Lausanne World Pulse – Learning from Ants: Missionary Teams and the Pyramid Model
By Justin Long
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“Perhaps we should build several “pyramids”—moderately |
Our question from the last issue was: How many pioneer missionary teams do we need to serve the unreached of the world, to help find and raise up the local evangelists who can complete the task? If we assume any given missionary team can mentor a local church planting movement that will impact at least 100,000 people (read how we got to this number by clicking here) over the space of a decade, then we arrive at a simple number: forty-three thousand teams.
How can we recruit and send that many teams? Last month we talked about the skyscraper model of mission. This month, we will look at the pyramid model.
Pyramids are an ancient construction, yet one thing can certainly be said for them: they endure. There are about one hundred known pyramids today in Egypt, of which the three best known were built at Giza over four thousand years ago.
Although many possible purposes for the pyramids have been proposed, most of the evidence suggests they were built as tombs—the smallest, for wealthy individuals; the largest, for the great kings of Egypt. The Great Pyramid at Giza was 481 feet high when it was originally built—about twenty percent of the size of a modern skyscraper. (It has since lost about thirty feet due to erosion). Each side measures about 750 meters feet in length, and is oriented to one of the compass points (north, south, east, west). The pyramid consists of approximately two million blocks of stone, each weighing more than two tons. (One source suggests there are enough blocks in the three Great Pyramids to build a one-foot thick wall completely around France).
Pyramids were not confined to Egypt. Some two hundred pyramids were constructed in Nubia (modern Ethiopia) as monuments for their kings and queens. The Mesopotamians also built pyramids, called ziggurats, but because they used mud bricks, little remains of them. Mesoamerican peoples built pyramids; the largest of these is the Great Pyramid of Cholula in Mexico. Pyramids have been found in ancient Rome, and there are also some in China.
There is considerable debate over how the Egyptian pyramids were built, and how many people it took. Some (mostly earlier) estimates suggested a workforce of over 100,000 people, mostly slaves (e.g., the Jews). More recent estimates suggest perhaps fewer than thirty thousand people were required to built the Great Pyramids, and these were mostly rural Egyptians who worked on the monuments during the flood season, when they could not work the fields. Whatever the truth of the matter, the pyramids represented a substantial investment of time and manpower.
What Can We Learn from Pyramids?
- Pyramids are carefully engineered to be stable and enduring. To design a pyramid requires a considerable amount of engineering know-how. Every pyramid is carefully designed so each side is equal, the angles on the corners are exact and each side is oriented to one of the cardinal points of the compass. This requires a significant knowledge of math, geometry and astronomy.
- Pyramids were designed for one particular purpose. One did not hold dinner or garden parties in a pyramid. They were, essentially, tombs. Egyptians invested time in these monuments so people who lived thousands of years after them would know they were there.
- Though not cheap, pyramids are relatively inexpensive. They require a substantial amount of time, manpower and resources to build, as well as some fairly advanced know-how; however, they are not necessarily cutting-edge technology.