Where Two Kingdoms Collide

Where Two Kingdoms Collide

Persecution has been a common trial for many, if not most, of the movement churches in north India for the past ten years, but it has significantly increased these last three months. Ethan* and Nicole* receive almost daily messages from Sanjay* and John* about the persecution the disciples and house churches face. The hardest of these messages was that a lady was martyred. She and her husband (and their two young boys) were active disciple-makers. One day, while meeting with others for a prayer meeting in a home, a mob stormed the house and brutally beat all who were there. She was hospitalized for weeks due to her extensive injuries and passed away on January 11th. They believe this is the movement’s first female martyr.

Ethan and Nicole recently shared: “Jesus said the gates of hell wouldn’t be able to stand against God’s Kingdom. This is what we’re seeing.” As God’s children in India go to their neighbors, relatives, and even their enemies, the gates of hell are falling. Yes, the place where the two kingdoms collide is a battlefield, but we know that eventually, God’s Kingdom will prevail. God’s Kingdom will be established in every tribe, tongue, and every ethnic group on earth. Hallelujah! What a relief to know the outcome! In the interim, though, battles are fought. But, in the middle of what sometimes feels only like chaos and darkness, we receive voice messages like this one:

” ‘…It is true that we are very worried…’ But we all know it is very important to have all this [suffering]. It is necessary to fill up the work of the Lord. For the last few months, we have seen a lot of persecution. But [we’re] also seeing that the number of house churches is filling up every day because when the persecution is going on, many people who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ ask, “Why are these people being killed?” And when [the persecutors] tell those who do not know the Lord that these people are being persecuted because they believe in Jesus Christ, the ones who are [watching], who perhaps used to be neutral, begin to wonder at what they are seeing. They wonder that people can continue to love the Lord even after persecution, even after being badly beaten. They wonder why believing in Jesus should matter so much, and so they ask to know more. And so, in this way, the work is quickly being accomplished… And also, [in addition to this great fruit of growth, we must remember that] we are witnesses of these things. We who are strong should continue to help the weak in these days – during these events, as the Holy Scripture tells us.”

Ethan and Nicole continue, “Our friends in India have such amazing, enduring faith. They continue to press on. We recently received news of more than 500 baptisms! That’s only a sampling of all that God is doing.”  

“Please pray with us, as the early church did … now, Lord, consider their threats, and grant that Your slaves may speak Your message with complete boldness, while You stretch out Your hand for healing, signs, and wonders to be performed through the name of Your holy Servant Jesus.” When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak God’s message with boldness. (Acts 4:29-31).

“There’s no revenge thinking in Acts 4. No hatred toward the persecutors. Only a request for God to move, and that His children would respond with obedient boldness. Amen and amen.”

*pseudonyms

MISSIONS IN A DANGEROUS WORLD
Jesus tells us in Matthew 24 that life will get worse with all kinds of natural and human disasters. People will be handed over to be persecuted, …. read more

WHEN PERSECUTION BECOMES CELEBRATION
In the 2001 persecution, one group of believers received threats that they would be forced to reconvert to Hinduism read more

LEARN ABOUT OUR WORK IN S.ASIA
South Asia is the most populous affinity bloc with nearly two billion people. While a majority of these read more

Journey to Discipleship

Journey to Discipleship

Two of Jane’s* young children were watching and hearing about Sasa’s* openness to Isa (Jesus). They also wanted to tell Sasa how God had made a difference in their lives. So that evening, they each sweetly shared the gospel with her. Sasa was amazed at what God had done in their young hearts and lives and saw it as evidence of Jesus. 

Jane suggested a way that she and Sasa could begin to study God’s word. Before they read stories about the events of Jesus’ life, Jane would start with a quick summary of the people in the Old Testament who offered sacrifices – people like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, etc. They talked about how “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). 

Sasa was interested in each of the Old Testament stories and asked, “Are these stories talking about the blood of Jesus?”

