The Invisible Nations
We count the unreached. We color our maps. We organize the world into countries, languages, and people groups.
And then we look at the result and ask: Where should we go?
It’s a good question.
But I wonder whether we need to ask another one first.
What have we learned to see—and what might our way of looking leave out?
A dot can tell us where a population is concentrated. A shaded area can show where a language is spoken. A national boundary can help us organize information.
But where do we put a relationship?
What color represents a community whose life connects several places across different seasons?
And if people share a language with their settled neighbors, what tells us whether they share the relationships through which trust, belonging, and faith take shape?
Someone can be present in our statistics and still be difficult to recognize in our plans.
A place on the map is a beginning
Let me be clear: mission researchers have done valuable work.
The people compiling these resources are not unaware that human communities are complicated. Joshua Project, for example, distinguishes peoples across countries from peoples within countries. Its definitions recognize barriers of both understanding and acceptance. Speaking the same language does not automatically mean belonging to the same community. [1]
That matters.
So the question is not simply, “Why haven’t the researchers counted NOMADs?” Some of us are!
The more useful question may be: What happens when we ask a map or a people-group list to tell us more than it was designed to tell us?
A database entry can help us begin learning about a people. It cannot complete that learning for us.
Yet it is tempting to move rather quickly from “We have identified this population” to “We understand how to reach them.” And, I might add, this “us–them” thinking is often a big part of the problem!
There is quite a lot of life between those two statements. The kind of life lived among or alongside the people, until the people themselves are the ones saying, “Actually, we think there’s a better way!”
People live through relationships
Think about what we might need to understand in a community where seasonal movement remains important.
Where are people at different times of year? Who moves together? Who stays behind? Which relationships connect the people who move with those who no longer do?
Where do families exchange news? Whose introduction makes a stranger welcome? Which language is used in the market—and which language carries a difficult conversation at home?
Those are questions to investigate with a particular community. Their answers will not be identical everywhere.
But they show why knowing a location or a primary language may leave important work unfinished.
Joshua Project’s own technical documentation describes a longitude field that can represent a language polygon or the centroid of a district of highest population density. That is useful geographical information. It is not a description of every relationship or movement within the population represented. [2]
Nor should we expect one point to carry all that information.
We should, however, notice when our planning begins to behave as though it does.
Movement can be part of the picture
We do not have to choose between making maps and recognizing mobility.
The League for Pastoral Peoples, for example, provides mapping resources that include pastoral communities and migration routes. Such work offers a reminder that movement itself can be something we investigate and represent. [3]
Pastoralists and NOMADs are not interchangeable categories. In our network’s terminology, there are also Service & Trade NOMADs and Collector NOMADs. No single mapping project answers every question we need to ask.
Still, this opens a useful possibility.
Alongside “Where do these people live?” we can ask, “How are the places in their lives connected?”
Alongside “What language do they speak?” we can ask, “How do they use different languages within different relationships?”
And alongside “Does a church exist among this population?” we can ask, “Which parts of the community can actually encounter and participate in its life?”
The answers might confirm our plans.
They might also change them.
What did Jesus ask us to do?
In Matthew 28:19, Jesus commissions his disciples to make disciples of “all nations”—a commission I understand as extending to all people groups.
Those words give our mission its breadth. They do not give us a ready-made database.
We need care here. The Greek word ethnē should not simply be treated as though it names the exact categories in a modern mission research system. Our classifications are tools for carrying out the task; they remain open to examination. [5]
The commission itself continues into baptism and teaching people to observe what Jesus commanded.
That brings us into the life of actual communities.
We cannot teach, listen, share responsibility, or walk faithfully with people solely through a category. At some point, the people represented on the map must help us understand what life looks like from where they stand.
And perhaps from where they move.
Let people help us read the map
I have written before about the routes and relationships that maps of early Christianity can leave difficult to see. The question now is what we do with our own maps. [4]
Here is a modest place to begin.
Choose one community your church, network, or organization already prays for or hopes to serve. Look at the information you use to understand them.
Then ask:
- What do people call themselves, and does our description make sense to them?
- What changes with the seasons?
- Which relationships connect them across settlements, languages, or borders?
- Whose knowledge shaped our understanding—and whose voice have we yet to hear?
- What would we change if their answers challenged our plan?
We should also ask what information belongs in a public resource and what should remain within trusted relationships. Understanding people does not entitle us to publish everything we learn about them.
The point is to become better listeners and more responsible partners.
A map can help us find our way toward a community.
The community can help us understand what the map means.
Who is missing?
Perhaps some people need to be represented more clearly in our research.
Perhaps others are already there, under a name we recognize, while important dimensions of their lives remain outside our attention.
We should investigate before deciding which is true.
But we can begin with a question that reaches beyond the completeness of our databases:
Whose understanding of the world is missing from the way we plan our mission?
If the answer includes the people we hope to walk with, we have somewhere practical to start.
And we may not need to travel very far to begin.
Some of those neighbors may already live in our city.
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Sources and further reading
1. Joshua Project: Definitions—people groups, national boundaries, and barriers of understanding and acceptance.
2. Joshua Project: People Group Data Field Descriptions—how geographical coordinates and other information are represented.
3. League for Pastoral Peoples: World Pastoralist Map—pastoralist mapping and migration-route resources.
4. Monasteries Preserved It. More Than Likely, Nomads Carried It.—the earlier article’s questions about historical maps and transmission.
5. Stephen Hre Kio, “Understanding and Translating ‘Nations’ in Mt 28.19” The Bible Translator 41, no. 2 (April 1990). A discussion of the term in its biblical contexts; Kio argues for a Gentile-focused reading, illustrating why the translation question should not be treated as settled by modern mission terminology.