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But centuries of failed attempts to reach Tibetans for Christ show that beauty can be deceptive. Whether living in the awesome shadows of Mt. Everest, in exile in India, Nepal or as far away as Europe and North America, the world’s 5 million Tibetans are among the world’s least-reached peoples.
The unresponsiveness of this people group to the gospel is indisputable. According to Operation World, only a relative handful of Tibetans are Christians-perhaps as many as 1,000 evangelical and 2,000 Catholic. Some Christians working with Tibetans believe that the actual figure is much less.
“I would greatly rejoice if there were so many Tibetan Christians [as Operation World reports],” one Christian observer said. “But where are they? Some groups come, hand out tracts, and share about Jesus. Tibetans listen and may even say they believe, but they don’t have a hint of what believing means.
“After the Christians leave, all [Tibetans] do is put the tract in their altar and bow down to it as they do to all their other spirits and gods.”
Despite this disheartening picture, from northwest India come encouraging signs that the future of Tibetan outreach may not be as bleak. With 130,000 Buddhist Tibetans in India – the majority of whom are in exile-this is long-awaited news not only for that country, but for what was Tibet, since 1950 an autonomous region in south central China.
A New Testament translation project is seeking to update and simplify an earlier, scholarly version that took 90 years to complete and remains the only version currently available in the Tibetan language. (The Old Testament has never been translated.)
“What is now available is a very monastic book,” said Kelsang*, an evangelical Indian national who left a university teaching position five years ago to answer God’s call to the Tibetans. He opted to serve this people group though he knew of the hardships. Until recently, all would-be missionaries have given up within six months of moving to Dharmsala, the home-in-exile of the Tibetans’ spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama.
“When I came here, I didn’t know about the need for retranslating the New Testament, ” Kelsang said. “But when I tested the Bible on people, I discovered they couldn’t understand what was written because it wasn’t written for the common people. I realized that bringing God’s Word to the Tibetans was God’s call for me.”
At first, Kelsang had to sit for hours to retranslate a single verse. “It’s getting easier now,” he said. John, Romans and Ephe-sians now are complete, and he’s making good progress on Luke.
Kelsang and a Tibetan refugee young man with whom he spends five or more hours a day also are working on Revelation. As they read and discuss the retranslation, Kelsang is able to determine whether his friend’s 12th-grade education allows him to understand the concepts easily. If so, there has been success; if not, the missionary starts over again, often discovering that he needs to make up new words to avoid those that point to Buddhist or Hindu understandings.
One example is the word for baptism. “What had been used in the first translation was the word for a Buddhist sprinkling ritual,” Kelsang said. “So we had to come up with new words that conveyed the Bible’s meaning rather than use a word that already had an existing meaning in Buddhism.”
Hours of reading the Bible together with his young Tibetan friend have opened the door for further sharing, some of it prompted when his assistant told him, “I want to be part of your family.” But Kelsang’s response to him-“Believe in Jesus as your God and then you will be part of my family”-is not something on which a Tibetan can act easily.
“Tibetans are yet one of the most closed people to the gospel,” another tentmaker said. “They are bound by demonic strongholds, especially their minds. They are driven by fear of the gods and evil forces, so long-term work is the only way to reach Tibetans.”
The key, he believes, is friendship over time.”Building relationships among the people, so that they see and experience and then hear of the love of God, is the only way we will ever reach them,” he said. “We know that, from their perspective, we are asking them to cease being Tibetan in order to accept Christ. They must be convinced by our lives that the payoff is worth the risk of total rejection by their world.”
But living and working among Tibetans in the Himalayan region is not easy. Tibet is known to persecute Christians, especially missionaries. In North India, the pro-Hindu, anti-Christian government does not allow active missionary outreach. In Nepal, where outreach is more tolerated, few Christians have targeted the Tibetan people, despite the presence of a large refugee group. Neighboring Bhutan, to the east, is entirely closed to any Christian work. Other Tibetans who have fled China’s political persecution reside in Myanmar. But there, too, Christians face restrictions and growing persecution.
Adding to this challenging picture is the fact that Tibetan outreach is not a “popular” mission field. Only three known workers in northwest India are engaged in long-term evangelism to Tibetans. “Most Christians [in the West] don’t even know where Tibet is located or what the real situation is with these beautiful people,” one of them said.
Whatever the challenges, Kelsang is convinced that living in this yet-unresponsive field will bear fruit one day. “Since 1996, this is the only place I’ve wanted to be,” he said emphatically. “God has given me this translating work to do, and I feel an urgency to complete it so that these lovely people can come to understand God’s love for them and know they don’t have to live in fear.”
Encouraged by a growing number of contacts, he described a Tibetan woman who recently told him, “You are just like God. There is so much happiness in your face.”
“That’s my prayer-that God’s face will shine upon me so that these people will see more of him and less of me,” Kelsang said. “I know of no Tibetan church in the whole world. But one day it will be different because the Father has been faithful.”
*a pseudonym
Cheryl Johnson Barton writes for World Pulse from Kobe, Japan.
July 5, 2002