“No, these events were before Jesus came,” Jane explained. “We’ll talk more about Jesus when we get into stories of His life.”

“So Jesus was the final sacrifice, then?” Sasa asked. “There is no more need for sacrifices now?”

Jane was amazed. They talked for a while about the hope and peace we can have in Jesus because he was the final sacrifice that provided for the forgiveness of our sins and our entrance into heaven. 

“I’m sorry,” Sasa said, “but can I ask… Is Jesus…God?”

In response, Jane led Sasa through some Scripture verses. In fact, throughout the evening, and for each of Sasa’s questions, the Holy Spirit led the women — Jane into Scriptures and personal testimonies as answers to Sasa’s questions, and Sasa into ever-deeper truth. 

“I’m afraid, because I know I have sinned. I’m afraid of hell,” Sasa confessed.

“You know, this is a big deal, Sasa,” Jane encouraged. “You are looking for truth and answers. Keep wrestling until you find the Truth. I am glad to be on this journey with you. Can I pray for you?” 

Ask God to ready Sasa’s heart for salvation and baptism soon. Pray for protection for Sasa and Jane’s family as they walk this road to freedom. 

Missed last week’s story about Sasa? Read it here.

*pseudonym

OTHER STORIES ABOUT DISCIPLESHIP

TRUE DISCIPLESHIP
For several weeks, the church has been studying the book of Romans. On the week they studied Romans 7, … read more

WHAT KIND OF DIRT ARE YOU?
After reading through the passage together, Matt asked which kind of soil their respective churches read more

TRADING TRADITION FOR MULTIPLICATION
Samir remembered conversations with Frank about reaching whole families and helping people become read more

Cascading Movements

Cascading Movements

by Stan Parks

God is on the move! He is starting Church Planting Movements (CPMs), the only ministry approach in which kingdom growth exceeds population growth, while also transforming societies from within—in holistic and financially sustainable ways. In CPMs, disciples multiply disciples, churches multiply churches, and leaders multiply leaders. We are  also learning that movements multiply movements! A survey of leaders representing over 1500 CPMs showed that 80–90% of movements have been started by other movements. These movements  are cascading from their initial peoples and places into other peoples and places, both near and far. And these movements are our best hope under God to fulfill the Great Commission in our lifetime.

Matthew 28:19 records Jesus’ command to make disciples of all ethnē. And we know from Revelation 7:9 that there will be a vast multitude from every tribe and language and people and ethnē worshipping God before God’s  throne.  ALL.  EVERY. We don’t know when this will happen, but we do know this is God’s plan.

I use the Greek world ethnē because the common translation “nation” often causes people to think of political nation-states instead of ethno-linguistic nations. But seeing the church established in a political nation is not enough.

I was born in Indonesia, where my parents were missionaries and served during an amazing movement of God in 1966-68, when an estimated two million Javanese Muslims came into the church.1 Years later, my wife and I were praying about our call to missions. Where did God want us to go? We felt an urging from God to serve those in greatest need of the Gospel.

Due to the millions of Indonesian Christians, I saw no need for pioneer efforts there. Imagine my surprise to realize an estimated 121 million Indonesians were part of 200+ Unreached People Groups (UPGs)! In 1996, Indonesian leaders gathered to consider the Great Commission need within Indonesia. Significant collaborative advances were made in prayer, research and mobilization. Within just five years, the number of Indonesian UPGs being served by Gospel workers grew from only 21 to over 100! Amazing and sacrificial effortsm were made in the centuries prior and the years after 1996, but 28 years ago there were 121 million unreached Indonesians and today there are 192.5 million unreached Indonesians.

In 1996 and afterward, our motivation was right, our desire was great, tremendous prayer and mobilization happened, and many people made great sacrifices. But we made a fundamental mistake. We thought sending workers to all these groups would result in reaching them. But the vast majority of us used traditional methods to try to reach groups that had been either resistant or cut off from the Gospel for centuries. We saw some bright spots, but for the most part we failed to make enough impact to offer real hope of reaching these groups.

