How Could We Miss So Many People??

—by Keith Carey
(All information taken from Operation China)

We know the end of the story. We have read the end of the book. God Himself clearly says, “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb’” (Rev. 7:9-10, NIV).

Notice that God directed John to use the word “every.” Though there has been tremendous progress towards taking the gospel to every nation, tribe, people, and language during the last 30 years, this picture God paints for us is still a goal, not a reality.

It is fair to say that not all people groups have been discovered as yet by Christian organizations. In places like Daghestan, Russia, where there are different languages in just about every valley and on every mountain ridge, it will take more research to find them. It is very hard to determine where all the people groups are in countries that are made up of many islands like Indonesia, or many castes like India.

China’s Special Challenge
China poses a special challenge. For hundreds of years, the Chinese government has tried to downplay the existence of minority groups. Chinese anthropologists chose to consider the minority peoples to be part of the Han Chinese majority. This must have been a deliberate oversight considering the vast language differences between the Han Chinese groups and the minority tribes.

In the 1920s, the great Chinese leader Sun Yatsen claimed that there were only five ethnic groups in China. The original flag of the Chinese republic displayed five colors, one each for the Mongols, the Han Chinese, the Manchu, the Tibetans, and the Uighurs. He commented, “The name ‘Republic of Five Nationalities’ exists only because there exists a certain racial distinction which distorts the meaning of a single republic. We must facilitate the dying out of all the names of individual peoples inhabiting China.” Thanks to this kind of attitude, there was not much known about China’s minority until the 1950s.

Efforts of Missionaries
French Catholic missionary Paul Vial, who worked in China’s Yunnan Province between 1880 and 1930 commented, “The Chinese observe foreigners, Miao, Lolo, or Europeans only through the magnifying glass of their immense conceit, and all objects have the appearance of a grotesque caricature which seems reality to them.” In the 1840s, the British Consul F.S.A. Bourne’s comments explain the sad results. “There is probably no family of the human race…of which so little is accurately known as the non-Chinese peoples of southern China.”

John Kuhn, a missionary, documented 100 tribes in Yunnan Province in 1944. Until Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission emerged in 1865, almost all missionaries served only on the coast, where they remained ignorant of the vast majority of China’s minorities. Other missionaries learned only about the tribes in the area where they labored.

The Communist Surprise
Surprisingly, it was the Communist Revolution of 1949 that began the process of discovering China’s hidden peoples. The new leaders drew up a new constitution in the early 1950s which declared China to be a “unitary, multi-national socialist state.” The communists invited leaders from China’s minority groups to register their tribes with the new government. For the first time, a Chinese government was recognizing minority peoples. Government hostility towards these groups was waning.

It didn’t take long for the communist government to become overwhelmed. By 1953, over 400 groups registered, 260 of these being in Yunnan Province. The government arbitrarily combined groups until there were only 55. Though this was only a fraction of the real number, it was far better than ever before. But there were now 350 groups that the government denied existed. Almost all information coming from China declared that there were 55 people groups. There has been very little or no information about any of the other 350 groups until the time Operation China was published in 2000.

The surprising thing is how much the communist government did which allowed the spread of the gospel to every people in China. They made Mandarin the official language, so that for the first time it was possible to reach most of China’s population in a language they at least could understand. They improved roads on which evangelists could travel. And if that weren’t enough, the government managed to remove the threat of highway robbers who made travel dangerous. The insistence on atheism and communism as a state religion gave the people a yearning for meaningful spirituality. As evangelists were called by God and sent throughout the nation, the government could do little to stop them. All they could do was imprison or kill them, which made the gospel all the more appealing to those who wanted to find something worth suffering and dying for. Millions have joined God’s family since the 1949 Revolution. The question at this point is, how many of the minority groups have heard the gospel from Han Chinese evangelists?

China’s Completely Unreached Groups
Operation China offers information on about 300 of China’s people groups. We also know from Operation China that there are still a number of ethnic groups that have no known believers and no Christian materials. This month, we will focus on these groups be they small or large.

How important is it that we pray that some from each of these tribes join God’s holy family? Let me quote Operation China to answer that. “This appears to be of such importance in the Scriptures that the final sign of the imminent Second Coming of Christ is linked to the completion of this task: ‘And this gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (ethnae), and then the end will come.’”

If spreading God’s glory to every people is important to God, shouldn’t it be important to us as well? For this reason, I would challenge you to either continue praying through this issue after July is over, or give it to someone else to pray through.

Let’s Pray!

• Let’s pray for the peoples in China who at this time, have no Christian witness at all.
• Pray for God to set in motion ways for even the smallest tribe to hear of His glory.
• Pray for the Church in China to be mindful of the need to reach every tribe, no matter how small.
• Pray for Christians everywhere, especially in China, to be vigilant in their efforts to pray for and go to the peoples that still wait to have their first believer.