Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Unreached People Groups in Africa and Beyond
By Reuben Ezemadu
August 2009
The Unreached People Groups (UPGs) concept is very popular among evangelicals, especially those who take the Great Commission very seriously. A lot has been written and many strategies have been designed as to how the UPGs are to be reached. Although I will make references to some of these writings and strategies, my main desire is to highlight the current implications of the people group concept, especially from an African perspective, in the context of present global realities.
The people group concept has been a major plank of the African National Initiatives. It is also the basis of the current exercise by the Movement for African National Initiatives (MANI) as per the following statement:
The Movement for African National Initiatives believes that mobilization of the African Church will be heightened by country-level assessments of the unfinished task. For the next two years MANI regional and country coordinators will make it their priority to begin updating the Joshua Project list of people groups, particularly those considered least-reached. Several countries have begun forming review teams or even research networks for accomplishment of this goal.
The Joshua Project List, which, among others, is the basis of the assessment, is the most authoritative source for definitions, clarifications, and strategies of the UPGs concept. One of the principal authors of the list and some of the “actors” on the field are part of the MANI team championing this new effort in Africa.
My desire is for us to see how and where changes regarding UPGs have occurred and to capture the new parameters which are redefining the concept and invariably would determine our priorities and impact our strategies.
Origin of the Concept and Evolution of the Definitions
The concept of a people group, defined by common language and culture, emanated from the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. In 1982, a common definition for a people group was: “For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the gospel can spread as a church-planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” The Joshua Project Web site defines the term this way: “A people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group.” Such a group is therefore regarded as “Unreached or Least-Reached People Group.”
The debate, however, continues as to what constitutes the indices of a people group. Such efforts to clarify the task and develop appropriate strategies have led to further expositions on the concept, bringing up terms such as least evangelized people groups, ethno-linguistic families, unengaged people groups, affinity blocks, gateway peoples, and people clusters.
The Unreached People Groups of Africa
The issue in this article is not to quote figures or describe the UPGs in Africa. There are already enough publications on that and the MANI Country Assessment Process (MANI-CAP) will afford us more data on such.
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The unreached people groups of Africa |
My concern is to highlight the changes in the locations and identities of the UPGs of African descent in order to stimulate attention of the local, national, continental, and global Church and the mission community toward these new phenomena of the African unreached peoples.
These changes are induced by certain factors which are already well known:
- rural-urban migration;
- relocation or dislocation due to (internal or external) displacement of communities by wars, natural disasters, or persecutions (such as political, ethnic, or religious cleansing); and
- economic migration from depressed national or local economies to the areas or countries (usually the West), where life is perceived to be more bearable.
These factors account for the ghetto camps (slums) that are now characteristic of most urban areas in Africa.
The same factors account for the increasing tension developing in the countries of southern Europe where populations of African immigrants are being perceived as social misfits and security risks, making them targets of various forms of hostility in the host countries. Most of these “displaced” people, whether abroad or in the African urban centers, come from ethnic groups or religious blocks that constitute the UPGs of Africa.