by the year 2000, we can offer 4 current reasons for such a failure:

Evangelical agencies are concentrating resources on largely evangelized or christianized countries, peoples, and cities.
Ecumenical agencies are preoccupied with international partnership and consistently overlook sharing resources for the frontiers where countries and religions do not want to be evangelized.
Roman Catholic agencies have too large a job mobilizing their 1 billion members to become renewed evangelizers.
Pentecostal and Charismatic agencies see a worldwide field of non-Spirit-filled Christians as the priority target.

Evangelicals have the most rapidly deployable mission resources but are jealously guarding an agenda that distracts them from the hardest work. Pentecostals/Charismatics are the most open to change but it may take several years to set up global resource structures and by then they may have discovered mission among other Christians to be a more rewarding primary focus.

Apart from a major change in how resources are managed, Christianity organized as at present will not make year 2000 goals related to reaching the unreached in World A.

Resources: deployment of finance is a major problem

Presbyterian Church (USA) bureaucracy in 1989 cost $95,935,631 for 3,524 employees for a denomination of 2.9 million. One can see how so little money makes it to the frontiers when organizations focus so heavily on their own existence. (They send 56 missionaries to World A countries). Yet, ironically, this denomination is in a steady decline.

Let's try the strategic placement of a few tiny resources

The new scientific theory of self-organized criticality states that many composite systems naturally evolve to a critical state in which a minor event starts a chain reaction that can affect any number of elements in the system. For example, snow builds up in small patches on a mountainside until a huge pile forms. At any given point, a relatively small amount of new snow can trigger an avalanche. Other applications for this theory are earthquakes, economic markets, and ecosystems. If scientists can better understand self-organized criticality, they may be able to more accurately predict catastrophe (Scientific American, January 1991:46-53)

From the viewpoint of world evangelization, perhaps a minor event could trigger a chain of events leading to the evangelization of the world. Examining the individual agencies and plans it is difficult to see how things fit together. But once the critical state is reached a relatively small push could lead to closure. That is why we must continue to tirelessly promote a few strategic initiatives on behalf of the least evangelized segments of humanity.

New Events

Resources: the local church

A Methodist congregation of ethnic Koreans among the community of 5,000 in Moscow has now been allowed to register. There are 450,000 Koreans in the whole of the Soviet Union (Ecumenical press service).

Resources: the media

Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, spoke to the World Congress of UNDA (International Catholic Association for Radio and Television) in Bangkok on November 12, 1990. He encouraged UNDA to increase its efforts to train and support Catholic professionals working in the media. As we approach the year 2000, he encouraged them to plan a strategy that will make the media, secular and Catholic, effective instruments of evangelization (International Fides service).

Resources: social action in human need

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has signed a contract with the Iranian government to construct 150 homes and two clinics for the victims of the June earthquake. The SDA church is not officially recognized in Iran but this kind of cooperation is sure to further the progress of the gospel there.

Resources: the "Jesus" film

1.9 million people saw the movie "Jesus" in remote areas of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador during a campaign in the summer of 1990 conducted by Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Campus Crusade for Christ. 39 four-person teams showed Spanish and Indian language versions of the film nearly 4,000 times. More than 162,000 people prayed a salvation prayer at the end of the film (National & international religion report, Nov. 5, 1990:5).

New Statistics

Civil war disrupts basic resources

The Ethiopian Orthodox churches in Ethiopia have suffered greatly from the ongoing civil war. In 1989, 83 churches were burned and 30 clergy lost their lives. Many valuable relics have been lost. Three orphanages were forced to relocate, causing thousands of children to suffer (Ecumenical press service, Nr. 21/1:91.01.50).

The massive resources of one denomination in India

India holds 15th place among the countries of the world having the most Catholics. With its 15,700,000 Catholics it follows 7 American nations, 5 in Europe, the Philippines in Asia, and Zaire in Africa. The Church in India has 122 ecclesiastical jurisdictions, 14,093 priests (8,230 diocesan and 5,863 religious), 2,688 religious brothers, 61,817 sisters (nuns) and 400 members of secular institutes (International Fides service, Dec. 12, 1990:437).

Good use of resources: India sends 34,500 citizen missionaries

The Catholic Church in India at present sends over 2,000 Indian-citizen men and women as foreign missionaries to other countries; it has 3 Indian missionary institutes or societies (Society of the Missionaries of St. Francis Xavier, Indian Missionary Society, and the Heralds of Good News); and it has the Catholic Mission League, a lay missionary association with 750,000 members, which at present is the largest lay mission association in Asia. There are also nearly 3,000 Indian Jesuits working in India (International Fides service, Jan. 19, 1991:29).

