* Once upon a time, long ago, in a distant land, a shepherd made a paradigm shift. He decided that it was not cost effective to go wandering around at night in dangerous places during a storm just to look for one lost sheep. How much was just one sheep worth compared with the hourly wages of the shepherd? He decided that precision, efficiency and predictability were more important than meandering around in the night calling out for just one lost sheep that had already heard the call many times. He decided it would be a much better use of funds if he would allocate his resources to locating lots of sheep who had never heard the call of the shepherd. He thought, "if a lost sheep clearly hears my call one time and doesn’t come, it’s time to move on to other potential lost sheep." The new paradigm would cost a lot less per sheep. “Fewer dollars per lamb” was the new slogan.
* Since the emerging paradigm demanded precision, he met with an international committee of itinerant shepherds to precisely define unreached and unevangelized. Maybe the unevangelized sheep were those who had never heard the call of the shepherd, and unreached are sheep who heard the call, but have not yet arrived back in the sheep fold. Since sheep tend to move in flocks they could proudly proclaim that an area had been fully reached when 20% of the lost sheep were safely in the fold. With this wonderful paradigm, billions of sheep could now be classified as evangelized and reached while every single one of them is still lost and outside the fold.
* The parable could go on and on, but maybe the crucial problem is not the definition of evangelized or unreached, but the deeper problem of an innapropriate paradigm shift. The Good Shepherd doesn’t count the cost of finding a lost sheep and is not motivated by a cult of efficiency, but is passionately in love with lost lambs.
As someone who is passionate about research and the unevanelized/unreached factor, I found myself at once both at odds with and in agreement with this post. I agree with the general thrust of it, but there are aspects of unreached/unevangelized that your parable doesn't take into account. The primary purpose of the unreached/unevangelized research - as created by researchers - was to illustrate the fact that > 90% of Christian work is done among peoples who are being saturated with calls, and < 10% among peoples who rarely hear the Gospel or who have never heard it. In other words, to use the words of your parable, >90% of the work is being done within the fold, and <10% being done outside where the lost sheep roam. The simple fact is that most evangelism is being done "in someone else's fold." Now, maybe these are true believers, and maybe not, and that's not an issue I'd want to get into here. What I consistently ask for is balance: 33% of work done among people who are nominally Christian, 33% among those who have heard the call but not yet responded, and 33% among those who have never heard once. That way all have a much better chance to follow Christ.
ReplyDelete