PGA – it’s not about golf. It stands for People Group Assessment, and that’s been on my mind a lot since 3 others came to My Country to join me for a whirlwind 3-week, 3-people group PGA trip around the country. The goal is to see if people groups that look unreached (or “least-reached,” since that’s more politically correct now) online and through other reports we’ve read really do look least-reached when you’re there among them.
So after 3 weeks of traveling to at least 15 different towns and villages, we’ve learned a lot. On the team we also battled one case of malaria, one cold, one case of likely food poisoning, a war starting in the home country of one of our teammates, and a car breaking down. But God brought us through it all, thanks to lots of prayers. Now it’s time for writing up what we saw so that leadership can discuss where to go from here during their meetings in January.
You can pray for the people we met and the missionaries who will likely go work in some of these villages among them.
I can’t tell you everything about our trip, but let me give you one illustration . . .
Imagine we were going on a PGA trip among Americans. While there we found several churches from all the main denominations and got to talk to many of the pastors. Some had better theology than others, but altogether we could see that the gospel was being preached and going forth. In that case you would likely say that the general American population was reached with the gospel.
But now imagine that all those churches were in Chinatowns across the country. Would that change your picture a little if all the churches were in Chinatown and didn’t really have an interest in reaching beyond Chinatown? That everywhere the white American population (however you say that politically correctly) lived there were no churches, and in US the only churches were in Chinatowns?
The illustration kind of breaks down there, since the people we went to research are the minority groups and yet it’s their territory that the others are entering into, bringing with them the church. But the church is staying with the new groups and in only one church did we see a few people from the people groups we were researching.