Ratios and radical revelations

During one of the plenary sessions of the Anglican Frontier Missions training, I was sitting beside a church planter from Sokoto State. Bishop Inyom was asking the participants what ethnic groups they wanted to work with. One after another told of a group on their heart, and one after another they named groups right there in River State, the very place where we were meeting. There in the heart of the Christian south, surrounded by Anglican dioceses, churches of all stripes, Christians numbering well over 80%, Christians bumping into each other at every turn–that was where this group wanted to go to find the unreached.

I leaned over to speak to Lucas, the church planter from Sokoto. I asked him how many Christians there are in that state. He said Christians amount to less than 2%. I asked how many people there are in Sokoto State. He said, "About three million."

When Bishop Inyom paused in the reporting, I rose to make an observation. A simple statement of ratios is what I made, a comparison of the ratios of Christians to population in Sokoto State (2%:3,000,000) and in River State (80%:7,000,000),an appreciation of church planting in our own neighborhoods, and the obvious conclusions of the two ratios, conclusions of need, of neglect, of wrongful priorities, and of the obligation of reversing that trend. At that point I should have used an expression I heard many times from Nigerians: "Are you getting it?"

Julian Linnell gives the motto of Anglican Frontier Missions as, "Where the need is greatest".