EMQ » October–December 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 4
By Brad Gill
In the ’70s when my wife and I had determined we would pursue ministry among Muslims, I remember needing a map. I wasn’t lost, really, but I definitely needed some orientation. The mapping of “unreached peoples” had gained some momentum, and we used it to explore the labyrinth of Muslim peoples. I recall highlighting the Muslim Hui of China, the Kurds of the Middle East, and the Berbers of North Africa.
It was then that the watchword “A Church for Every People” arose and gave impetus and force to mission among unreached peoples. After four decades, it appears to have lost its edge in the American evangelical public. Let me bracket the concept of church, setting it aside for now, and focus on the concept of “peoples.” As a disclaimer, I admit I was quite invested in this idea of peoples – of unreached peoples. I had studied under Donald McGavran at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and had benefited greatly from the anthropology of Paul Hiebert and Charles Kraft. They had effectively hammered at my American evangelical individualism and reshaped my understanding of receptivity among socio-cultural groups. But I had also married into Ralph Winter’s family, and his statistical anthropology would map for me a global ethnoscape of peoples. My wife and I had actually sat with McGavran and Winter when the concept of unreached peoples coalesced into this watchword. To say the least, we were a bit entangled in the assumptions and inclinations behind this missiology of people groups.
We would soon find out, as they say, that “the map is not the territory.”[1]
The complexities of “a church for every people” would mushroom for a younger generation sent to these fields. The evidence of new movements over the arc of forty years is impressive – even unprecedented – and more often confirms the presence of those “bridges of God” that McGavran claimed would transmit the gospel throughout a people. On the other hand, any rough, superficial mapping of people groups had to gain social and anthropological maturation. The temptation has more recently been to discard such a crude mapping of ethno-linguistic peoples. From my experience, I would contend it provided an excellent orientation for ministry.
Re-Mapping the Territory: A Field Odyssey
I arrived in the North African country of Morocco where quite an auspicious league of anthropologists had already done field research. They included Clifford Geertz and Ernst Gellner, each a theoretical leader in their respective schools of thought. For all the rank atheism of modern anthropology, I am greatly indebted to these men and women who began to map out the territory for me. Early French ethnography had divided Arab and Berber in a colonial effort to control that historic Muslim kingdom. While there was substantial social reality to those ethnic distinctions, the reigning king was attempting to assimilate these peoples in an effort to modernize his country.
My wife and I were the first American family to settle into our Atlas mountain town. In the early 80’s there was opportunity to establish a small business that introduced me into the town’s commercial life. Historically, that town had been the nexus of a large confederation of tribes. Their powerful chief had led a heroic tribal resistance against French colonization in the early twentieth century. But when his sons later flipped their support to the French, the monarchy of Morocco had to carefully negotiate this wily region when it established its independence from the French. This was a Berber town which was navigating its way into a modernizing Arab world.
The watchword – A Church for This People – provided a basic map for our purposes in this small urbanizing peasant town. I recall the day down in the center of that market town when I happened upon an old building with the words Dyur Shiukh inscribed on the entry way: “The Houses of the Sheikhs.” This originally had been the small parliament of their tribal confederation. Looking around, there was no immediate indication of that sociological reality. This peasant society appeared to be well on the way to developing a more urban, civic government, and the reality of “peoples” or “tribes” seemed to be dissipating. T. E. Lawrence once said that Arabs didn’t believe in institutions, only individuals, and I wondered if it was true of these Berbers as well.
The local contours of “peoplehood” – that sense of collective social inclusion – only gradually emerged. I can best describe it through different episodes in my relationship with two men who became my dear friends. Abdurahman (Abbas) and Abdulaziz (Aziz) lived in the same town, spoke the same dialect of Berber from that region, but their lives pointed in two very different directions. Those distinct orientations distinguished them socially, culturally, and territorially. Their lives helped my rudimentary attempts to map Berber culture, and eventually to settle on a social watershed which was potentially relevant for any future turning to Christ.
Admittedly, that town forty years later has yet to see a movement to Christ of any significant form. There are encouraging indications of a turning to Christ in the region, especially with new forms of social media. But one of those who had begun to follow Jesus was my friend Aziz. His life helped me appreciate the texture of Berberness in our region.
Aziz’s faith had actually led him out of town, down to the big city where he was able to assimilate into a small but diverse group of Moroccan believers. That’s where I first met him, when I was visiting the senior foreigner who was discipling Aziz. I recall this expatriate’s blunt response when Aziz introduced himself as a Berber from our mountain town, interjecting, “They’re all the same, Arab and Berber.” Morocco certainly gives that impression, but I could tell Aziz had more on his mind. A few months later, he visited us up in his hometown. He became a friend who helped us understand the hidden Berberness of this urbanizing region.
