Reaching the linguistically "least of these"

God has a plan for each one of the nearly 7,000 living languages in the world today. According to Revelation 7:9, that plan includes the salvation of some from each language:

"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands..."

The task of the Church is to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19). These "nations" (or "people groups") are best able to learn to be disciples and to understand "the things Jesus has taught us" (Matthew 28:20) in their heart language, rather than a trade language or language of wider communication.

Understanding the context

In an effort to inform our missiology and ministry strategies, it is worth understanding the linguistic context of the world. An invaluable resource to that end is the Ethnologue. The charts below use information from the Ethnologue to portray the linguistic situation of the world today, looking at how many languages are spoken and how many people speak those languages.1

Number of languages

This chart shows how the languages of the world are distributed, based on numbers of speakers (click the charts below for larger versions):

We see in the first column that there are 8 languages in the world having between 100 million and 999,999,999 speakers.2 By contrast, there are more than 2,000 languages that have between 1,000 and 9,999 speakers (the sixth column).

Number of speakers

The chart above becomes even more interesting when compared with the number of people in the world, distributed according to the number of speakers of their language:

This shows that the 8 languages having between 100 million and 999,999,999 speakers account for more than 2.3 billion people in the world, while the languages that have between 1,000 and 9,999 speakers account for 7.8 million people.

Speakers & Languages

This chart shows the same numbers, but merged into 3 brackets: languages having more than 1 million speakers, languages having between 10,000 and 1 million speakers, and languages having less than 10,000 speakers:

This chart shows that more than half of the languages of the world have fewer than 10,000 speakers. By contrast, approximately 95% of the people of the world speak approximately 5% of the world's languages.

So What?

These numbers have significant implications for mission organizations and ministries working in other languages. There are many questions and observations that could be made about how to apply these numbers, but I want to look at one in particular:

What economic model will reach the people in the "least of these" languages with indigenous discipleship resources?

Assuming that "ignoring them" is not a viable strategy for serving those in the least populous languages, what kind of missiological and economic strategy will be able to go the distance and not exclude a language based on its relatively tiny number of speakers?

We live in a world that wants, understandably, to see results. Churches that support missionaries usually want to know that their financial "investment" is a good one. If the missionary works in a language with, say, 200 million speakers, and 5% of the people in that language group get "reached" by the missionary's work, the total "reached" is 10 million people. By contrast, if 5% of the people in a language group of 10,000 are reached, the total is 500 people. Which is a better use of resources? Are the languages different in value? What factors do we use to answer these questions?

In the digital realm, this correlates to tracking analytics such as "number of hits", "app downloads", "video plays", etc. If your website/app/video in a large language gets 20,000 times more traffic than your website/app/video in a small language, that could translate into more funding as donors hear about how many millions of people your project is reaching. The economics of missions would favor the larger language, and all too often the smaller language is forgotten.

It makes sense that larger languages often get the missionaries and the resources first. But there is a subtle danger in "playing the numbers game" in missions as it can begin to corrupt our theology of mission. Some churches have completely stopped sending their own people to live and die cross-culturally for the Kingdom because it is "so much more economically responsible to just send money to the locals already there." This idea is as understandable in its intent as it is tragically fatal to the life and growth of the church. We should seek to be "shrewd as serpents" even in our missiology, but not at the risk of elevating our economic model above God's Sovereign purpose in world mission: bringing to His flock people from every nation, tribe, people and language.

So if God really does care, as Scripture states, about each language, and not just numbers, we need a better strategy and economic model that puts all languages on an equal footing. What would that model look like?

A new model for missions

Rather than try to define an all-encompassing new model for reaching the linguistically "least of these", these are some of the components that I believe will be part of the missiological model that will be shown by history to be the one that went the distance:

• Open collaboration as a global church - The future of missions will look a lot like a social network that is interconnected horizontally, where all "nodes" in the network are equal, and none of the "nodes" are more equal than others. Local believers will work together with believers in other language groups, missionaries, and people in other parts of the world, in real-time over the Internet. Instead of the all-too-prevalent sense of "competition" among ministries, there will be a growing realization of the bigger "Team", in addition to our own "teams".
• Open-licensed content - The traditional model of missions involves each entity creating its own discipleship resources which, because of international copyright law, are "all rights reserved" and so are critically limited in how they can be used by others. The creation of unrestricted (open-licensed) discipleship resources will rise in importance as a means for enabling the "least of these" to help meet their own needs, especially when it is not economically feasible to meet their needs using a traditional missions model. Instead of having nothing in their language, or needing to become pirates to get access to discipleship resources, they can legally use existing open-licensed discipleship content and translate it, making it culturally and linguistically effective for their needs.
• Open-source tools - As with open-licensed content, open-source software enables anyone, anywhere to make the software effective for their particular ministry needs, legally and without needing to have massive financial resources and a legal team. Instead of each ministry creating its own tools from scratch (reinventing the wheel over and over again), they can use the work of another ministry as a starting point and improve upon it. This will significantly reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of the tools, especially among believers who are the socioeconomically (as well as linguistically) "least of these".
• Open-access platforms - Facilitating all of this will be open-access, web-based platforms that enable the global church to collectively meet the spiritual needs of the global church and reach the least-reached. There will be no artificial divisions, e.g. "only members of organization ABC" or "only people in region XYZ of the world".

There are two things you may have noted in the preceding points:

1. The future of the global church is "Open" - as our intro video suggests, removing restrictions and obstacles to ministry is probably the most crucial key for reaching the "least of these". Paul spoke of removing things that hinder the advance of the Kingdom when, in the context of "the worker is worthy of his wages" he presented the counterpoint:

   "...we endure anything [even giving up the wages of which we are worthy] rather than create an obstacle for the Gospel." --1 Corinthians 9:12

2. It's hard to make money from free resources (or "If everyone collectively owns everything, how will ministry be funded, since selling our stuff to others would not be possible if they already effectively own it?") - First off, we're not suggesting that owning content and selling it to others is wrong or has no place in world missions. We are pointing out that the lack of a core of unrestricted discipleship resources that can be legally used by anyone, anywhere to grow spiritually, is a significant obstacle for the growth of the global church.

   Secondly, we are looking for the same kind of results in the spiritual realm that the early church experienced in the physical realm, where "there was not a needy person among them" (Acts 4:34). What brought about this awesome result?

   "Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common." --Acts 4:32 HCSB

Even in a world where the linguistic and economic challenges are significant, I believe we can and will see the growth of the global church in every language. But getting there will involve working together in open collaboration as a global church to create unrestricted discipleship resources that can be legally made effective by anyone for use in every language. Even the ones with less than 10,000 speakers.

Photo credit: DamienHR

• 1. These numbers do not take into account the 277 languages in the Ethnologue that do not have information on the numbers of speakers. It should also be noted that counting languages and speakers is a notoriously difficult task, and the numbers here should not be taken as absolutes as much as a very close approximation of the linguistic context in the world today.
• 2. Another table, however, appears to list a ninth language as having more than 100 million speakers. It should also be noted that Chinese (zho) includes a number of variants and the total number of speakers is listed as more than 1.2 billion.