The Peoples
July 23, 2008 1:07 pm Blogs
People are fascinated with people. Two of the top magazines in the country are PEOPLE and US Weekly. People are interested in people. Whether you’re in an airport or a mall, people are always secretly looking at each other while trying to be seen looking. But having a true people focus, that goes beyond uncaught glances isn’t that easy. Common, the hip hop artist, says this in his song titled The People, “We do it for the people…the struggles of the brothas and the folks…lovers under dope, experiment to discover hopes…Scuffle for notes, the rougher I wrote, times were harder…Went from rocky starter to a voice of a martyr.” It’s not easy to really care for people.
An ongoing discussion, exploration, and thoughtful interaction with culture and people groups is part of the lifeblood of who we are as The Resolved Church in San Diego. It permeates our individual relationships, our community, and our missional philosophy. So I want to pose this question: what makes a people a people? What is a people group? If understanding and reaching out to people groups is an integral part of how the gospel works in lives, then we must know what a people is.
When Christians used to hear the word “missions” they would think that meant sending a pastor and his wife to some foreign land or territory who had not yet heard of Jesus. In 1974 at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism, this striking truth was made known, the gospel had penetrated to every country of the world BUT regardless of the geographical boundaries being crossed, four out of five people still had yet to even hear the gospel BECAUSE the boundaries were not geographical but cultural (including worldview, ethnicity, and language).
It has been over 30 years since that Lausanne Congress and little has changed because Christians and churches have been very slow to recognize that their neighbor is very likely just as different from them as the person who lives in some indigenous tribe half way across the world. Missions is now next door and understanding people as part of a people group is essential to the task of missions. Many churches and Christians from other countries are now sending people to the US because they are looking at how lost we are and looking at the US church and seeing that we no longer understand mission.
So what is a people group? The Bible’s word is ethnos, where we get the word ethnicity. Amazingly, it NEVER refers to an individual. It is always a group of people, often times translated “nation,” though not always necessarily referring to a people who are self-governing (have a form of government). For a great exegetical discussion of ethnos, see chapter 5 in John Piper’s great book on mission called “Let the Nations Be Glad.”
There have been several attempts to define a people group. Part of the difficulty is determining where the line is between a cultural interest group and the formulation of an actual people. Essentially what makes a people group a people group is when there is a set of common set of identity factors such as age, race, religious worldview, language, commitments, and history. One person may belong to several groups but there is one people group they find the most affinity with.
Here are several good websites addressing the issue of people groups both foreign and next door:
- Joshua Project
- North America People Groups Project
- People Groups
- Take it Global
To get to know your neighbor and what people group they are a part of and/or from is an essential first task in the mission of the gospel for them. Here are a few questions you can use to get to know a person and their ethnos.
- How long have you lived here? Where were you born or was your family from?
- How many brothers or sisters do you have, where are they, what do they do?
- What is your primary language and what other languages do you know?
- What do you do for fun, what are your hobbies? Are there a bunch of people you hang out with who have those similar interests?
- What do you do for work? How did you get into that? Do you enjoy it?
- What are some of the “unique words” of your field of work or hobby interests that most people might not know about or understand?
- What is your religious or spiritual background?
- What do you think about Jesus?
- What do you feel like is your biggest need in life right now?
- What do you think San Diego’s biggest needs are?
- How can I pray for you?
You’d be surprised at how much people enjoy you taking an interest in their life. It is not often that an individual stops to ask another real questions about who they and how they are doing. Most people love talking about themselves and wish people would ask them questions like these. When you do ask, they feel loved, like you actually care about them. And that provides an opportunity or a platform for the work of the gospel.
I wrote about “The Peoples” this week because the theme of last week’s sermon was God’s care and plan to have mercy on all people groups. God is a missional God and cares about the peoples. Do you? Who are you currently trying to reach out to and gather data about their world so that you can hopefully lead them into the gospel? May God grant us as The Resolved Church, the wisdom and the grace to respond to Jesus’ words to “Go therefore and make disciples of all peoples (Matt 28:19).”
- Pastor Duane