August 01, 1985 by John A. Holzmann

They had often told one another that, when they retired, they would go where the Lord led. But if it hadn't been for some unusual promptings, one wonders what might have become of those promises.

Two years ago Barney Mcclain would not have thought it possible that he should be working at the U S. Center for World Mission. But even skilled managers find their plans and objectives overruled.

God is the final authority on job descriptions and performance standards. They are His objectives, in the end, that we must fulfill. And so, a 72 year old master of Management by Objective found himself in a managerial rote he would not have picked for himself.

Barney McClain and his wife, Esther, came to the U.S. Center for World Mission from Portland, Oregon, a year ago, seven years after Barney retired as plant manager for a tool manufacturing firm.

Barney now manages the Centers Extension Ministries Department and Esther works as switchboard operator/receptionist, and hostess for Center visitors.

The Mcclaios had often promised one another that, when they retired, they would go where the Lord led to tell people about Him.

But if it hadn't been for some unusual promptings, one wonders what might have become of those promises.

Barney tells the story.

"We had some friends in the Philippines who had said that, when we retired, they'd like us to come out and help them with their work among the middleand upper class people in Manila.

"When they talked to us about it we said we'd come out there, but we really didn't give it much thought.

"Now we had both been involved in Bible studies  Bible Study Fellowship. Esther had been in it for 10 years. But as I approached retirement, the Lord began to lead us away from it.

'Just a couple of days after I retired, I sent a letter to BSF headquarters resigning from the class the following May. And a day or two after that, we went to church, and a letter from our friends in the Philippines was waiting for us. It said, 'We've been praying about this for several months. Now is the time for you to crone.'"The timing of it, right after I'd sent the letter of resignation  we took it to be a sign from the Lord.'

So, after finishing a Master's degree program at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland (Barney's thesis concerned the use of Management by Objective in a local church setting), the McCtains went, and spent 19 months in the Philippines working with their friends.

The fact that they left the Philippines had nothing to do with their personal desires. God moved them.

Barney got an allergic cough that he couldn't get rid of. Their mission board thought it would be better if the McClains left the tropics.

Back in Portland, their home church had just called a young pastor with no previous experience. "He was looking for some grey hairs to balance his youth,' says Barney. "1 qualified for the grey hairs. And so our home church called me to be a pan time associate pastor doing visitation and conducting home Bible studies."

Three years passed relatively quietly, and then, just over a year ago, Barney was reading about different opportunities in missions when he noticed a listing for the U.S. Center.

We were vaguely familiar with the Center," says Barney. "We saw several possibilities that we thought we might be interested in. Since we had a son  in law who was graduating from Fuller in June, we decided that, since we'd be here anyway, we might as well visit the Center."

They did. And they "weren't too impressed."

Barney continues:

"We came down here Saturday morning A dynamic role for a senior team and the whole place was closed up. Nobody was around. Bruce Graham he's one of the finance men here  happened to conic in with one of his children. He said, Come back Monday morning at 8:30 and have a tour then.

Well, we didn't want to come back Monday. We wanted to leave early to get to Sunnyvale to visit our daughter there. So we picked up a little literature.

But we finally did decide to come Monday morning and one of the guides showed us the slides.

"We were getting fidgety, wanting to go. We didn't want to take time to get the whole picture not time for the tour. But we picked up more literature. Bruce Graham went by and we didn't know what was going on  but he threw down an application blank along with all the papers we were picking up."

"Well, when we were at our daughter's she asked, What do you think? Are you going to work at the Center?"

I said, "Well, maybe sometime. It's about a 10 to 90 chance."

We went home. I went to our pastor, and said, "Kurt, I need to tell you, it's about a 20 80 chance that we're going to go."

Each one of them said, "We don't want you to go, but we feel like you should."

And he said, Well, I knew we couldn't hang onto you too long, because of your interest in missions.'

Well, then Evelyn Varney, an old friend of ours, a retired Conservative Baptist missionary, was with her family in Portland. We went over to visit her this is the same week, right after we got back from Pasadena.

"It turns out, she works in the Personnel Department at the Center. When she found out that we were interested in coming, she got quite excited, and said. We have a dozen jobs for you!'

Well. It went up to 40-60 at that point.

"But we were struggling. We went to church Sunday night and Esther was in tears. I was afraid people would think we'd had a quarrel or something.But she was just struggling with it."

Esther chimes in:

"I could hardly think about what was going on, because all of this was in the back of my mind."

Then we went to bed and I said, "We've just got to go!" That was on Sunday.

"At church we'd asked a special couple to pray for us. And on Saturday I asked a close friend. And on Monday we asked our neighbors who are also close friends. So there were five people besides our girls who were really praying for us."

"Each one of them said, "We don't want you to go, but we feet like you should."

Barney: 'I'm a real stick in the mud. I don't move fast on a change like this. I stay put. But we made our decision Tuesday morning.

"Now there were several things after that.

"We filled out an application blank. We said, 'Well, let's wait until Saturday. We wont mail it. We want to be sure. Maybe the Lord is going to close the door.'

