Lausanne World Pulse – Learning from Ants: Missionary Teams and the Skyscraper Analogy
By Justin Long
July 2007
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 over the space of a decade, then we arrive at a simple number: forty-three thousand teams.
So, then, how can we recruit and send that many teams? That is a question we will begin to address in this issue.
The Task Before Us
First, we need to remember that this number is too simple and that we must not take it too literally. The unevangelized world is far more complicated. For example, many ethne are very large. How should teams be allocated? By countries, provinces or cities? By sociopolitical grouping? By age group? For men, for women? We may indeed need more than one team per 100,000 people.
And, some ethne are very small, perhaps only ten thousand people. Do they still need a team? Should teams be sent to “clusters” of peoples? Does an ethne having different castes within it need separate teams? How many people should be on a typical team? These are truly very difficult problems that will affect the total number of teams needed and the number of workers required.
The real value of the forty-three thousand figure is this: it opens our eyes to the scope of what is required. Let us assume each team has, at minimum, two people (a stretch, but the bare minimum for the word “team”). Think of D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey. With two people each, we need eighty-six thousand individuals.
Does anyone come close to this? Let’s look at the big picture in rough estimates:
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