The definition of closure determines the task

“Closure” is the missiological technical term for “finishing the task.”

Not everyone thinks the task can be completed, but those who do think the task can be completed often define completion differently.

Some examples:

• everyone has access to the Gospel, even if they haven’t specifically heard it: the Gospel is available, in the form of a nearby church, or copies of the Bible, or Christian broadcasting, or Christian friendships.
• everyone has (most likely) actually heard the Gospel, in a way that they can understand it and respond to it.
• a substantial portion of the population (>60%) are professing or affiliated believers.
• a substantial portion of the population is an evangelical Christian (“true believer”).

(For a fuller exploration of the evolution of terms like “evangelized,” see Datema 2016).

To achieve closure in any single people or place would mean everyone among the people or in the place has crossed one of these “finish lines.” For 10 people to at least have access to the Gospel is fairly easy. For 100,000, it’s far more difficult. To achieve closure for the entire world – across multiple languages, and in the midst of governmental restrictions – is so challenging that it hasn’t been achieved in 2,000 years.

The most obvious method would be to deliver the Gospel as a mass produced message, translated into every available language, within a short period of time. Yet part of the problem with such an effort is the very public nature of it. Consider a different example: the great, public, global campaign to eradicate polio. This has little (at least on the face of it) to do with spiritual issues, and even governments are generally in favor of it. Yet it has aroused fear of conspiracy, and vaccination workers have been killed. A global campaign to present the gospel at a single point in time would be (has been) fought against and blocked in many places. Realistically, it will have to be done bit by bit, place by place, people by people.

This kind of bit-by-bit progress encounters all the same issues as a global campaign, but it can slowly circumvent them over time. Governments that block the gospel during global campaigns today don’t last forever. Walls come down, governments change, new platforms and technologies make the spread of the Gospel possible. But since it must be done over time, closure encounters another problem that once-in-a-moment campaigns do not: demography. In every place and among every people, new people are being born every day (and others are dying).

The closure achieved by delivering a message to the population of today misses the children born today. In three to five years, when those children are old enough to understand the message, it will have to be delivered to them. Today’s message doesn’t count for that moment. If people hear the message today, but do not respond, they are still non-believers. They will not pass the message on to their children. Thus, the children of non-believers grow up unevangelized (even though the parents, hearing the message, were themselves once evangelized), unless they hear the message from an outside source.

This is why defining “closure” as “everyone is a Christian” fails: not everyone in history has been a Christian, which means we would have already failed. (Finishing the Task does not mean everyone will believe).

Also, defining “closure” as “everyone has heard” likewise fails: at any given time in history, there are people who are alive but cannot hear and understand (babies), and so at no point can the task be “finished.”

Defining “closure” as “everyone will have a chance to hear the gospel at least once in their lifetime” seems to be the only thing that fits the situation. (Finishing the Task means everyone will be able to hear–but not that everyone has heard.)

Defining it this way means that to “finish,” (a) everyone must be able to hear the Gospel, which means (b) they must have access to a source by which they hear the Gospel—and in the case of an unevangelized area, this is a source outside themselves, (c) this source must be perpetuated over not just individuals but generations.

This is a strong argument for sustainable closure: one that is not point-in-time, but rather sustained across generations—the current generation, and future generations. It requires us to “build up” sustained, ongoing closure in each people and place, group by group, place by place, until all of them are sustainably closed. We don’t worry about “losing” progress in one place as we go on to another because we leave the place in a position of sustainable closure. “Sustainable closure” has the added benefit that, with a church that can reach everyone in a place, you are reaching all of the individuals, not just a minority.

The primary way this is done is to plant a church among a people or in a place that can achieve this. And that, by definition, is “reached”: a people group possessing a church that can evangelize the group to its borders [here I would add, at least once per generation, and ideally once per year] without cross-cultural assistance.

Datema, Dave. Defining “Unreached”: a short history. IJFM 33:2 (Summer 2016). PDF.