Missions

The Woadani are a native tribe in the jungles of Ecuador along the Amazon river. They live simply as one might imagine but bore the distinction of being one of the most violent people groups known to exist. This violence perpetuated through generations of revenge killings. One family group or clan would murder with spears or machetes members of another family group or clan who had previously murdered their members. These killings had become so frequent that their entire ethnic group would have likely ceased to exist, had the killing not stopped.

This is the setting of Beyond the Gates of Splendor, a documentary on the tribe and the missionaries who impacted their lives so greatly. Five missionary families had gone down to Ecuador to reach out to many of the native peoples of that area and support the work of nearby missionaries. In 1956, the men were killed after a successful conversation with some Woadani ended in one big misunderstanding and a lie that the foreigners were there to kill them. They were speared to death.

Later, some of the Woadani very apologetically ask two of the women to come live with them. They do and by their love and teaching, many come to know Jesus through his "carvings", the Bible. Little else changes in their community, but the love of Christ alone, impacting an entire people group causes the killing to drop by more than 90%.

As you watch it, the documentary then follows one of the boys whose father was killed as he becomes friends with the men and boys of the Woadani and after he grows up, he brings his family down to Ecuador to live with them for a while.

I had already read "End of the Spear" a book by Steve Saint (the boy above) which tells both the history and of his journey back to live with the Woadani people. It's priceless though to hear and see the actual people from the widows to the grandchildren to the Woadani themselves tell the story from their perspective. And seeing Mincaye, one of the Woadani tribesmen who killed his father, walking through a grocery store with Saint is amazing.

Make sure you check out this documentary!

The Online Mission Trip is an opportunity for youth to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the Internet and online social communities by sharing their faith with their friends on Facebook and other sites. The trip begins February 1st and goes for two weeks.

So how will these young people do this?

First, training is going on right now. A 3-week series of Bible studies have been prepared specifically for this event. they cover questions and issues like: what the Bible says about sharing our faith, how to share our faith, and how to use social media to share our faith. The site also has links to how to share your faith with different kinds of people.

Then through the course of the trip, students will use photos, blog posts, videos and other posted items to social communities. Discussions will ensue and the students will share the good news with their friends. After the trip, they will follow up with anyone who decided to receive Christ.

If you are at all interested in participating, check out the website and get ready for Feb 1!

More than 6,000 people groups - representing about 2 billion people - are considered "unreached" by the Joshua Project. The Joshua Project seeks to "highlight the ethnic people groups of the world with the least followers of Christ. The mission of Joshua Project is to help bring definition to the unfinished task of the Great Commission by identifying and highlighting the people groups of the world that have the least exposure to the Gospel and the least Christian presence in their midst." Those unreached people groups represent a huge amount of work yet to be done for missionaries and Bible translators.

On their website, the Joshua Project presents profiles of each unreached people group so that we can become more aware of who we are praying for and working toward reaching. One people group is the Tajik people which are in Tajikstan and northern Afghanistan. They have a separate profile for the Afghani Tajiks and it is quite interesting. You can learn that they speak Dari Persian, are descended from the Persians, were "forcefully converted to Islam by Arabs in the 7th century", and most Tajiks are Sunni Muslims.

Along with these profiles they display the Joshua Project Progress Scale rating for the people group. It is a fusion of several other indicators: % Evangelical, % Adherent, Johnstone Church Planting Indicator (CPI), IMB-SBC World Evangelization Status Indicator, Morelia Scale, World A-B-C classification and others. The Afghani Tajiks have a scale rating of 1.2 which means evangelicals are greater than 0.01% of the people group's population but less than 2% and adherents to Christianity are less than 5%.

The Joshua Project also has Mission Facts which are short explanations of the work yet to be done to reach the world with the good news of Jesus. Examples:

• 48 of the 77 people groups in Afghanistan do not have even Bible portions available in their primary language.
• About 4,400 languages are without Scripture portions available, with some 634,000,000 speakers. Translation projects are in progress in an estimated 1,600 languages that currently are without adequate Scriptures. There are about 2,500 languages needing Bible translation work to begin.
• There are 1,007 languages with the Jesus film available, 323 with Gospel radio available, and 4,170 with Gospel recordings available (plus approximately 2000 language recordings that have not had Ethnologue codes assigned yet). 2,209 languages have none of these resources available, with about 195,000,000 speakers.

Be sure to check out the Joshua Project website for a lot more on the progress of mission work around the world. Note that over in the right side bar of the Christians and the Media front page is a short profile from Joshua Project of an unreached people group.

Esther Joy King writes at RELEVANTmagazine.com about her experiences celebrating Navidad in Mexico. Her parents are missionaries in Juarez and their family had a unique role to play in the celebrations.

But for my family, Christmas started months before Los Pasadas. For months leading up to Dec. 25, people from the States would send stuffed animals, dolls, play cars and every other kind of toy imaginable to my family in Mexico. Boxes of toys would start to fill closets around the house. By Thanksgiving, we would start piling the boxes in our living room and, by Christmas day, our home was packed to the brim with boxes of Christmas gifts. We would move boxes out to the cars just so we could have room for a Christmas tree. But these toys weren't for me.

The presents were for the boys and girls in the community who would be invited to a big Christmas party/church service on the three nights after Christmas. After each service, the children who came would receive a gift sent down by Americans months beforehand.

Having just been out in the pushing and shoving of Americanized Christmas, I long for a simpler celebration of Jesus' birth like Esther does. Feliz Navidad!