He took us up the road to another town where he had relatives. Sitting on the floor, eating, I watched the sudden transformation of my friend. He became animated and appeared to be experiencing some kind of psychological release. He pulled out the bendir (large, round, hand-held drum) and began to lead a round of traditional Berber songs. The whole environment changed. Gone was his formal and stiff social comportment of the city. He was back home. He was where he belonged.
A year or so later, he visited and asked us a dangerous question, one that would not find a sympathetic ear in his fellowship in the big city. “Would it be all right to marry a girl from my Berber town, even though she is not a Christian?” It seems he had chatted on the bus with a nice girl from town on one of his visits. He could tell she had a sweet spirit and might be open to Christ. Hmmm. Aziz was not getting any younger, and he wanted to marry someone from his home, a Berber who spoke his language. Well, his mind was pretty made up, the marriage happened, and it led to her coming to faith, to children, and a wonderful life together. Marriage is so often the bottom line of identity.
I was tempted to feel Aziz’s decisions were confirming the validity of ethnic identity for communicating Christ into this bilingual, bicultural mountain region. But towns are complex, which became vividly clear when I introduced Aziz to another younger Berber believer in town. As we sat together that day I was surprised by the social distancing, the formality, the absence of any personal affinity. Christian reality had hit a wall. In the days that followed I learned that I was witnessing a severe socio-economic cleavage. Aziz was from a family who had served as privileged serfs on the great landholdings of aristocracy (the oppressor), while my other friend was from a squatter family struggling to make it on the edge of town (the oppressed). So much for a wonderfully homogenous people. The urban realities of mega-cities were already manifesting in this modest-sized mountain city. An ethnic map is not the actual territory.
This ethnic reality was made even more clear when I got to know yet another friend, Abbas. He was from a small oasis on the other side of the mountains, where the Sahara begins to stretch south into Africa. That’s the opposite direction of the big city where Aziz had gone. But Abbas had made good, had attended the big university, and was now an Arabic teacher at the local high school in town.
His Berber dialect, while not the same, was linguistically intelligible to those in town, but his demeanor was very different. I should have noticed it in the way he walked, but I gradually caught it in conversation as he helped me learn the local language. He was a proud man. Affable, fun, but proud. I eventually came to understand that there was a distinct sense of honor emanating from these Saharans. One day I was walking down the main street and Abbas called to me. He was sitting at one of the local cafés with fellow teachers from the high school. Come to find out they were all from different points on the Saharan side of the Atlas. Their territorial affinity even overcame their major linguistic differences, and they were sealed together by the deep cultural estrangement they felt on this side of the mountains. These were Abbas’s people.
One local reality explains much of this social division between Abbas and Aziz. This mountain city was known throughout the country for its prostitution. It was a morally dirty town, whose excesses my other friend Aziz could easily rationalize away. But my friend Abbas blushed when admitting this reality to me as a foreigner. The dignity bred in those desert regions resisted the pull from this den of iniquity. This explained his Islamic religiosity: very little participation in public ritual, but a dogmatic personal identity as a “clean” Muslim. He was nothing like the puritanical movements which had emerged out of the desert over the centuries, but he claimed the same desert roots as their religious prophet, Mohammed. There was a clear pride of place.
A local like Aziz might accept Christianity, but Abbas’s religious identity would never transit that religious barrier. Christianity was identified with the West, with the colonial oppression of the French. I remember the day Abbas and I were walking across the hillside behind my home and we suddenly found ourselves walking in and out of little pits in the landscape. “What are these holes?” I asked. Abbas was embarrassed. “These were the local grave sites of the French whose caskets were dug up and sent back to France after independence.” Abbas was not a violent man, but he nevertheless aligned his religious honor against any oppressive colonial modernity.
There also remained a deep Berberness in Abbas, and I learned it was the key to opening his hardened religious spirit. He would tell me over the years that I should go to see the maraboutin (holy ones) who crafted and sold rugs in the mountains. Interesting. These were Catholic sisters in that mountain region who made carpets as a way to employ and support local Berber tribes. I was not sure of his interest in them. But then he offered a story from when he was in high school and boarding in the town where these sisters had a small convent. On one occasion, he was sick and hospitalized at the local clinic where he had befriended a very young Berber girl in the bed next to his. She was waiting for her mommy to come.
Abbas tells how the day came when her mommy arrived, but to his utter surprise this mommy was one of those foreign sisters dressed in mountain Berber attire. She could speak fluent Berber, and she turned to Abbas, and thanked him for caring for her “daughter.” Apparently, this woman traveled with and cared for a transnational Berber tribe, and it was this indigenous, authentic expression of Christian love that had bypassed all of Abbas’s defenses. He was in awe of these women who followed the Christian way.
