Disengagement: the fly in the wine of the UUPG list

A small blog post from IMB’s North African & Middle East peoples highlights a problem: “Two countries, four people groups, formerly engaged, but now sadly unengaged.” I’m guessing from the context of the article that the groups are the Kabyle Berber, the Black & White Moors, and the Shawiya Berber peoples.

The problem is this: the people groups on the “unengaged” list are marked as “engaged” as soon as there is a church planting team among them. A team could be a group of 2 or 3 people. While I applaud the idea of getting all groups engaged, the difficulty in this methodology is that a team of 2 or 3 is pretty tenuous. They could get kicked out of the country in fairly short order, or workers could retire from the field, or could be killed, or …

So we need to remember that many of the engagements on the UUPG list are very tenuous.

We’re tempted when we see the list to see all the rows that are green and think “the task is being done.”

But the tenuous nature of the engagement doesn’t show up due in part to a shortcoming of the HTML table.

On the PDF list, you can see which groups are “underengaged” because the green bar only goes halfway across the list.

In the HTML table on the website – which is probably more frequented – a group that has been engaged is “fully green” even when the number of workers committed falls far short of the number of workers needed.

For example, note the very first group on the list – the Baluch of Afghanistan. It is marked as engaged (whole group is highlighted in green), but look closer at the details and you’ll notice only 3 workers committed out of a need of 13. So it is 75% under-engaged – and Afghanistan’s a pretty dodgy place. Those 3 workers might not be there soon.

It looks like disengagements are being pretty quickly being on the list – the Shawiya of Algeria are marked as unengaged, though I have no idea if this is the group that is now “disengaged” according to the IMB. If they are, that’s good.

But we should not fall for the list-making/check-off “brain bug” trap of thinking that once a group is “engaged” the job is “finished.” It’s not. In most cases, a team that just engages a group won’t even have learned the language/culture for at least a year, if not more – and it can take 2 to 3 years to see first disciples, a first church, a multiplying movement. An engagement today may not see anything substantial for 5 years or more.

This is why % unevangelized (as measured in the World Christian Encyclopedia) and % unreached are both based in large part in measuring the impact of historical effort (unevangelized measures the % of a population that has been evangelized over a large span of time, about 30 years), and/or on the fruit of the effort (the presence of the church) – not the individual engagement of workers.

All of this is not to say the UUPG list isn’t useful. It is, particularly as a motivating tool. But they don’t intend it as a measure of the completion of the task, and we shouldn’t take it as such. It’s only monitoring one part of the process.