Hello!
This past week, I've been working on something that disturbs me since my wife Vanessa and I started collecting quotes to write Evangelhopolis (I hope we will soon be able to release an english version of it). Among Mrs. Ellen White's various instructions, this one in particular is one that bothers me the most:
“In this work all the churches which have been established are to have a part, according to their several ability. If difficulties come up in missionary fields, let interested investigation be made without delay, lest the path of duty be hid or made obscure. As these questions come up before those who are wise in God's wisdom, examination will be united with the exercise of prudence. By using the knowledge God has given them men will gain a clear, sharp experience. By exercising their God-given ability in helping to plant the standard of truth in new territory, they will receive great blessing. After they have unselfishly tried to gain a right understanding of the situation, they are to approach the mercy seat, asking for clear intuition and an unselfish purpose, that they may see the necessities of far off fields. As they ask the Lord to help them to advance the work in regions beyond, they will receive grace from on high. Never will they seek the Lord in vain.” The Kress Collection, p.117 As I put together EGW texts about evangelism, I was soon struck by the fact that their instructions point to truly spiritual evangelism, which cannot be guided by feelings or vague perceptions about the best places to work. True spirituality in evangelistic work seeks to understand with all dedication the concrete reality of each mission field, whether near or far. Among all the appeals to rational faith made during Mrs. Ellen White's ministry, the call to consistent evangelism is just another one... So I asked myself: if the instructions are clear about earnest, conscientious, well-informed, and intelligent evangelism, why do Seventh-day Adventists hold mystical evangelism in such high esteem? Why so many random shoots in all directions? Where does the lack of logic in evangelism come from? Why are missionaries scattered everywhere without any criteria or guidelines? The main reason for this, according to the research that Vanessa and I did, is the supremacy of mobile goals evangelism, which we tried to describe in the book Evangelhopolis (english version coming soon hopefully). Once all these questions were understood, another one arose: what then should a biblical evangelism be, if moved by rational faith and not by vague sensations? In chapter 7 of Evangelhopolis, we raise some biblical instructions and comments from Ellen White. First of all, we must repent from keeping the money for evangelism always at the same places:
"Home and foreign missions are to share equally of God's trust money. In planning for the work, the difficulties to be met in foreign fields are to be considered. Let not those who have every advantage be niggardly in appropriating means for the advancement of the work in mission fields. For Christ's sake willing support is to be given to the work of the gospel, which is to be carried to all parts of the world. And by the work of the press the work is to be established and confirmed.
Christ should never again be dishonored and his cause put to shame by a lack of the true missionary spirit. A great mistake has been made. In their selfishness men have grasped means and advantages for their own field, though knowing the need of help in new fields. They have not supplied that which was necessary for the progress of the work. They have not helped their brethren fight the battle which once had to be fought in the fields they now occupy."
The Kress Collection, p.117
And the second point is: it is necessary to start building, with research and prayer, a clearer vision about evangelism, whether it is locally or worldwide. The advantages, defects and needs of every field must be studied and thorougly understood, so that the work will be done in a clever and rational way (I have never particularly seen Mrs White encouraging any kind of foolish, irrational ou mystical faith):
"The work all over the world is to receive consideration. New fields are to be entered. Let those at the heart of the work remember that much means and much hard labor is required to accomplish the work in new fields. Let them be faithful stewards of the Lord's goods. Let them not feel that they are rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing, but let them practice true Bible religion, which enjoins self-sacrifice at every step. They are to closely examine the needs of the work, reviewing the needs of all the fields; for they are God's agents to do this. They are set for the extension of the truth in all parts of the world. They are not excusable if they remain in blindness and ignorance regarding the needs of the work. They are to know the advantage and defects of each field, and then with a true spirit of unselfish interest they are to work for the accomplishment of the work as a whole."