With Protestants, India now sends abroad as foreign missionaries 4,500 of its citizens, serving in 80 countries. In addition, 120,000 Indians serve in India as full-time Christian workers; 30,000 of these are home missionaries (mostly cross-cultural). A third of all these personnel are Charismatics.

New Trends

Unexpected resources: Christian tribes in World A

The magazine Bridge is a gold mine of information on the minority peoples of Yunnan province. There are some encouraging reports on the growth of Christianity among these peoples. The Lisu should be entirely Christian within a few years. The same is possible among other groups. These peoples are in close proximity so there is likely to be a rapid spread of the gospel across many peoples currently unevangelized.

World A peoples in Germany face harder times

The trends are going against Turks in Germany and other foreigners there. They feel that unification of East and West Germany is making things harder for them. As one indicator, racially motivated crimes increased 500 percent in 1990. It is up to the church to deliberately counter this trend and offer help to these peoples (The Lutheran).

New Plans

Global plans fail because resources get diverted

Ponder this quote: "President Bush's proposal that NASA send astronauts to Mars in 2019 won approval in principle from a panel assessing the future of the U.S. space program, but the group declined to support a specific date. 'The long-term objective of human exploration of Mars should be tailored or respond to the availability of funding, rather than adhering to a rigid schedule' the panel concludes in a summary of its report released on Dec. 10, 1990." Thus, in practice, these goals will not be met if other projects needing funding (i.e. war, S&L bailouts, etc.) preclude the Mars initiative (Science news, Dec. 22&29, 1990:398).

The parallel for world evangelization is mission agencies agreeing in principle to reaching the unreached by the year 2000 but making this contingent on extra personnel and finances becoming available. As we have demonstrated elsewhere, this is a dangerous letout--the total Christian resources available today are completely adequate. The holdup is one of management: the majority of all 4,000 agencies remain heavily deployed among peoples already Christian or evangelized. In many cases, the ecclesiastical political price is too high for them to focus attention on unreached peoples.

Self-deception about resources deflects mission

In Charisma magazine Vinson Synan sketches the first Pentecostal global evangelization plan. In 1900 Charles F. Parham believed that "xenoglossolalia" or speaking in foreign languages through the power of the Holy Spirit would solve the problem of evangelizing the whole world in a generation. Parham grew up in the wake of Moody and Pierson's desire to evangelize the world by the year 1900. On January 1, 1901 Agnes Ozman spoke in Chinese at a prayer service. Would this usher in a new century of Holy-Ghost-filled missionaries who would quickly reach every language_ As it turns out this strategy did not work when it was tried and Pentecostal missionaries had to learn languages just like other missionaries. Then, like other missionaries, they deployed themselves primarily among Christian peoples where they could see easier results and greater church growth. So, today, Pentecostalism is not spreading primarily among non-Christian peoples (Charisma, January 1991:78-85).

A major strategic resource: reflections on a new encyclical

A new Roman Catholic global plan was made public by the Vatican on January 22, 1991. It is the text of the eighth encyclical of John Paul II, entitled "Redemptoris Missio" (The Mission of Christ the Redeemer). Twenty five pages in length, it has one overriding theme--mission ad gentes or mission to non-Christian peoples. The timeliness of this document is evident as one sees a renewed emphasis on the unreached peoples at the advent of the Decade of Universal Evangelization (December 25, 1990-December 25, 2000).

John Paul II begins, "From the beginning of my pontificate I have chosen to travel to the ends of the earth in order to show this missionary concern. My direct contact with peoples who do not know Christ has convinced me even more of the urgency of missionary activity, a subject to which I am devoting the present encyclical" (emphasis added). It is interesting to note that it is direct, personal contact with truly non-Christian peoples that has impressed the pope with the need for renewed emphasis on preaching the gospel among them.

The next issue of the Monitor will expand on this somewhat.

New Diagram

What is a "sharing globe"_

With this issue, our series of global diagrams introduces a new concept--the "sharing globe". This term refers to a circle representing the Earth's population divided into the 3 segments of our World A/B/C mission typology, on which we place numerical data to illustrate what missionary sharing is going on. It is particularly useful in revealing where a specific resource or mission agency has its heart--either mainly in World A, or B, or C.

Actual distribution of Christian resources today

For clearly understood historical reasons, the actual distribution of Christian resources today is completely different to the ideal picture of it held by most Christians. This is illustrated in the following diagram. This shows 16 globes illustrating how 16 different kinds of resources are in fact divided amongst Worlds A, B, and C today.

It is clear from these globes that Christians themselves are consuming vastly more than their fair share of all these resources. One could almost say that they are virtually dooming their global foreign missionary enterprise to failure by robbing it of 99% of its rightful share of resources.

