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We Christians—especially we in the Western world—love to count things. We count the numbers of unreached peoples, the numbers of untrans-lated languages, and the number of mega-cities in Asia. Those like myself, who spend time trying to mobilize the church towards greater global concern, often try to reduce the world to statistics. We talk about 1 billion of this and 2 billion of that. Chinese, Muslims, Hindus, Kurds, street kids and more: give us a need and we have (or can find, courtesy of David Barrett, Patrick Johnstone and others) a statistic.

But the sheer volume makes us numb. We discuss masses of people and plethora of needs, but the size alone overwhelms us into stunned inactivity or unfocused guilt. Perhaps the key to staying soft and compassionate is remembering that every Muslim, each hungry person, each street kid, each Chinese…has a name.

The self-revealed God of the Bible sets himself apart from other deities in the pantheon of religions by his immanence. He knows our names. Our names are written in the Book of Life. We may not be Jeremiah, but each one of us believes that God knew us before he formed us in our mother’s womb. The Bible affirms (i.e., it’s not just an off-shoot of Enlightenment individualism) that we are fearfully and wonderfully made—one at a time, name by name.

Emerson Boyce, veteran of more than 20 years of missionary service in the Caribbean, attended the Urbana 2000 conference looking for ideas on how to mobilize Caribbean young people for missions. After the conference, I asked him the highlight of what he had learned.

I expected to hear something about facts or data or developments in missions. Instead, he referred to one of the worship songs. He said, “God knows my name.” In the face of global need and worldwide evangelistic opportunities, the most profound lesson for Emerson was that the sovereign God of the universe knows his name.

Malcolm Muggeridge expressed the Christian perspective succinctly. He says, “Christianity is not a statistical view of life. That there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over all the hosts of the just, is an anti-statistical proposition” (Something Beautiful for God [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 28).

On September 25, 2001, a rabbi speaking at the post September 11th “Prayer for America” in Yankee Stadium made the point profoundly when he referred to the individualized grief of each bereaved family. He said, “On September 11th, it wasn’t 3,000 people that died. One person died 3,000 times.”

I knew he was right. I didn’t think of statistics dying on September 11th. I thought of Mrs. Holland, a member of our church who was on the American Airlines flight that hit the first tower. And I thought of my United Airlines acquaintance, Jesus Sanchez, who was on the United Airlines flight that hit the second tower.

Statistics become real when we know their names, their stories, their families. On a recent visit to Nigeria, my host’s brother, age 37, entered the hospital because of a “blood infection.” Several days later, he died. I saw his family’s grief; I heard the young man’s story.

I had often spoken in my “Current Events in Missions” class on the huge numbers of people in Africa with HIV/AIDS. On that day, however, HIV/AIDS in Africa moved from being a statistic or a graphic in a Power Point presentation. HIV/AIDS in Africa has a name. His name is Jacob.

While visiting Sri Lanka, my wife and I were talking with Ben Manickam, principal of Lanka Bible College, about the impact of the civil war there. I asked, “Is it true that 70,000 people have died over these past twenty years as a result of the war?” He responded affirmatively.

We asked if he actually knew anyone who had died. He then told us the story of his father. His father was on his way to work, waiting for a bus in Colombo. He and 25 others were killed when a bomb-laden car exploded as it stalled in front of the bus stop. Death in Sri Lanka’s war has a name; he is Ben’s father.

I recently taught a short course at the Alliance Biblical Seminary in Manila. Every day on the way to class, I walked past a 30-something year-old man sitting by a plywood table along the sidewalk. He was selling candy and gum and cigarettes— probably earning the equivalent of a few dollars a day. He is married and has three children.

I recognized him. I had met him four years earlier—in the same location at the same table! When people told me that 70 percent of the Philippines lives beneath the poverty line, I no longer thought of the statistic. Poverty in the Philippines has a name; he runs a sidewalk table selling gum and cigarettes. His name is Jose.

Those of us who deal with the volume of data available to us about our world (i.e., those who are likely to be reading Pulse) need to remember that the world is not made up of statistics. The world is made up of people who each have names. The victims of the violence in Israel and Palestine are not statistics. They are people with names like Moishe and Yacob and Ibrahim. The earthquake victims in Gujarat and the factory workers in Malaysia and the homeless of Calcutta and the fearful people on the streets of Colombia—each one has a name.

How can we keep from getting desensitized about world need? How can we combat our own apathy—a vividly descriptive word that literally means “no feeling”? Perhaps the best way is to get to know a few names.

World Vision captured the idea years ago and mobilized thousands of people by personalizing a billion hungry kids through the “adoption” of individual children. Perhaps we should seek to get a name or two of people affected by the crises and needs that we read about. It reminds us that God is not concerned about “the world” as some sort of impersonal unit. He is concerned about each name.

June 21, 2002