| How do we decide what the task of missions is, or even if there should be such a thing as missions? One answer would be that love demands it and love defines it. If people all over the world are under condemnation for sin and cut off from eternal life (Ephesians 2:2-3, 12; 4:17; 5:6), and if calling on Jesus is their only hope for eternal, joyful fellowship with God, then love demands missions. But can love decide and define missions? Not without consulting the strange ways of God. Sometimes the ways of God are not the way we would have done things with our limited views. But God is love, even when his ways are puzzling. It may not look like love for your life if you sold all that you had and bought a barren field. But it might, in fact, be love from another perspective, namely, that there is a treasure buried in the field. So, of course, love will consult God's perspective on missions. Love will refuse to define missions with a limited human perspective, love will test its logic by the larger picture of God's ways. Sinking Ocean Liners The limits of love's wisdom become plain when we imagine missions as a rescue operation during a tragedy at sea. Suppose there were two ocean liners on the open sea, and both began to sink at the same time with large numbers of people on board who did not know how to swim. There are some lifeboats but not enough. And suppose you were in charge of a team of rescuers in two large lifeboats. You arrive on the scene of the first sinking ship and find your self surrounded by hundreds of screaming people, some going down before your eyes, some fighting over scraps of debris, others ready to jump into the water from the sinking ship. Several hundred yards farther away the very same thing is happening to the people on the other ship. Your heart breaks for the dying people. You long to save as many as you can. So you cry out to your two crews to give every ounce of energy they have. There are five rescuers in each boat and they are working with all their might. They are saving many. There is lots of room in the rescue boats. Then someone cries out from the other ship, "Come over and help us!" What would love do? Would love go or stay? I cannot think of any reason that love would leave its life-saving labor and go to the other ship. Love puts no higher value on distant souls than on nearer souls. In fact, love might well reason that in the time it would take to row across the several hundred yards to the other ship, an overall loss of total lives would result. Love might also reason that the energy of the rescuers would be depleted by rowing between ships, which would possibly result in a smaller number of individuals being saved. So love, by itself, may very well refuse to leave its present rescue operation. It may stay at its present work in order to save as many individuals as possible. This imaginary scene on the sea, of course, is not a perfect picture of the church in the world, if for no other reason than that the rescue potential of the church is not fully engaged even where it is working. But the point of the illustration still stands: love alone (from our limited human perspective) may not see the missionary task the way God does. God May Have Another View God may have in mind that the aim of the rescue operation should be to gather saved sinners from every people in the world (from both ocean liners), even if some of the successful rescuers must leave a fruitful reached people (the first ocean liner), in order to labor in a (possibly less fruitful) unreached people (the second ocean liner). In other words, the task of missions may not be merely to win as many individuals as possible from the most responsive people groups of the world, but rather to win individuals from all the people groups of the world. It may not be enough to define missions as leaving the safe shore of our own culture to do rescue operations on the strange seas of other languages and cultures. Something may need to be added to that definition which impels us to leave one rescue operation to take up another. It may be that this definition of missions will in fact result in the greatest possible number of worshippers for God's Son. But that remains for God to decide. Our responsibility is to define missions His way and then to follow Him in obedience! That means a careful investigation of how the New Testament portrays the special missionary task of the church is needed. More specifically it means that we must assess biblically the widespread concept of "unreached peoples" as the focus of missionary activity. People Blindness Since 1974 the task of missions has increasingly focused on evangelizing unreached peoples as opposed to evangelizing unreached territories. One reason for this is that at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization Ralph Winter indicted the Western missionary enterprise with what he called "people blindness." Since that time he and others have relentlessly pressed the "people group" focus onto the agenda of most mission-minded churches and agencies. The "shattering truth" that he revealed at Lausanne was this: in spite of the fact that every country of the world has been penetrated with the gospel, four out of five non-Christians are still cut off from the gospel because of cultural and linguistic barriers, not geographic ones. Winter's message was a powerful call for the church of Christ to reorient its thinking so that missions would be seen as the task of evangelizing unreached peoples, not the task of merely evangelizing more territories. In a most remarkable way in the next 15 years the missionary enterprise responded to this call. In 1989 Winter was able to write, "Now that the concept of "unreached peoples" has taken hold very widely, it is immediately possible to make plans...with far greater confidence and precision." A Milestone Definition Probably the most significant unified effort to define what a "people group" is came in March, 1982, as a result of the work of the Lausanne Strategy Working Group. This meeting defined a "people group" as 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....[It is] the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance. We should be aware that this definition was developed not merely on the basis of Biblical teaching about the specific nature of people groups, but mainly on the basis of what would help missionaries identify and reach the various groups. This is a legitimate method for advancing evangelistic strategy. We also need to make clear at the outset, that I am not going to use the term "people group" in a precise sociological way as distinct from "people." I agree with those who say that the biblical concept of "peoples" or "nations" cannot be stretched to include individuals grouped on the basis of things like occupation or residence or handicaps. These are sociological groupings that are very relevant for evangelistic strategy but do not figure into defining the biblical meaning of "peoples" or "nations." "Test All Things" My aim is to test the people group focus by the Scriptures. Is the specifically missionary mandate of the Bible 1) a command to reach as many individuals as possible, or is it 2) a command to reach all the "fields," or is it 3) a command to reach all the "people groups" of the world, as the Bible defines people groups? Is the emphasis that has dominated mission discussion since 1974 a Biblical teaching, or is it simply a strategic development that gives mission effort a sharper focus? The Great Commission Passage
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