Something New Under The Sun Part 2

NEW WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was launched into space in May 1991, he thought it would be a routine three-month mission. Instead, he was delayed in orbit for 11 months and returned to Earth to find that the whole world had changed. The
USSR that had launched him no longer existed. While Krikalev circled the Earth for 331 days, not only did the Soviet Union disintegrate, but global Communism collapsed, the Cold War came to an end and the territory he landed in, Kazakstan, had become an independent republic! Krikalev is like a lot of missionaries we’ve spoken with lately.

While I was gone, they say, someone reorganized
my denomination, dissolved my mission and even changed the
name of the Foreign Mission Board!

Change is sweeping across our world. Hold on to your hat! To the question “What happened today?” there are a million different answers. Some of these are positive, many are negative. Each of them is demanding a gospel response.

At a rapidly accelerating pace, unseen forces such as demographics, politics, commerce and technology are conspiring together to sweep us into a new world order. No sooner do we adapt to one set of changes than another one is upon us. Let’s look
at some changes and their implications.

Population and Politics

Driving much of the rapidly changing world are sheer demographics.
The world is expected to reach 6 billion inhabitants before the year 2000. Within another half century, this number may nearly double to 11 billion before it is expected to plateau. Fueling this growth is 32 percent of the world’s population below the age of 15! In less-developed countries the percentage of individuals below the age of 15 is as high as 38 percent. Nowhere is this crowding of planet Earth more pronounced than in our cities. The pace of urbanization continues to climb today with nearly half of the world’s population (43 percent) currently living in urban areas.

This human time bomb has led some sociologists, such as Robert Kaplan, to predict a bleak forecast for the coming millennium. Rather than looking to Europe or the United States for future global realities, Kaplan views the future through the lens of West Africa over the past two decades. He predicts a “world (that) faces a period of unprecedented upheaval, brought on by scarce resources . . . , overpopulation, uncontrollable disease, brutal warfare, and the widespread collapse of nation-states and indeed, of any semblance of government.” “Welcome,” says Kaplan, “to the 21st century.”

Unfortunately, many signs of the coming calamity are already here. The world’s chronic refugee population stands at more than 13 million with a further 4.9 million internally displaced persons.

Ecological disasters and global warming have led to floods in South America and Africa along with ruinous fires in Central America and Indonesia. Events in Rwanda, Liberia and the Balkans have made genocide a household word. Hostilities between Pakistan and India threaten to spill over into neighboring countries, go nuclear and possibly embroil the whole world. Meanwhile, militant Islam rolls on unabated as extremists wage a jihad against perceived Western enemies.

If there is any good news for such a troubled world, it’s only in the hope offered by the gospel. Missionaries can be assured that the need for them and their message shows no sign of diminishing in the century ahead!

Travel and Tourism

Despite this bleak side to the future, there are positive trends as well. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arena of tourism and global travel by common citizens. Americans spent more on tourism last year than any other country, over $52 billion. During 1997, for example, Brazil welcomed some 2.2 million tourists, while Spain, the second most popular tourist destination in the world after France, saw more than 45 million tourists.

Countries that have long feared the outside world are opening their doors today, but not necessarily to missionaries. In 1997, an estimated 25,000 Southern Baptists visited China as tourists, businessmen or as other professionals. The allure of tourist dollars
even led relatively closed Cuba to welcome 1.2 million foreign visitors last year, causing tourism to surpass sugar as the No.1 currency earner for the country.

If tourism is opening countries all over the globe, could it be that God is trying to tell us something? Can tourists be missionaries? Can missionaries be tourists?

Communications

In addition to the flood of tourists worldwide, the peoples of the world are becoming interconnected through communications channels. Where formerly people were insulated from one another by political and geographical barriers, today they are engaged in a flood of invisible interaction. At an international conference in Berlin in 1998, Renato Ruggiero, executive-secretary of the World Trade Organization, observed that “thousands of miles of fiberoptic cables now join oceans and continents together, as do the millions of sound waves and electromagnetic signals that crisscross the atmosphere above our planet. Twenty-four hours a day this global network carries the world’s business contracts, currency transactions, medical information and educational resources instantly across time zones, borders and cultures.”

A network that can carry business contracts and currency transactions surely can carry a more precious cargo. Today’s communications networks may be the equivalent of the first century’s Roman roads, allowing the gospel to stream into places where missionaries are restricted.

Commerce

This interconnected globe is creating the closest thing yet to a single, borderless global economy—an economy which will have profound implications for the way national systems operate in the future. With NAFTA, the European Economic Community and the World Trade Organization, we already can see the trend toward freer global trade.

By early next century, almost 60 percent of world trade is scheduled to be tariff free. Already, American companies employ roughly 3 million workers in Europe alone. The implications of all this global interconnectedness for Christian missions is enormous. If we are able to enter the flow of international business activity, virtually no country on earth will be closed to us.

Computers and Technology

It’s hard to believe that only 30 years ago, in 1969, the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) went online connecting four major U.S. universities, and the Internet was born. Since that time, the Internet has doubled in size almost every year. In
January 1997, an estimated 16 million computers were connected to form the Internet. In 1998, more than 50 million people were using the Internet.By the year 2000, that number should climb to 300 million users. Small wonder that as early as 1982, rather
than choosing a “Person of the Year,” Time magazine declared the personal computer the “Machine of the Year.”

The implications of this computer interconnectedness are astounding. According to the Net. Journal Directory, in 1997 there were at least 10,000 magazines and journals available on-line.

Today’s communications networks may be the equivalent of the first century’s Roman roads, allowing the gospel to stream into places where missionaries are restricted.

Already emerging satellite downloads promise speeds that will be up to 14 times faster than conventional telephone modems. This high-speed delivery makes it possible to transmit the text of 35,000 full-length novels every second. The cost of this transmission
is virtually the same whether it is going across town or around the world.

For gospel proclamation, this burgeoning computer network truly has been a God-send. It has enabled us to put the Bible in dozens of languages online so that university students and private citizens in countries around the world can down-load the Word of God in the privacy of their own home or dormitory room. Campus Crusade already has put the Jesus film in more than 20 languages online for computer access. Dozens more language translations of the Jesus film are being digitized now and will be accessible via the Internet soon.

Knowledge and Action

Few would argue that the information age has resulted in far more information than we can ever digest. In addition to the remarkable opportunities afforded by the technology and information boom comes additional responsibility. As never before,
Christians are able to view the world in all of its complexity, diversity and lostness.

Today, we know that roughly 1.7 billion individuals living in 2,000 distinct language communities around the world have little or no access to the gospel. This would have been news to any generation of believers prior to our own. But for us, it is more than
news, it is a haunting reminder of the unfinished task ahead. As the Apostle James wrote: Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins (James 4:17). It is this awareness that drives us with a renewed sense of urgency.

The International Mission Board is changing so that we can take full advantage of today’s possibilities and meet the full range of tomorrow’s challenges. Despite the perils that lie ahead for believers everywhere, the knowledge that millions are still perishing
in darkness carries with it a responsibility to do whatever it takes to finish the course set before us. Let’s press on!