The territory was gradually taking shape. Two men, Abbas and Aziz, situated in a single ethno-linguistic identity, classified themselves differently. Their way of constructing sameness, of including and excluding others, was self-evident to them. Their perceptions were what anthropologists might call a “folk classification.” These anecdotal experiences with Abbas and Aziz were my way of beginning to discover how group identities were distinguished across this Berber terrain. This was their map, not mine. And that indigenous map shows the territory so vital for the natural diffusion of the gospel.
Some Reflections on Mapping Peoples
But let’s get back to our maps and, in particular, our own classification of “people groups.” From my experience I would want to suggest three things.
The map of unreached people groups is a reduction, but it is a useful one.
Essentially all maps are abstractions and leave out a lot of detail. All maps are wrong, but some can be useful.[2] Accuracy is important, but their usefulness is the way they direct our attention and initially guide us. But we can begin to confuse this map of people groups with actual reality.
For many people, the model creates its own reality… We forget that reality is a lot messier. The map isn’t the territory.[3]
The ethno-linguistic map of the Berber peoples was a place for me to begin. Remember, thinking about people groups was counterintuitive for me as an American, and this map can reaffirm an essential social reality: people will map themselves in society. This people group sensibility – though quite abstract and reductionist – forced my American eye to see the social realities of Berber peoples.
The map of unreached peoples has strategic limitations.
… the first step is to realize that you do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations. We must always be vigilant by stepping back to understand the context in which a map is useful…[4]
People group thinking has been legitimately criticized for the way it can cause us to ignore the wider context.[5] Admittedly, our modern taxonomic propensity can push us to overreach and invest too much in a simple ethno-linguistic model. Reaching “every tribe, language, nation and people” is certainly our end. It is a biblical promise, a biblical task, and a biblical objective. But it does not warrant a narrow strategic focus on ethnicity, groupness and cultural homogeneity. One must appreciate the entire context God is using, what McGavran used to call the “human matrix.”
For example, urbanization as a human system intersects with ethnicity and apparently seems to make inconsequential any folk classification. It’s obvious that Abbas’ and Aziz’s children face a whole new set of conditions. The acceleration of globalization may erode their traditional maps of group identity. Modern processes of social dis-embedding, self-reflexivity, and cultural hybridity, as well as migration, poverty and epidemics may loosen or even dissolve the social categories of their parents. Consequently, they may acquire a more modern structure of consciousness, or they could experience that pervasive homelessness that erodes their once more socially intact background. New freedoms could bring deep disaffection and malaise, and new generations will no doubt entertain options. Any counter-actualization could choose from new ideologies, indigenous art forms or socio-religious associations that champion traditional values. Old maps are re-constructed into new maps that then re-create belonging.
All to say, we must respect the limitations of this map of unreached peoples. Every mission sending base, every training institution and curriculum, must recognize and transcend the way the map may appear more real than the territory. Any effective missiology requires it.
The map of unreached peoples is based on a principle.
The map is not the main thing. The interactions with Abba and Aziz are not solely for pinning down their homogenous social affinities. The map emerges from the use of a compass, a more basic principle, and McGavran would state it in a sentence: “Men like to turn to Christ without crossing ethnic and linguistic barriers.”[6] That principle might be stated a number of ways, but it will always emphasize familiarity as fundamental to the context in which people prefer to turn to Christ.
During my years in Morocco the principle was confirmed across the border in Algeria. We continually heard of an unprecedented movement to Christ – a church – among the Berbers of the Kabyle mountains – a people. I would witness this extensive fellowship when I traveled into France. But that momentum never crossed into our Berber region. The principle, it seemed, was a fairly good compass for our region of the world.
Conclusion
I like to think the Apostle Paul anticipated this entire discussion about mapping unreached peoples. His missiology of peoples appears when he speaks to those Athenians of the diverse peoples (ethne) of mankind (Acts 17) and the way God would determine their “allotted times” and the “boundaries to their dwelling places” (17:26–27). His motivation was not the map, but a deeper apostolic compass for reaching all peoples: “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find Him.” The map is an afterthought, but a very strategic thought at that. It’s all about peoples finding God.
Brad Gill is Senior Editor of the International Journal of Frontier Missiology. After assisting in the founding years of the U. S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, now Frontier Ventures, he served in North Africa for thirteen years. He is currently President of the International Society for Frontier Missiology.
Notes
[1] “The Map Is Not the Territory,” Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2015/11/map-and-territory/.
[2] “The Map,” Farnam Street, quote from George Box.
[3] “The Map,” Farnam Street.
[4] “The Map,” Farnam Street.
[5] Brian Howell and Edwin Zehner, ed., Power and Identity in the Global Church (William Carey Publishers, 2009).
[6] Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 198.
EMQ, Volume 56, Issue 4. Copyright © 2020 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