Around the world, there has been an upsurge in attention to the unreached in the last 30 years. But the results are not better.

  •  2.25 billion (28%) of the world’s people do not have access to the Gospel.2
  •  3.37 billion (42.5%) of the world’s people are members of the world’s 7,415 Unreached People Groups3.
  •  Only 18.3% of non-Christians personally know a Christian,4 and if current trends continue, that will grow to only 20% by 2050! How can they hear unless someone tells them?

And the problem is more complicated than just these facts.

Problem #1: We need to count up before we can count down.
One danger among some Great Commission thinkers is the desire to count down. We want to determine the number  of  groups  who  need  to  be reached, then mark them off our list—based   on certain markers of activities as opposed to outcomes. But our goal is the Gospel for every person and multiplying churches that saturate and transform every community within that people/ language/tribe/ethnē.

We almost certainly have more segments than just 7415 UPGs to reach. Some strategists estimate needing a movement effort for each segment of 100,000 people. One engagement for every segment of 100,000 people among 3.37 billion Unreached People Groups would be a minimum of 33,700 segments. When you add to “peoples” their “places” (such as the 43,000 world’s districts), the increase in complexity is daunting. If each district averages three segments, that could be 120,000 places in need of movements.

Answer: Movements are cascading into multiple people and places around  them.  With the DNA of every disciple being a disciple maker and close cultural affinity to the peoples around them, they are far better suited to reach them.

Problem #2: Some “single” people groups are actually multiple groups (they are waffles, not pancakes).
Jesus did not tell us to disciple a few individuals, but  to  disciple   entire   ethnē.   The   Greek   word ethnos (singular of ethnē) is defined as “a body of persons united by kinship, culture, and common traditions, nation, people.”5 Revelation 5:9 and 7:9 round out the picture of the ethnē who will be reached, adding three more descriptive terms: tribes, peoples, and languages—various groups with common identities.

In our urgency to simplify the task, for mobilization and strategy, we have  lost  some  wisdom  from the early pioneers  of  the  unreached  concept.  The Lausanne 1982 people group taskforce stated: 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.”6

Here’s one specific example. In the 1990s, a research team led by Marvin Leech discovered that the Jawa (Javanese) people group, which had millions of believers and was counted as one large “reached” people group, was almost certainly at least eight distinct people groups by the Lausanne definition. Three of these groups had between 7–10% Evangelical Christians while five of them were less than 1% Christian. Obviously, barriers existed between the 10% Christian Jawa Negarigung and the 0.1% Christian Jawa Pesisir Lor. Counting them as one Jawa people group greatly neglected the five groups who were unreached.

Answer: We have seen movements start in all five of the Jawa UPGs in the last 10 years. They were started by movement catalysts from Indonesian and  Javanese  backgrounds.  Much  more  effort  is needed to reach 100+  million  Jawa  people,  but this is a very encouraging start. Also of great importance is that these Jawa movements and other movement practitioners are reaching out and have started multiplying disciples and churches, with movements in 30+ UPGs and some pre-movement fruit in another 40+ UPGs. This same dynamic is happening all over the world! You will read other exciting examples in the rest of this issue.

Problem #3: 2% may be too low.
A history of the term “unreached” shows that prior to 1980, 20% seemed to be the accepted line between reached and unreached. Then in the 1980s, various figures such as 5%, 10%, 20% began to circulate.

In 1995, a committee representing Operation World, Adopt-a-People, IMB, SIL, and AD2000 made a decision to choose “somewhat arbitrary” criteria of less than 2% Evangelical Christian and 5% Professing Christians.7

Dave Datema states he was “unable to find any  other research or study to back up the choice of  2% Evangelical as a criterion” nor could he find “research to justify” the use of 5%.”8

Interestingly, Patrick Johnstone writes in 2011 that many sociologists take 20% as the point at which a population segment begins to impact the worldview of the wider society.9

In 2011, a study out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that the “tipping point” for the rapid spread of ideas was 10%. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”10 Perhaps we should re-open the conversation about percentages and consider the current evidence in making this decision.