"But by Friday we both said, we'd better mail it."

Esther: "We came down for an interview, and we told them at the interview that we'd come down the end of September or the 1st of October, but when we got home from that we thought, there's no point in our staying here! We've made our mind up to go, so we might just as well go.

"And so we came the middle of August instead of six weeks later."

Barney: "Well, we saw the need here, and we were just no good up there. Our minds were down here. And to halve our bodies there and our minds here just didn't work."

To listen to them tell it, you'd almost think they were a couple of starry eyed newly weds, But Barney and Esther have been married 50 years. And they've raised five daughters. They have seven grandchildren. Barney managed a manufacturing plant with over 200 employees. He's won awards and earned a graduate degree in management.

So how can they justify a seemingly childlike jump into the unknown?

Says Barney:

"To leave a home that we've lived in for 43 years, and a church of which we were charter members, and friends we'd lived with, and our very special grandson, and daughter and son in¬law there; and neither one of us liked Southern California  we've been down through here many times, and we just never liked Southern California: well, only the Lord can take us out of that and bring us here and give us a peace and joy.

"We are supremely happy."

"It's just the peace of the Lord," says Esther.

"We're doing what He led us to do," says Barney.

"We went back to Portland in November and spent Thanksgiving there. As we drove along, we found that about 90 percent of the time we spent talking about things back here, nothing about what we were going to in Portland. And that was such a transformation.

"We thought that we would have sort of a romantic attachment to the house, because you don't live in a house for 43 years without it becoming a part of you. But we did  we were able to detach ourselves from it.

"We have a seminary couple that are living in it. We're renting it to them for just enough to pay for the taxes and insurance on the place. We're helping them because they're having a real struggle to get through seminary.

"We're paying twice as much rent for our little gingerbread house as what we're getting for the rent of the house in Portland.

"We live in a little house just across the street from the Center, one of the houses that the Center owns.

"To compare it with our home in Portland  there's just no comparison.

"Things are different. But we find ourselves very, very happy."

Written by John A. Holzmann. based on an interview conducted by Mary Ruth Cutlee.

You may have seen it in 'The Church Around the World' put out by Tyndale House Publishers. The June 1985 issue (vol. 15. no. 7) had an article titled "Number of Unevangelized Drops."

"The number of unevangelized people in the world now stands at 1.3 billion, four percent less than in 1980," said the article. '. . . The unevangelized now constitute 28 percent of the world's population.'

The statistics upon which this article was based came from David Barrett, an Anglican statistician and editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia.

I saw this article and wondered, Now wait second! Who's right? The U.S. Center and others who follow them claim that somewhere around half the world's population is unreached.

Barrett, on the other hand, says that barely a quarter of the world's people are unevangelized. Who's right?

Actually, Barrett and the U.S. Center are talking about two different concepts, and they use two different words.

When a people group is unevangelized, it is, necessarily, unreached. But the reverse is not true. When a people has been evangelized, it has not necessarily been "reached" in the technical sense of that word as used by the U.S. Center.

The words unreached and unevangelized refer to two different concepts, two different ideas, and we need to understand the difference.

Evangelized and Unevangelized

First of all, unevangelized. What does that mean?

According to Barrett, evangelism is specifically related to Gospel proclamation. Evangelized, he says, refers to "the state of having had the good news spread or offered; the state of being aware of Christianity, Christ and the gospel' (World Christian Encyclopedia. pg. 826).

'(Evangelization) is often used incorrectly as if it were synonymous with conversion .... In fact it has, throughout Christian history, always been used in a broader sense to mean the spreading of the Good News of Jesus Christ and the pro. clamation of the gospel of the Cross.

(WCE, pg. 119).

By Barrett's definition, a person is evangelized if and when he has been exposed to the gospel.

By Barrett's definition, a person is evangelized if and when he has been exposed to the Gospel. So when he speaks of evangelism, evangelization, or evangetizedness he is saying nothing at all about response or responsiveness.

Notice, then. When Barrett says the number of unevangelized people has dropped in the last five years, he is saying nothing about the number of Christians in the world. He is saying nothing about conversions. tie is making no comment about the effectiveness of evangelistic efforts.

Indeed, in the 'Church Around the World" article we read that 'the number of Christians has actually declined by one half percent during the same period.'

So. When Barrett says the number of unevangelized has dropped, all he is saying is that the gospel has been "spread or offered" to several million people.

Barretl, then, is measuring possible exposure, not the impact or significance of that exposure. He is saying something like the radio broadcaster who announced, "25 million people went to the beach yesterday." That is a significant observation, but it is not equivalent to saying, '25 million people got a tan, a burn, or a nice, warm feeling yesterday," or even, "25 million people sat in the sun.'

Some of those people may not have sat in the sun. Perhaps they sat under a beach umbrella, or went scuba diving.

Barrett's statistics merely tell us how many could have been exposed to the suit at the beach if.

One more point, though, before we move on.

Even though Barrett's statistics measure merely the extent to which the gospel has been offered¬ how many people could have heard the gospel message  we should give him credit he is involved in a biblical pursuit.

