Let's think about clusters, not peoples

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and post-writing about the number of peoples that are still remaining to be reached. And there are various people who disagree about the numbers (largely depending on how one handles the peoples of India).

I’m not thinking much about peoples any more. I’m thinking about clusters.

Clusters are large groups of people that tend to share a common language and culture (and often location). The research into the cluster groupings was first done by Patrick Johnstone (of Operation World) and has been extended since. Joshua Project has a very good list that’s easily accessed.

There are a lot fewer clusters to deal with: 253 clusters, out of which there are 107 unreached.

Several organizations (including the IMB and ActBeyond) have reorganized around affinity blocks and clusters. So we have a group that focuses on the Han Chinese cluster, for example, wherever they happen to be found.

Some of the clusters are quite small – the Parsees and Nuristanis, for example, are about 150,000 each. Some are quite large – the Urdu Muslim cluster is 105 million people. The Hindi cluster is 492 million. And the Chinese cluster is 1.2 billion.

I know, some of the clusters are almost “too large” to adequately consider. But then, the people groups within those clusters are very large as well, so you’re not gaining anything by getting down to the people group level. Instead, we need to start thinking about targeting a specific cluster and then developing location-specific strategies.

These clusters also obviously lend themselves to partnerships and consultations. It’s a lot easier to talk about 107 partnerships than 16,000.

What if we looked at the clusters and considered Chris Maynard’s scale in light of each?