Reaching a new group of a million people every other day for the next 10 years—such is the challenge presented to the church by the Global Strategy Committee. The challenge has been endorsed by the Annual Council and will be presented to the 1990 General Conference session.
Adventists have not always thought of loving the world as a positive character trait. In his First Epistle John warns against loving the world's selfishness and other sinful influences. But in his Gospel the same author tells us that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son," to make everlasting life available to all who believe in Him (John 3:16). Jesus commanded His disciples to "love one an other; as I have loved you" (John 13:34). And He commissioned them with these words: "Go ye into all the world" (Mark 16:15). "And ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth" (Acts 1:8).
Climbing a stepladder and looking at your room from chandelier level gives you a different perspective than you get at ground level. The Global Strategy committee invites you to climb the ladder and take a new look at the Adventist church in the world. For a century we have been looking at the world in terms of countries. The United Nations lists 215 of them. Seventh-day Adventists have entered and maintained a presence in 184 of these. Of the 31 unentered countries listed in our 1988 annual statistical report, Afghanistan (18 million) is the largest, followed by Saudi Arabia (14 million) and the Syrian Arab Republic (12 million). Four other countries have between 5 and 10 million inhabitants, eight have between 1 and 5 million inhabitants, and 16 have only a fraction of a million. Two of these have only 1,000 each. Altogether, the population of these 31 countries is less than 2 percent of the population of the world. So these statistics make it appear that Adventists have reached 98 percent of the world with the gospel.
And the most recent reports indicate that the situation is improving. Since the 1988 list was compiled, an Adventist church has been organized in the United Arab Emirates. Steps are being taken to enter Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen, and Mauritania. Isolated members and groups of imported technicians and service personnel exist in the Falkland Islands, in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of Yemen (Aden).
But simply listing nations as "entered" or "unentered" gives a distorted view of the church's penetration of the world's population. Within the countries that we list as entered there are people groups to be reached that comprise populations larger than some of the countries we consider unentered.
Mianyang prefecture in Sichuan province in China, for example, has a population of 13 million and is only one of 192 unentered prefectures in China. Even in Christian countries there are enclaves of non-Christian ethnic minorities. One of our Christian missiologist friends calls these groups the "hidden peoples." Many of these groups are further isolated by language barriers. In current evangelical thinking, they are listed among the unreached people groups. Recently it has been estimated that there are 12,000 such groups still untouched by Christianity. Some of these are very small, but others include several million people.
The Global Strategy Committee is nudging the church away from, the country concept in missions and toward the goal of reaching every person on earth—every creature. The committee is calling us to provide a witness to all of the ethnic, language, geographical, cultural, occupational, and socioeconomic groups in the world. In doing this, we must not give the same priority to the few people on Johnston Island as we give to reaching China's 1.1 billion.
The global view
The world's population passed the 5 billion mark at about the time our committee started its analysis in mid-1987. We divided the world's population into 5,000 geographical units of about 1 million each and found that by God's grace Seventh-day Adventists are witnessing in about 3,200 of these.
This leaves about 1,800 geographical units in which we have no ongoing work. Of these, 1,150 are outside the territory included in our present world divisions and will require special attention from the General Conference. The areas with the largest concentrations of unentered geographical units are the People's Re public of China, Soviet Central Asia, the Islamic areas of North Africa and the Middle East, the Hindu areas in and around the Gangetic Plain, and the Buddhist areas of Southeast Asia.
Of the 750 units that are in the territory encompassed by our world divisions, 350 are in the Southern Asia Division, mostly in the Northern Union Section.
With our target populations identified, the next step is to begin to set up a strategy for reaching them. Each population will require a different strategy be cause of its felt needs; its language; its urban, agricultural, or nomadic way of life; its educational level; and many other factors.
The Global Strategy is to achieve by the year 2000, through the sum of these individual strategies, the placing of a Christian witness within each of these 1,800 target populations. If we prioritize those target populations in which there is no Christian witness, sincere Christians in other denominations will respect us for this. Where other Christians are already working, we should visit their leaders and befriend them, try to help them partake of our burden for sharing the gospel in its fullness, and offer our cooperation in achieving such a witness. This witness should, from the vantage point of Seventh-day Adventists' unique perspective, share the blessings of the gospel in the fullness of (1) its hope for the future and (2) its lifestyle, which helps fill the present life with health and joy.
The pioneers of our church came from a Christian background and took for granted the fundamental truths of the gospel. And they targeted most of their evangelistic outreach at people who already believed the basic message of Christianity. Reaching a new group of 1 million people every other day among Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Communists is not the same as bringing a final xyz to people who already accept the main portion of the Christian "alphabet." But it is not only religious vocabularies and thought patterns that form barriers to the spread of the gospel. There are also the 271 languages spoken by a million or more people that we have yet to establish a work in. These have been identified and taken into account in the strategic planning of Adventist World Radio, but radio program responses must be followed up by personal contact. Ultimately it is incamational ministry that is effective—the Word made flesh— reaching out and touching people with body language. This requires winning people's trust and confidence by living among them.
Practical strategies
David B. Barrett and James W. Reapsome, in a book published in 1988, have suggested 16 approaches by which Christians can deal with the challenges of closed countries. Eight of them operate through Christians who are nationals of such countries, and eight of them through citizens of other countries.
Among these approaches are three that are especially appropriate for consideration by Seventh-day Adventist professionals and university students. Be cause most of the readers of Ministry are in countries in which the Seventh-day Adventist Church is well established, I will emphasize noncitizen or nonresidential strategies.
The "tentmaker" approach refers to Paul, who exercised his skill in making tents to earn his living while witnessing and preaching the gospel. One agency lists 15,000 opportunities for Christians to obtain employment by providing the specialized skills needed by host governments, many of them in "closed" countries.
We know of a Seventh-day Adventist civil engineer, the Loma Linda heart team, and ADRA personnel who are in demand and have developed lasting friendships in countries in which an Adventist missionary could never obtain a residence visa. We also know of Adventists who have served in "closed" countries as diplomatic or service personnel of their own governments. Their contacts and friendships strengthen and encourage spiritual life in the host country and prepare the way in anticipation of God's working to open the door for more direct missions (and doors have been opened).
Adventist tourists—especially from Europe and North America, but increasingly from other countries such as Japan and Australia—are able to travel extensively in ways never dreamed of by our pioneers. Contacts made and friendships established on such trips can be used of God to open the way for witnessing.
Exchange students and exchange professors can be an avenue of communication in two directions. We know of youth who have gone as students to universities in closed countries and whose lives were a witness to fellow students and teachers.
And some Adventist colleges and universities have accepted non-Adventist students from closed countries. Cultivating the friendship of citizens from closed countries who are guests in our own country is perhaps one of the easiest avenues to evangelism, because people who are in a new environment often are receptive to change.
In addition to these strategies, our work in closed countries will depend on Adventist lay professionals working for governments of those countries, subsidized re location of Adventist families into areas in which they can continue living as self-supporting laypeople, and follow-up of responses to shortwave radio broadcasts.
Loving the world may end up being very simply that--living God's love among people who have not known that love, or who, having known it under a different name (such as Allah), can be led to recognize it and share it. Some of these people may never adopt the name Seventh-day Adventist, or even Christian, because the people they live among would misinterpret the title and reject our message sight unseen as a result of past experience with Christians who behaved in very unchristian ways.
