UUPG Engagement
UUPG stands for Unengaged Unreached People Group. Organizations like The Joshua Project have been identifying various groups for many years. Missions loves UUPGs because they identifying and engaging them is one way to narrow the scope, allow no one group to slip through Gospel proclamation cracks, and harken back to missional engagement for the last 2000 years. I grew up on Jim Elliott's journals. Jim Elliott was a part of a team that died trying to reach a UUPG, and God's great story that same UUPG find redemption as a result of their fearless engagement.
UUPG engagement, however, is more complex than ever before for several reasons:
1. Turns out people groups don't perfectly segregate themselves from the rest of society. Many are being driven to cities. And people groups meet and marry each other.
2. Just because a group has a distinctive culture does not mean they've no access to the Gospel, nor that they do not understand the Gospel. Much time may be spent translating the Bible into pig Latin, only to discover that Latin will do. (I'm being a little cheeky here, but you get my drift).
3. Ethnic belonging is one layer. Though it's a powerful layer (and important), ethnicity is not a silver bullet. It's an outer layer. In fact, the lens through which we view belonging is moving "retro" - back through modernity to pre-modernity, wherein allegiance trumped ethnicity.
4. Beware assumptions of UUPGs. Turns out they change as much as everyone else does. Political parties in the U.S. do this with color blocks all the time. They assume that a skin tone equates to a vote in a specific direction. But people also have brains. They disagree with each other. They have personalities and there are change agents, black sheep, rebels, and all kinds of other factors.
5. Cell phones are a game changer. Yes, they're a portal to the internet, but the bush doesn't care about the internet. But cell phones? Cell phones are nearly ubiquitous. And they change things. As tech moves along, our ideas of what is backwards or forwards changes. Today, we view those without indoor plumbing as primitive. But it wasn't that long ago (my grandfather's generation) when outhouses were the norm in many communities in the U.S.
Finally, there's the whole issue of what constitutes "engagement." Most missions organizations talk in terms of 2% or less, but defining what happens to push it to 2.1% is difficult at best. People have free will. So they can be engaged and reached, but not saved. To complicate things further, there's the issue of generational engagement (language, culture, etc.).
There are two ways of thinking that may be pertinent to the future:
1. A return to geography.
Old school DOM (Director of Mission) practice was to draw a 5 mile circle around a point on the planet and then see who lived inside of it. Engagement meant "somewhere in this circle there should be access to the Gospel." Though that's not necessarily helpful, the basic idea of "gridding" a geographic area, determining who lives there, and then formulating strategies to reach who lives there may be more valid than ever before. In the old world, figuring out the geography was the issue. We were still discovering countries and tribes. But now, we have a pretty good handle on land mass. What we need to know is who lives there and why. This requires some old school approaches. Thankfully, a lot of this can be automated with gov't taxation or survey information. It also frees us from "silver bullet" thinking in that we can now take each square as "unique" with its own unique set of challenges.
2. Migratory flow.
Another way to consider engagement is through viewing the world like a global weather pattern. By looking for currents and streams (not literally, but in terms of migratory behaviors), it gives us a way of knowing where in cities UUPGs may be moving, how isolated culturally they may be, and what is required to "enter the stream" alongside of them. Here, we can view exit pains, ports of entry, assimilation processes, and values clashes. Migratory flow helps us (as sojourners, aliens, and strangers ourselves) to carry burdens while also embodying revelation and others seeing revelation (think: Emmaus Road story).