New Books
World government by P.J. Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 256 pp., $45.00) highlights themes used to illuminate the history and present roles of governing institutions in 170 sovereign nations.

The atlas of South America by Moshe Brawer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990, 144 pp., $65.00) is a complete visual introduction to South America, with more than 100 maps and illustrations covering the region and each individual country.

International directory of the world's religions by G. Ward (Apogee, 1991) offers up-to-date information on the world's religions.

Macmillan published the Coptic encyclopedia by A.S. Atiya in 8 volumes in January 1991.

A history of food by M. Toussaint-Samat (Blackwell, Aug 1991, $50.00) supplements other studies on the effect food has on culture and history.

From 1991 to 1994 the Human Relations Area Files will publish the World cultures encyclopedia (Yale University, G.K. Hall, 10 volumes, $800 for the set before April 1991).

The guide to quantitative history by R. Darcy and R.C. Rohrs (ABC-Clio, November 1990, $49.00) documents the new phenomenon also known as cliometrics--the quantitative analysis of historical data.

Oxford is publishing the Illustrated encyclopedia of world geography from November 1990 to February 1991 in 4 volumes at $45.00 each.

Look for Sources of information for historical research by T.P. Slavens (Neal-Schuman, summer 1991, $45.00).

Atlas of the Crusades edited by Riley-Smith (Facts on File, November 1990) shows detailed maps and diagrams of this important period in Christian-Muslim relations.

Atlas of the Arab world edited by Fargues (Facts on File, March 1991) is timely in light of the Persian Gulf war.

Women's international statistical compendium (Gale, June 1991, $89.50) contains approximately 1,000 tables, graphs, and lists on women in the U.S. and worldwide.

World hunger: a reference handbook edited by P.L. Kutzner (ABC-Clio, February 1991, $39.00) is part of a contemporary world issues series.

Facts on File is publishing a series Handbooks to the modern world which now includes Africa edited by Sean Moroney (1,248 pages in two volumes, $95.00), Western Europe edited by Richard Mayne (700 pages, $45.00), The Middle East edited by Michael Adams (896 pages, $45.00), and The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe edited by George Schopflin (638 pages, $45.00).

The Irish missionary movement: a historical survey 1830-1980 by Edmund M. Hogan (Catholic University of America Press, 1990, 235 pp., $29.95) traces Irish missions among non-Christians over the past two centuries.

Dateline 2000: the new higher education agenda by Dale Parnell (AACJC Publications) tracks current trends and forecasts possible future action in American higher education.

China and its national minorities: autonomy or assimilation by Thomas Heberer (M.E. Sharpe, 1990, 165 pp., $39.95) surveys the ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups of China with an extensive bibliography and index.

The Bread for the World Institute on Hunger and Development has produced Hunger 1990: a report on the state of world hunger. The book provides country studies of hunger in 44 developing nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. It is available for $9.95 plus $2 shipping from Bread for the World, 802 Rhode Island Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20018.

In his new book Technological risk (Norton, 1990, 353 pp., $22.95), physics professor H. W. Lewis evaluates the actual dangers of everyday life in the modern world, concluding that technology itself poses less risk than do bad policies, misdirected resources and a poorly informed public.

21 out of 23 Harvard graduates didn't know why it's hotter in summer than in winter. Find out in Science matters: achieving scientific literacy by Robert M. Hazen and James Trefil (Doubleday, 1990).

New Technologies

A vital, continuous, automatic resource: online databases

Looking for a good directory of online databases_ The voluminous quarterly Directory of online databases, published by Cuadra/Elsevier, is excellent. It costs $175.00 for two complete issues and two supplements. Order it directly from Elsevier Science Publishing Co. Inc., 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010; (212) 633-3980, fax (212) 633-3990. The number of databases is steadily growing. According to Elsevier, in 1979 there were 400 major databases, 59 online services, and 221 database producers. Today there are over 4,615 databases, 654 online services, and 2,005 producers (PC magazine, January 29, 1991:83).

Also see the Directory of portable databases (Cuadra/Elsevier, $85.00) which catalogues 583 databases that are not dependent on time-sharing or telecommunications for access. 66 of these need only a PC for access, 409 a PC and CD-ROM, and 108 are on magnetic tape.

Minimum resources for your global evangelization operation

With consumers around the world concerned more about the environment, ethics, and education, more businesses are moving out of urban centers to set up shop in out-of-the-way places. With a computer, a printer, a copier, a modem, and a fax machine, where a business is located is not as important as it used to be. Soon telecommuting, as it is called, will be a global phenomenon with employees choosing remote locations all over the world to do business from (Home office computing, January 1991). This is good news for our readers, too.