Answer: Movements are not just good at starting; they are very strong at sustaining efforts. Some movements are seeing 15, 20, even 30 generations. Once a movement reaches four generations in multiple streams, it is very likely to continue multiplying and effectively reach segments and sub- segments of their people group(s).

Problem #4: Overemphasis on ethno-linguistic groups
I have been an eager proponent of focusing on UPGs. But we have to admit that many of us have focused almost exclusively on ethno-linguistic groups, without significantly noting tribal, language, cultural, kinship and many other groupings.

Consider the reality that people groups are not segregated into one pure homogenous homeland. They are increasingly intermingled with other groups. This is why the 24:14 Coalition has the vision of movements in every unreached people and place.

The starkest example is cities. There are “593 majority non-Christian megacities”.11 Justin Long states that the incredible complexity of the cities “means that including ‘cities’ as segments to be listed, focused on, described, researched, documented, tracked, measured, and strategically engaged is probably just as important as ‘unreached people groups.’”12

Answer: Movements are increasingly focused on reaching cities and geographical segments, in addition to ethno-linguistic segments. Several of the articles in this edition offer examples of this.

Problem #5: The failures of the Church13

  •  The Church has roughly 3,000 times the financial resources and 9,000 times the manpower needed to finish the Great Commission.
  •  Evangelical Christians could provide all the funds needed to plant a church in each of the 7,400 unreached people groups, with only 0.03% of their income.
  •  Annually, we spend $52 billion on missions of any kind. Meanwhile $59 billion is lost to theft by church members.

Answer: God is doing a new thing! These movements are brand-new breakthroughs by God, with 2,000-year-old patterns. The global Church has the opportunity to join this fresh move of God. God is starting streams in the desert, as the most fruitful movements are growing in many of the (formerly) hardest, least reached peoples and places of the world. The rest of this issue shows the main way God seems to be working to reach the unreached.

In the article in this issue: “How Long to Reach  the Goal?,” Justin Long documents that since 1995, movements have grown at “an average annual growth rate of 23%, or the number of believers doubling on average every 3.5 years.” That is far different from the 1.18% average growth rate of global Christianity in the last 20 years, or even the 1.8% growth of Evangelical and 1.89% of Pentecostal Christians.

This 23% growth is primarily internal, as the movements reach their own populations.  And yet while seeking to reach their own desperately unreached people groups, these movement disciples are frequently compelled by the Spirit to reach beyond their borders to other nearby peoples and places.

We currently know of:

  •  1,967 CPMs
  •  1600+ pre-movements, with 2nd and 3rd generation fruit
  •  2000+ other movement engagements

Notably, 200+ initial CPMs have started approximately 3,300 CPMs and pre-CPMs! We can begin to see how 33,700 or even 120,000 movement engagements could be possible.

God our Creator loves variety. So while we can recognize similar principles, each story of a movement starting another movement is unique. Learn from the following examples of God’s cascading Gospel, as movements start movements.

1977 Indonesian Revival: Why Two Million Came to Christ
Status of Global Christianity
Urbanization and Measuring the Remaining Task
Unreached Peoples
Defining Unreached
Status of Global Christianity

As you read, ask God how you can be involved. Then read the concluding article, “What Must be Done?” for some specific ideas to spur your thinking.

About the Author: Stan is a Church Planting Movements trainer and a coach for leaders of Church Planting Movements around the world. He has been serving Unreached People Groups since 1994 while based in Indonesia, Singapore and Dubai. He is Co-Facilitator of the 24:14 Coalition which is focused on Kingdom Movement engagements in every Unreached People and place by 2025.

This article was first published in Mission Frontiers: Cascading Gospel: Movements Starting Movements, Jan/Feb 2023, pages 8-11. It was used here with permission.

