The church has a
plethora of examples where men have been moved by God’s Spirit to make
seemingly illogical moves. “For many, however, God uses statistics to reveal
the presence or lack of presence of the Holy Spirit around the world.”[1] It
is commonly accepted that “Ralph Winter, Luis Bush, Patrick Johnstone, and many
other mission leaders who have helped awaken the church to places no one was
working have all used statistics extensively.”[2] But
other missions leaders like Jerome and William Carey also made use of statistic
analysis. These positive instances are noteworthy, as they shed light on the
affirmative influence statistics have had on missiology.
Jerome, one of the
early church fathers, could hardly be described as a missiologist. Yet amidst
the doctrinal conflict that raged between the Donatists and Catholics, Jerome
was revolutionary in his statistical review of the missionary progress of the
church. David Barrett claims that Jerome used primitive statistical analysis as
he “surveyed the rapid advance of the schismatic Donatist Church
William Carey has been hailed as the father of the modern
missions movement. In Section III of
his classic Enquiry[4] there are 23 graphic missiological
surveys outlining geography, land mass, demographics and religion. The
statistical information contained in these surveys lead Carey to conclude that
there is a loud call “to Christians, and especially to ministers, to exert
themselves to the utmost in their several spheres of action, and to try to
enlarge them as much as possible.”[5]
It could be contended that Carey’s use of statistics to base his missiological
strategy was what established missiology as a science.
In association
with the former Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, David
Barrett was a modern missiologist who made no apology for his far-reaching
exploitation of statistics in missions. His scientific method during the latter
part of the twentieth century was based largely upon the social “science of
ethnographic research: participant observation, informal interviews, and formal
interviews.”[6] But his applications of
those data were probably more comprehensive than earlier missiologists. Dayton and Frazer seem to
indicate the Lausanne Committee adoption of sociological terminology like people groups grew out of a focus on
mission strategies similar to Barrett’s scientific methodology.
The reason we identify them and
group them together is because of the task of sharing Christ with them. Because
they form a long network of social relationships and share a common set of
values and attitudes, they respond in similar ways. This is true of how they
respond to Christ as presented by particular evangelists. When they are
responsive, the growth of the church follows the natural lines of social
relationships that bind the group together. When they are resistant to the
gospel, most of the people in the same social network will resist it.[7]
While Barrett’s statistical
analyses have led to current missiological terms like evangelized and unreached,
his engagement in scenario planning and futurist narratives was unprecedented
and to some unacceptable. Barrett’s study of people movements led him to make
predictions:
What we are here primarily
concerned to investigate is the one problem: to what extent, if at all, are
these movements basically similar in origin and in expansion, wherein does this
similarity lie, and what overall explanation does it imply? Or, shifting the
focus of the problem slightly: what are the conditions necessary for
independency to emerge in a given tribe or region? Or, the practical
application: to what extent can future outbreaks be predicted, and where will
they take place?[8]
And although these guesses created
a division between missiologists who could accept them and those that could
not, there was still a base commonality that Barrett proposed. “For our
purposes the number of nations with a minimum gospel witness, the number of
people or people groups without any witness is important only if we identify
where they are and set about to reach them one by one.”[9]
According to Barrett good statistics could lead to more lost people being
identified, and therefore statistics validated missiology’s purposes.
After a
restructuring and renaming of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board,
David Garrison’s statistical study on the emergence of church planting
movements led to a discontinuous change in strategy. In his book Garrison tells
the demographic story of how rapidly reproducing churches are breaking out all
over the world. He relates how India ’s
billion-strong population is experiencing a statistically curious phenomenon
that has resulted in over four thousand new churches within a seven year
period. In China
there are now more than 30,000 baptisms every day and thousands of house
churches being planted each year. A Singapore example highlights a
home-cell mega church phenomenon that has led to the forty-fold explosion of
evangelical Christian adherents. Garrison systematically analyzed these
observations, and his resulting categories of characteristics, universal
elements and common barriers led the International Mission Board to place a
heavier emphasis on reproductive church planting for more than a decade.
[1] Dave
Williams, “Redirecting Members of Short-Term Mission to Unreached People Groups,” Global Missiology 3 (April 2008): 14.
Cited 19 February 2009. Online: http://www.globalmissiology.org/english/docs_pdf/williams_short-term_unreached_peoples_4_2008.pdf.
[2] Dave
Williams, “Redirecting,” 14.
[3] David B. Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary
Religious Movements (Ely House London W.I.: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3.
[4]
The complete title of William Carey’s work is An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the
Conversion of the Heathens. In Which the Religious State
[5]
William Carey, Enquiry, 66.
[6] Roger S. Greenway and Timothy M. Monsma, Cities: Missions’ New Frontier (Grand Rapids
[7] Edward R. Dayton and David A. Frazer Planning Strategies for World Evangelization
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 29.
[8]
Barrett, Schism and Renewal, 5.
[9] Dayton and Frazer, Planning Strategies, 30-31.
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