What Happens When A People Group is Reached?

“You guys are Christians, right?”

I admit, I was a bit surprised. After 10 years of working among an unreached language group called the Chon* in a closed country, our family didn’t have a lot of people asking us about our worldview. But I could tell something was different about Arzhaana.*

She asked if she could meet with us because she had a spiritual crisis. Until the day before, she had been a committed atheist, although it wasn’t something she talked about, since most of her people group viewed their own Tibetan Buddhist worldview as an essential part of their own ethnic identity.

But with an aunt’s health failing, and the doctors unable to do anything to help, her family had decided to visit a shaman to perform a ceremony in a last-ditch effort to enlist some help from the spiritual realm she didn’t really believe in.

As she entered the shaman’s hut, not expecting anything except to sit in the back during the ceremony, he immediately singled her out, called her by name and described to her in some detail the nightmare she had the night before.

In an instant, her ordered worldview of purely naturalist explanations for everything in the world was shattered. She hadn’t told a soul about the recurring nightmares she was having, and somehow this shaman had known all about it!

FROM NORTH CAROLINA TO CENTRAL ASIA 

Just a few short years before this happened, there wasn’t a church among this particular central Asian people group. When people like Arzhaana had spiritual questions, the only ones they knew had any insight were the Buddhist lamas and the shamans.

In this case, however, things were different. Years before, a small, rural church in North Carolina had decided to send out a young couple, first to be trained in phonetics and cross-cultural communication, and finally into the field to study the Chon language. And now that family, my family, was finally at the point where we had started to share the gospel with the Chon people.

It was very difficult to get to the point where we could share the gospel effectively in this language. There were many difficult years of preparation and equipping, language and culture study, and many logistical challenges before we could communicate on a worldview level in their language.

But the actual evangelism? Shockingly, it seemed to go easily! 

In many ways, it felt like we were farmers who, tired of throwing seed on the same long-hardened, weed-choked pathways, decided to hike up into the mountains, fight our way through dense, thorny forest, and somehow emerged into a valley where the Holy Spirit had gone before us to plow and irrigate a small, productive field.

We didn’t have to do anything special when it came to throwing seed. We just told people the stories from the new Bible translation in their language, and they responded. As one of the early believers told me, “Jay, I feel like I’m in the desert, everyone around me is dying of thirst, and I’m offering free cups of water!”

One of the things I don’t think we appreciate as outsiders is how hopeless people are who live in unreached language groups. It is hard to articulate the helpless feeling that permeates a culture that believes deeply in spiritual entities and powers, but have no experience of those powers acting for their good. 

The wind shifted when you were about to let an arrow fly at the wild pigs? Your kids are crying with hunger for the third night in a row? Your already desperate financial situation is made impossible because of drought during the growing season? Should have made sure that the spirits were on your side!

Every missionary to an animistic people has encountered these kinds of stories. The real crux of the problem, of course, is that there is no guarantee that you have ever really placated the spirits. In an animistic worldview, there can never be any assurance that the spirit world, which everyone knows is full of capricious, even malicious spirits, will deliver when you need it to.

This hopelessness can stifle creativity and enterprise, like a shroud hanging over every aspect of life. But in God’s gracious providence, it can also lead to a real hunger for the gospel. And when the gospel of Christ is first proclaimed, the contrast between those living in fear and those living in hope is impossible to ignore.

The resulting baby church can be one of the most remarkable miracles you might ever hope to see anywhere – a people who face the same challenges (and many new ones as opposition emerges!), except now through a lens of trust in the bedrock of Christ and his redeeming blood.

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

Our family was blessed beyond measure to be a part of this in one remote corner of central Asia. People just like Arzhaana, terrified and confused, heard the gospel for the first time as we walked through the narrative of Scripture. Some (certainly not all) believed, and the result was the first Chon church.

I don’t mean to imply that everything from that point was straightforward. What a difference, however, to have men and women standing next to you in the foxhole, eagerly soaking up what the Bible had to say and strategizing together with us how to reach the rest of their people.

All of that was over 10 years ago now. 

Eventually, we discipled these new believers and several of the men met the qualifications of eldership. The baby Chon church joyfully ordained them. At some point, we realized that in order for them to truly grow independently, it would be better if we moved away, so we returned to the U.S. to help other young families go out and plant churches in other unreached peoples around the world.

Of course, we left a large part of our hearts behind among the Chon. We continue to return for visits and regularly text back and forth with the church leaders there. Perhaps the greatest joy I have is, like the Apostle John wrote in 3 John 1:4, “to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”

And that gets at the heart of what happened among the Chon perhaps better than anything else: where once there was only darkness and deception, now, a ray of light and truth. There are still only a few hundred believers among a people of almost three hundred thousand, so to be sure, there remains much work to be done. I long to see the day when the first seminary emerges, when the first Chon is sent out as a missionary to other peoples, and the like.

In the meantime, however, we celebrate each new believer. Each new story of God’s grace reaching into a unique and hopeless situation and rescuing someone “from the domain of darkness and [bringing them] into the kingdom of his beloved Son” is yet another example of what it means for a people group to be reached (Col. 1:13).

That, ultimately, is what missions is actually about. In the same way that a diamond’s brilliance is seen anew as each facet reflects the light in a unique pattern, the glory of our God is seen distinctively in each people group as they hear about and respond to the sacrifice of His Son. Revelation 5:9-10 sums it up:

“Worthy are you to take the scroll
    and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
    from every tribe and language and people and nation,

and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
    and they shall reign on the earth.”