Matthew 24:14 says "the end" will not come until "this gospel of the Kingdom has been preached in all the world as a testimony to all nations."

Jesus links His return to the preaching of the gospel as a testimony to all nations. If we are to be aware of the signs of our times, we must know to whom the gospel has been offered. to whom it has been preached. If we look forward to the coming of our Lord and Savior, we look forward to the day when all nations will have heard the testimony of His gospel. In Barrett's words, evangelization is an Eschatological Sign  a sign of the end. We need to be aware of how we're doing: who has had the opportunity to hear.

Reached and Unreached

By definition, an unreached people is "a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Chris darts able to evangelize this people group' (Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, Chicago, March 16, 1982).

Primarily, reachedness refers to the presence or absence of an indigenous church within a cultural system. That's the basis for the slogan "A Church for Every People by the Year 2000." When there is a church for every people, every people will have been reached.Notice. Reachedness dues no, refer to the presence or absence of Christians in the midst of a people. There may be 10,000 Christians living and working among a particular people group and they may be witnessing and evangelizing diligentiy, but the people may remain unreached. One mission researcher has said, "The question is not, 'Is the church in the people?' but rather, 'Is the people in the church?"

What matters is not whether or not there are Christians among a people, not even whether or not there is a Christian witness. What matters is whether or not members of the people group are members of the church. And, more than that, whethe, or not the church of which they are members is culturally  relevant (indigenous).

Do members of the people group see the church as "their own" ..something that belongs to or belongs in their culture  or is it perceived as strictly something for eign? If the church is owned by the peo pie, if it is recognized as something mdi genous to that culture, something belong ing to it, then that cultural group may be said to be reached.

As with evangelism, so too with reachedness: at root it is a biblical concept. In Revelation 5:9 and 10, for instance, we are told that, prior to His return, prior to the Great Tribulation, Jesus will have "purchased men for God from every tribe and language arid people and nation" and will have 'made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God."

Jesus will not return until some from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation have been purchased by God. When we pray, "Come quickly, Lord Jesus!" we pray that the mustached will be reached, that the missionary task will be fulfilled, that some from every people group will be brought to know our Lord. This fact alone provides much of the impetus for the frontier mission movement.

But while we want to recognize its biblical character, its biblical roots, we need to understand that reachedness is more than a tool for discerning the signs of our times. It is more than a meter to tell us how close Jesus' return is. Reachedness is a strategic concept.

Revelation 5:9 and 10 tells us that the purpose of those who have been redeemed is to serve God as a kingdom and priests.

A priest is a mediator, he is a medium by which a message is communicated. In this case, those who are redeemed by God are called to communicate the gospel  to theft own people, and to other nations.

Part of the reason for thinking in terms of reached and unreached peoples is to discover the relative ease with which people can turn to Christ. When a people is reached, members of that people can become Christians far more easily than when it is unreached.

As Dr. Ralph Winter, director of the U.S. Center for World Mission, says, when a people has been reached, an 'indigenous beachhead' has been established, a "missiological breakthrough' has occurred. Members of reached groups are far more likely to see the gospel as a realistic, culturally relevant option for them than are members of unreached peoples.

Says Winter, "It is no more likely that fish will crawl out on the land to get the bait than that individuals embedded in a social matrix (especially a non Western one) will be likely to walk out to become Christians.

"It is our duty to move into their world and win people within it. We must not be modem members of 'the party of the circumcision' by demanding, directly or indirectly, that people ignore the social and family bonds within which they have grown up."

A people has been reached, then, when it becomes possible for a member of that group to become a Christian without breaking social and family ties: in other words, when it becomes possible for a person to become a Christian without at the same time being perceived  by himself or others  as joining a different cultural group.

So. Reachedness has to do with the existence of an indigenous church within a people. Evangelizedness has to do with the existence of a witness. Reachedness answers the question: "Is them a community of believers within this people that is viewed as being at home among this people, part of this people?" Evangelizedness answers the question: "Is the gospel message being proclaimed among this people?" Both concepts have scriptural roots, and both are essential to effective missionary strategy.

Reachedness has to do with the existence of an indigenous church within a people.

Proclamation and response, evangelism and reachedness must both take place. Both need to be measured. Both ought to be taken into account. They are related, but they are not the same. Those who are unreached must be reached. The unevangelized must be evangelized.

People of God: we have work to do. We have a task before us. About half the world's population lives in 17,000 wholly or largely unreached people groups. And 28 percent of the world's population remains virtually unevangelized. Let us be about our work! Pray the Lord of the harvest that He will send out laborers into His harvest field.

Further information on this topic can be gleaned from the World Christian Encyclopedia, $37.50 through the Mission Fron tiers Book Service (inside back page), and from the international Journal of Frontier Missions, Vol. 1, No. 2, normally $5, available through the Mission Frontiers Book Service together with the other three issues of Volume I at the special discount price of $10.

For a thorough review of the World Christian Encyclopedia, you are encouraged to peruse Missiology, Vol. XII, No. 1, January 1984.