Worker

Target Area

Features

The astonishing demonstration of love and sacrifice on the part of those who went
William Carey 1792 - Many valiant people reached out to Africa in spite of inevitable sickness and death. Coastlands

The First Era

The development of high quality insight into ministry strategy

- The idea that we should organize in order to send out cross cultural workers eventually became an accepted pattern. - They go from no church in the pioneer stage, to infant church in the paternal stage, and to the more complicated mature church in the partnership and participation stages.

London Missionary Society

- God strangely honored Hudson Taylor in spite of his anti-church-planting strategy because his

gaze was fixed upon the worlds least-reached peoples.

- It took 20 years for other ministries to begin to join Taylor in his special emphasis-the unreached, Hudson Taylor 1865 Inland China Inland Mission

inland frontiers.
- In the early stages of the Second Era, the new college-trained Christians, instead of going on to new frontiers, sometimes assumed leadership over existing churches, not reading the record

The Second Era

of previous ministry thinkers.

- By 1925, Second Era missionaries had finally learned the basic lessons they had at first ignored, and produced an incredible record. They had planted churches in a thousand new places, mainly inland; and by 1940 the reality of the younger churches around the world was widely acclaimed as the great new fact of our time.

Cameron Townsend 1934 Wycliffe Bible Translators

- When Cameron Townsend was just 23 he knew that there are populations that needed to be

reached in their own languages.

Linguistic Barriers - Like Carey and Taylor, he ended up starting his own organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, which is dedicated to reaching these new frontiers. - At first he thought there were about 500 unreached tribal groups in the world. Later, he revised his figure to 1,000, then, 2000, and now it is closer to 5,000. - McGavran discovered a nearly universal category, called people groups; in other words, vertical segmentation which means groups distinguished, not by geography, but by rigid social Social Barriers

The Third Era

Donald McGavran 1935

differences.
- McGavrans active efforts and writings spawned the frontier mission movement, the former devoted to expanding within already penetrated groups, and the latter devoted to deliberate

approaches to the remaining unpenetrated groups.

Sourced from Four Men, Three Eras, Two Transitions : Modern Missions, The Evangelical Renaissance, 1600-2000 AD