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A.D. 2000: Progress and problems


In recent years, evangelical Christians have initiated many efforts to “finish the job” of evangelizing the world by the year 2000. How did we do? Stan Guthrie, editor of Pulse magazine, provides the following evaluation.

The unreached

Progress: In the second half of the 20th century, missiologists, starting with Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter, shifted the focus in mission strategy from countries to the world’s estimated 13,000 ethnolinguistic peoples. In 1995, the AD2000 and Beyond Movement’s Joshua Project listed 1,739 people groups of at least 10,000 people without a church of at least 100 members or an active church-planting movement. Today, the revised list has 1,596 groups as a baseline. Of these, 500 now have a church of at least 100 members, 554 have a church-planting team, and only 194 have yet to be targeted or claimed.

Problem: Some 4,000 groups (some of them smaller than 10,000 people) have no viable Christian witness, missions statistician David Barrett says.

The unevangelized

Progress: The share of the world’s population that is unevangelized (that is, people who have never had an opportunity to hear the gospel) has shrunk from 50.2% in 1900 to 44.2% in 1970, to 29.5% in 1990 and to 25.7% in 2000 (David Barrett and Todd Johnson, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 2000).

Problem: The number of people born in the non-Christian world grows by 129,000 a day, or 47 million a year.

Bible translation

Progress: Scripture is present in 2,212 of the world’s 6,500 languages (including 928 New Testaments and 366 full Bibles), the United Bible Societies reports. Today about 80% of the world’s people have access to the Bible in a language they can understand.

Problems: Approximately 4,300 languages have no portion of the Scriptures, and some never will. For example, of the approximately 300 Native American languages spoken at the start of the 16th century, just 211 exist today. The same can be said of many smaller languages. Additionally, there are about a billion adults in the world who (due to such problems as illiteracy) would not be able to read a Bible even if they had one in their language.

Globalization of the church

Progress: In 1960, an estimated 58% of the world’s Christians were Westerners; in 1990, just 38% were. The number of Western evangelicals has grown from 57.7 million in 1960 to 95.9 million in 1990, but non-Western evangelicals have increased during that time from 29 million to 208 million. Some experts say there are now more non-Western than Western missionaries. Partnerships between Western and non-Western schools, agencies, and churches are multiplying. Moreover, the leadership of the world Christian movement is rapidly shifting to the Two-Thirds World.

Problems: Paul Borthwick of Development Associates International applauds the expanding global force, but also notes some of its drawbacks: “Some non-Western missionaries have launched out with great zeal, but they are repeating the same mistakes as Western missionaries of 100 years ago, creating – a new generation of cultural imperialists.” In addition, he says, the romanticization of the non-Western missionary in the minds of the Western church has resulted in two dangerous trends – first, the idea that our Great Commission responsibility is over, with the exception of sending money, and second, an unhealthy dependency on Western money in the non-Western church.

The “Jesus” film

Progress: The film has been seen by 2 billion people in more than 500 languages.

Problems: The “Jesus” film is not a quick fix, and, like any tool, it can be misused without proper teaching and follow-up. Such tools, says Kenneth Mulholland, president of the Evangelical Missiological Society, “function at less than their full potential when divorced from church-planting movements.” Additionally, there are still 6,000 languages in which the film is not available.

Christian radio

Progress: The World By 2000 radio initiative was launched in 1985 to provide Christian programming to the 279 “megalanguages” of at last 1 million speakers which did not yet have Christian radio. Today only 91 languages still lack a gospel witness by radio. An estimated 10 to 15 languages annually begin receiving such programming.

Problems: World By 2000 has changed its name to World By Radio, in recognition of the fact that the original goal has not been fulfilled. Indeed, more languages are added to the list every year, as populations grow.

Christian publishing

Progress: Annually 24,800 new Christian books are published, and 68 million copies of the Bibles are distributed. There are 4,000 Christian radio and TV stations, with 2.15 billion people listening and watching. There is enough evangelism going on to evangelize the whole world 79 times over – if evangelism were distributed evenly.

Problems: Evangelism is distributed very unevenly worldwide, and in many cases outreach encounters resistant people or governments. “The world Christian movement has largely stalled in relation to the Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist blocks of unreached peoples,” Ralph Winter, founder of the US Center for World Mission, stated in 1997. “We cannot reasonably expect to achieve the marvellous goals of the AD2000 Movement without a significant change in strategy. More of the same will not be enough.”

Reprinted, with permission, from Pulse, P.O. Box 794, Wheaton, IL 60189, e-mail@wheaton.edu; Web site www.wheaton.edu/bgc/emis.

Pulse is a newsletter published semimonthly by Evangelism and Missions Information Service of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. A free sample issue and subscription information will be sent to anyone requesting them.

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Last modified August 29, 2000.

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