The Kress Colection, p.117 So after a while I started thinking about the need to have good metrics, indicators and rational models of evangelism, considering Mrs Ellen White plea for a better understanding on the difficulties and resources of each field. I felt there should be some clear and useful information, which reflected relevant evangelistic facts. These metrics should show us at least some reality on important issues such as the real amount of available resources and the actual constraints in each region of the Planet. In summary, it seemed to me Mrs White was urging for something like Economics of Evangelism, or Evangelnomics (hence by the way this blog's name). After some research on available data, I started putting a few ideas into a spreadsheet, which really took me a whole week. The result was the ECI - Evangelistic Constraints Index (in portuguese, EDI become IDE, which sound like "Go!"). The complete spreadsheet and the documents from which I took the data are attached at the end of the post. In summary, ECI is a number that seeks to reveal the real evangelistic difficulty or constraint for preaching the three angels' messages in a certain region of the Earth, which can be a country or a smaller region within a country. A total of 310 regions were found in the world, including 54 regions in Brazil (the country with the highest number of Adventists).
To explain the ECI more didactically, I will use Vietnam as an example:
Vietnam has an ECI of 0.45, making it the 54th most difficult country or region in the world to evangelize out of a total of 310, give it's current constraints and available resources. But where does 0.45 come from? This index is nothing more than: (Oppression Index + Material Restriction Index + Missionary Scarcity index)/3 Let's see what are each of these three indexes that make up the ECI. * Oppression Index: composed of two indicators of religious freedom published by the Pew Research Center, an American research institute. The first indicator is the GRI - Government Restrictions Index, which measures the restrictions that each national government imposes on religious freedom in its territory. The second indicator is the SHI - Social Hostilities Index, which measures hostility and religious intolerance on the part of the population. In both cases, the greater the number, the greater the oppression. What is interesting about this research is the distinction between governmental and social oppression. For the case of Vietnam, the results are:
In Vietnam, the biggest problem for the missionary is the government (for a quick comparison, Syria's GRI is 8.4, while Brazil's is 2.45). The Vietnamese people, in turn, are relatively tolerant about religious freedom (in Syria, SHI is 9). But this is not always the case: in South Africa, for example, the GRI is 0.8, while the SHI is 3.9, which indicates that hostilities there come from the people and not the government. A small statistical treatment is carried out on the average of the GRI and SRI scores to adjust the sample and normalize the data, reaching the index number. * Material Restriction Index: it is nothing more than the financial constraint to which the workers are exposed in the region, which can hinder or delay the preaching of the gospel. This index comes from the GDP per capita corrected by the purchasing power of each region (data from the World Bank). The index is arrived at by the inverse value of GDP per capita (the lower the income, the greater the resource constraint). Some statistical treatments are performed to adjust the data. Vietnam has a material restriction index of 0.19, which is small compared to the restriction of African countries (0.70 in Congo, for example), but high compared to European countries (0.05 in Hungary). *Missionary shortage index: this is the total population in the country or region divided by the number of Adventists. In other words: it is the shortage of missionaries in relation to the size of the population to which the gospel needs to be presented. While not all Adventists are actually missionaries (we know this well), it is reasonable to expect the ratio of good and bad Adventists to be somewhat similar in different corners of the world. In summary, the number of Adventists is a good approximation for the number of missionaries because, assuming that the ratio of good and bad Adventists is more or less uniform everywhere, the number of good Adventists tends to be bigger if the total number of Adventists is bigger. By that I mean that even if we imagine, for example, that in general only 5% of Adventists are real missionaries and live the Bible, in a country with 1.7 million Adventists (Brazil), there could be 85,000 missionaries working right now! However, in Vietnam there are only 13,569 Adventists. Assuming also that only 5% are missionaries, there are only 678 missionaries there for a population of 96 million... The much larger workload that the Vietnamese missionary needs to undertake is in itself an additional difficulty, which is reflected in a Missionary Scarcity Index of 0.72. In Brazil, even in the region with the worst number of missionaries, the index is 0.25 (Rio de Janeiro). Finally, adding the three indices for Vietnam: 0.45 (oppression) + 0.19 (material restriction) + 0.72 (shortage of missionaries) and dividing them by three, we arrive at 0.45, which can be considered a high difficulty (at least much higher that the place with the greatest evangelistic difficulty in Brazil, Piauí, with 0.21). This is basically the ECI. I have no doubt that it is only a sketch and needs to be better thought through, and I surely hope I'll have some help from clever christians around the world. In the next posts, I would like to propose some reflections on what the ECI of each country actually means, what kind of information it really presents and for what purpose it can be used. No less important is knowing what it DOES NOT mean and in which situations it should not be used. I would also like to present some considerations that I found relevant when analyzing the whole world and Brazil in particular. A big hug to everyone!
Lucas
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