Subtitle: The Mission Field as field. . . and forest and river and mountain and topsoil

by Lowell Bliss, guest contributor

Ed has asked me to re-post this article from a recent issue of our Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, in particular as a means to discuss one way in which

Pray to Jesus for Tiger Protection: The people of the Sunderbans Mangroves (#139), from the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest

creation care can affect how the Church goes about doing missions: evangelism, discipleship, and church-planting.  “Go and make disciples of ta ethne, all nations,” the Great Commission says.   Even the Greek renderings of the words indicate that making disciples occurs among ethnic groups, or people groups.  Political nations may grant missionaries their passports and entry visas, but ministry occurs among smaller cultural and linguistic communities.  But what about ministry in something we would define as ecoregions?  To what extent should the local biosphere inform how we preach the Gospel to a particular people group?

A 1982 Lausanne Committee meeting in Chicago offered the following definition of a people group:  “A significantly large ethnic or sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one another. For evangelistic purposes, it is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.”  A creation care perspective looks at this definition from a number of assumptions.  One is that these “individuals” are homo sapiens, and thus not disembodied souls floating in a simple construct of culture and language.  People live, and they live somewhere.  That physical “somewhere” means something; it creates a valid “common affinity for one another.”  It also greatly affects how one hears and interacts with the Gospel.

The example mentioned in the Prayer Digest paragraphs below is of the Hindu and Muslim peoples who live among the tigers of the Indian and Bangladeshi Sunderbans Mangrove forests.  (You can access the entire article at www.edenvigil.organd even sign up for this free monthly e-letter guide to prayer.)  In considering just this one ecoregion, I learned three things I never knew before.

1. I newly learned of a goddess in the Hindu pantheon: Bon Bibi, the “goddess of the forest,” who defeats the demon disguised as a tiger.
2. I learned of a Muslim people group who apparently don’t think twice about participating in Hindu idolatry.   Why they do so is because “spiritual dynamics” invariably trump religious ones, something which traditional people group theory can have trouble computing.
3. That spiritual dynamic is fear, the result of living among the world’s most concentrated population of man-eaters (tigers possibly made more aggressive by the salinity of the tidal waters in their ecoregion.)  The people are afraid and so they pray to Bon Bibi for protection.

Just the little look I took at the Sunderbans was enough for God to put a longing in my heart to tell the people of the Sunderbans Mangrove forest that Jesus Christ is able to protect them from “the devil who prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (I Pet. 5:8).  It certainly has changed the way I pray for them, and all that’s the result of looking at them from an ecoregions perspective.

Here’s the article.  It will serve as an introduction to Christian missions seen through the lense of the World Wildlife Foundation’s Global 200, and to our plans for the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest in 2012:

Praying for the Peoples of the WWF Global 200

I’m scheduled for a phone call today or tomorrow with a publisher whose biggest sticking point on my book manuscript seems to be my environmental reflections on people group theory.  For a few decades now, the missions community has been profitably engaged in classifying the peoples of the world, with an emphasis on the “unreached,” “least-reached,” and “unengaged.”   For however much objective identification we might claim this work to be, there’s a whole lot of subjective conceptualizing in our classifications.  Exactly what cultural and linguistic factors make up this people group, as compared to that one?  What other factors might be important?

There’s actually a great deal at stake in people group theory.  Sometimes it can uncover a people who have been hidden from the Gospel.  We thought we were preaching to everyone, but we were only talking to the larger culture in which this people group had been subsumed and marginalized. People group classifications can help hone our message.  But, as in anything, a “hardening of the categories” can also be harmful.  In North India for example, our team spent a great deal of energy trying to reach a 19th Century vision of “the Brahmin caste,” rather than a 21st Century version of “the emergent middle class.”

Beginning in 2002, the World Wildlife Fund adopted an Ecoregion-Based Conservation (ERBC) strategy.  They defined an ecoregion as “a large area of land or water that contains a geograph-ically distinct assemblage of natural communities that:

(a) share a large majority of their species and ecological dynamics;

(b) share similar environmental conditions, and;

(c) interact ecologically in ways that are critical for their long-term persistence.

     With the help of the Nature Conservancy and other organizations, they reclassified this world of political boundaries and identified 825 terrestrial, 426 freshwater, and 229 coast and shelf marine ecoregions.  From this number, they further identified 238 places which they consider “the most biologically distinct. . . ecoregions of the planet.”  They call these places the Global 200, and according to the subtitle of their fabulously-beautiful photobook, they are “Places That Must Survive.”

Now, employing a definition of environment that understands it additionally as “that which surrounds those we love, those for whom Jesus died,” then people can be understood as one of those species that live in, depend on, and alter for better or worse that ecoregion.  For example, we could take a people group such as the Indian Bengali Hindu people and define them as we’ve traditionally done according to nationality/ethnicity/religious bloc.  But what if we reconceptualized that group of people as “the people of the Sunderbans Mangrove” (#139 of the WWF Global 200.)  What would that suggest for Christian love, evangelism, and church-planting strategy.  What would it suggest for prayer?

In 2012. the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest wants to find out.  Each month we’ll feature a different people group from an unlikely source: the WWF’s Global 200.   Thank you for joining us for another year of prayer.  (Although, if you bow your knee in the Sunderbans, you might sink in the mud.  If you close your eyes, you might get eaten by a tiger.)

Link: WWF Global 200

Link: book Global 200: Places That Must Survive, viewable at Amazon.com here (orderable through your local bookstore)

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil.  Watch for his new podcast, The Agabus Project, to premier this month with an interview with A Rocha’s Peter Harris about the creation care legacy of John Stott.

Related posts:

1. Urbana Dispatch – Final: Foundation for a Movement?
2. People aren’t the only ones who are hungry now
3. Urbana Dispatch #2: Pioneers in a movement
4. Urbana Update #1
5. Urbana Dispatch #3: Yes, we CAN change the world!