Interested in ways to get involved?  Talk to Us
Want to Learn More About Movements? Watch our Six Simple Shifts Video

 

Sasa is Still Searching

Sasa is Still Searching

Sasa* arrived at Jane’s* house right on time. The ladies dished some carrot cake before Jane asked Sasa to share her story. Sasa had grown up in a difficult home. Her father had died when she was young, and she and her mother had a strained relationship. She felt Islam was not answering her pressing questions and desire for truth. 

Many of Sasa’s Muslim friends and family were just nominal in their faith. She felt everyone was following Islam because it was what had been passed down to them. She wanted something to hold on to wholeheartedly. She even told her mom that she was searching outside Islam for truth. Her mother was very angry, but Sasa is still searching. 

She could tell that the Christian friends she knew had a close and deep relationship with Isa (Jesus). “I don’t have that in my religion,” she concluded.

“If you are searching for Truth,” Jane told her, “God is pleased. He will meet you in this process, walk with you, and reveal truth to you. I would love to walk this journey together with you too.” 

Jane shared how Jesus had changed her own life and about her personal relationship with Him. She also told Sasa about Rani, a friend who was a Muslim-background follower of Jesus.  “Would you be interested in seeing if Rani would like to study God’s word with us?” Jane asked.

Sasa thought this was a great idea. Before she left, the two ladies set their next meeting time and read from Matthew 6:25-34: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? . . . But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Pray for Sasa and those like her searching for a genuine connection with God.

*pseudonym

 

A Bag of Cucumbers: Luke 10 Wages

A Bag of Cucumbers: Luke 10 Wages

 During a recent outreach in Buddhist SE Asia, two brothers were walking through a village in the afternoon and saw a man sleeping in his hammock under his house. It’s culturally rude to awaken someone sleeping under their house, but these brothers reasoned, “We’ve come a long way. We’ll only be here once, so let’s wake him up.” As they approached the house, multiple dogs in the yard began barking menacingly.

“In the name of Jesus Christ we command you to be silent!” they said. The dogs immediately quieted down.

They called out to the man. He awoke, and they began by saying, “We’ve come to tell you important good news of Jesus, who has come to help people out of their sins.”

As the man really woke up, he interjected, “You know, I was just helping some Christians last week in a nearby village.”

“Did you hear what Jesus has done for people?” they asked.

“No, what did he do?” the man asked.

They told him God’s story from Creation to Judgement. “Don’t you see?” they said, “God was reaching out to you when you worked on a construction project with those Christians. Now God sent us here to talk to you. God is calling you — would you like to respond and relate to him?”

The man did! The two brothers asked about his life. What issues did he have? He sells things in the market and was recently divorced. They prayed that God would help him with his work and finances. The man was overwhelmed by their kindness and the news that Jesus could remove his sins. “I don’t have much to give you,” he said, “but here is a bag of cucumbers I was taking to market. Please receive this as an expression of my thanks for coming to tell me about Jesus.”

In Luke 10:7, Jesus tells the 72 He sent out to eat, drink and receive whatever they are given because “The worker deserves his wages.” We’ve seen many times that when villagers welcome the message of Jesus, they offer something to the messenger, a sack of rice, bags of produce, etc.

The next morning a follow-up team visited the man to find out if he was serious. Did he really want to follow Jesus? “Yes,” he said, “I am serious. I do want to follow Jesus.” As a market seller, he knows many people and has good relationships across his area. He said he would ask others to join the discovery study group they plan to start in his home.

Pray that many friends and neighbors will join this new brother in his home to hear God’s stories and learn to walk as Jesus’ disciples.

Other Stories from this Region

PRAYER WALKING
As she walked, Trisha began to see the people in a new light. She could see the communities in which they belonged: shop owners helping each other … read more

MIRACLES, DEMONIC EXORCISM
After prayer walking with a local partner, sowing gospel seeds with whoever was receptive Scott* asked the Lord read more

“IT MUST BE JESUS WHO …”
*Uhn was the town drunk and the senior patriarch of his large extended family. Over a year ago, *Scott’s local read more