Clint Bowman has served in West Africa for a number of years. He and his wife led the Engagement Team for IMB work in West Africa -- their tasks were to research Unreached, Unengaged People Groups* (UUPGs), identify UUPGs for engagement by Southern Baptist congregations in the US, and to train and facilitate those engaging churches. Clint is now the Network Strategies Coach for the IMB's Sub-Saharan African Peoples Affinity Group, working with IMB teams and national partners who want to effectively engaged UPGs (Unreached People Groups) in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I was recently reminded once again that our Baptist folks are truly people of prayer. They are always seeking new and better ways to be involved in praying for the work of reaching the UUPG's of Africa and beyond. Consequently, many of our missionaries are heavily involved in promoting their UUPG's and the needs of others as well. However, we get so caught up in this that we tend to forget that the world... even the African world.... is constantly and quickly (at times) changing.
Some years ago, I was leading a team which focused on surveying UUPG's in order to help facilitate their engagement with the Gospel. We were fairly new at this line of work and we jumped in excited to get churches from the USA to get on board and help us to reach the UUPG's. One such church from the US state of Delaware joined us and adopted a UUPG in which to begin work. Since it had been several years since this group had been surveyed, I went with the adopting church on their first trip into the area. We were assured by Baptist leaders in this country that the people group in question were most definitely a UUPG. Imagine our surprise when we discovered 33 churches located in the 30 villages of this UUPG! I wish I could say that this kind of thing doesn't happen very often but it does.....small indigenouus agencies and other denominations are working all the time to engage the UUPG's of this world. Praise the Lord for this!
However, this leads us to a problem. We often put out the names of UUPG's for our folks to pray for them and then we forget that those same folks who are praying often begin to feel God's leading to reach out to their adopted group. This is almost exactly what happened in the example I just gave of the Delaware group. They were given a name off a list which had been compiled a long time before to get churches to pray for UUPG's. No one realized that things on the ground in Africa were changing. Hence, a church was given the name of a group to adopt which did not any longer need adopting. This tends to make those of us involved in this line of ministry look as if we do not know what we are doing. I feel that it is important that those on the field side of things doing the research and those on the home side of things need to be in constant communication about what current needs are for getting UUPG's adopted. Care should be taken that only the names of those which need adopting are presented to churches for prayer or else that the church is made aware that the people group they are adopting has already been adopted by others as well and that work is moving forward there.
Having been involved in more than one situation where these kinds of things have happened, I can say that it is very uncomfortable to have to sit with a church team which has spent thousands of dollars and folks have given up the only vacation time they will get in the year to come out to Africa and then discover that the reality on the ground is not what they had been led to believe that it is. We must seek ways to avoid abusing our supporters back home in this way. The basic rule which my team adopted to try and stop this from happening was that we never took a church into a UUPG without first going and looking ourselves to determine the status of the UUPG.
The second thing we did was to try and convince the stateside prayer promoters and missions media folks to take the time to coordinate with us before they let out names of UUPG's for adoption. Though this seems to be common sense it actually took quite a bit of discussion to get them to do these things, but once we accomplished this we began to avoid those embarassing situations of churches, who thought they were the ONLY ones adopting a UUPG, showing up to evangelize their UUPG only to discover that others were there ahead of them and that the work was well on its way to bearing fruit.* UUPG - Unreached, Unengaged People Group. This is a standard designation for a people group in which less than 2% of the population are Evangelical Christians, there is no active church planting, and there is no church planting strategy under implementation. The Joshua Project has a good page that gives definitions of a number of terms commonly used among those involved in cross-cultural missions.
I am not saying that we don't want stateside churches to pray for UPGs which have already been adopted..... I am saying that if we put those types of names out there for others to adopt for prayer and engagement, we need to be as sure as we can that they are not misled into thinking they are the only ones who are praying for that UPG. We must remember that pray-ers tend to become goers in the work of engaging the UUPG's of this world.... Praise the Lord!
Keeping the lists which float around in our missions world as current as possible and coordinating between all of us who are involved in this work will help us to not waste our valuable resources.....such as the vacation times and the monies of those precious folks whom God is calling out to the harvest fields of Africa. Folks who are today successfully sharing the love of our Lord and Savior in some of the toughest areas of our continent.
Clint Bowman
Network Strategies Coach
Sub-Saharan African Peoples Affinity Group, IMB
How can we best ensure that we share accurate information about the status of the peoples of Africa with those who desire to pray for them and to engage them? What are you doing to ensure the accuracy of your information?
No comments:
Post a Comment