Propaganda Piece by @SwarajyaMag Falsely Claims 80% of Bhutanese Refugees have Converted to Christianity

Image credit: Swarajya Magazine

[NOTE TO READERS: I have just changed the settings on my blog to disable anonymous comments.  I know that will discourage conversation on some level.  However, I find it a bit unfair to all critics to hide when I'm not.  For those of you who want to dialog personally, you can email comment@tibm.org and I will eventually respond]

[UPDATE: Swarajya has updated their article to change the 80% figure to "large number". Of course, unless they have also updated their research methodology, their argument hardly gains weight.  Also they have yet to amend the other terrible errors in the piece I discuss here.  I doubt they will.  Too much ego involved.  The author has dismissed me as a "pastor" going "ballistic" instead of engaging my critique of her article. I hope she will do the right thing and withdraw her article. I know it can be difficult to get published and Swarajya is a magazine that can amplify one's voice a lot, but if what you are saying is false, you are only amplifying error.  It seems hat Ms. Singh is doing important work in the realm of climate change and clean water access.  I fear that evidence of faulty research on display in this article will cast doubts on her credibility elsewhere.  I hope she will choose the greater good and retract.]

I can't help but respond to an article that is being shared widely from the Indian social issue and current affairs magazine, Swarajya.  The piece is provocatively entitled, "Persecution to Proselytization: Bhutanese Hindu Refugees in America" and is authored by Sahana Singh.  Poor journalism is always sad, but I always feel worse when it comes from a nation for which I am constantly rooting.  I want to say to India, "PLEASE DON'T LET THIS PASS FOR JOURNALISM!"  Let me hit the highlights:

1. 80% of Bhutanese Refugees have Converted -- Singh quotes "anecdotal" statistics in claiming that 80% of Bhutanese refugees have converted to Christianity since arriving in Houston, Texas (USA).  Let me just say, that I can't imagine a scenario in which unnamed, "anecdotal" sources can be considered worthy of inclusion in a journalistic article.  How does Swarajya print such a figure? How does Singh include it in her article?  If a journalism student came to me with an unnamed, anecdotal statistic in an article, I would immediately give her a failing grade.  This is just inexcusable!

Now as for the figure itself, we are talking about a level of inflation difficult to imagine.  In reality, not more than 5-10% of the Houston Bhutanese community would identify itself as Christian and this includes those who were already Christian before arrival in the USA.  And, while I will protect the anonymity of my source, I will tell you that it is from a Bhutanese Christian living in Houston who is heavily involved in community development activities.  I also know demographic researchers on the ground who haven't published their data yet, but who would laugh at this 80% figure.  Actually, I can't wrap my head around the type of person from Houston who would even give such an estimate.  Perhaps the number came from someone who didn't understand mathematics or maybe the source was intentionally trying to mislead Singh or else was pranking her.  But she says, "anecdotal numbers".  That's plural! Are we to believe that multiple people gave this figure to Singh and that none of them are willing to go on record?  Actually, these aren't even "anonymous" sources, which would indicate that she spoke with someone who asked not to be named.  They are just unnamed anecdotes.  Which means, Singh could have gotten the number from one of my baristas in Uganda. Or she could have just made it up.  We have no way of knowing.  All we do know is that it is utterly false.

2. Houston as the epicenter for Bhutanese Resettlement -- Singh compounds the egregiousness of her 80% fabrication by calling Houston the city which has "absorbed the largest number of exiled Bhutanese".  There is no sense in which this is true!  First of all, no serious study has been conducted to determine the population of Bhutanese refugees city by city in the United States.  There are figures that resettlement agencies have but these only consider initial points of arrival.  The Bhutanese are highly mobile and secondary resettlement is very common.  There are a lot of Bhutanese in Houston. But also in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Akron, and a hundred other cities across the United States.  But, Singh needs to inflate the role of Houston because of her incredulous 80% "numbers" which come from unidentified sources there.  This gives her justification (but only in her own mind and apparently in those of her editors) to lead the article with this shocking sentence, "About 80% of Bhutanese Hindu migrants in the US have been converted to Christianity."  What is really shocking is that anyone should consider this to be legitimate journalism.

Of course most of the article is devoted to Singh casting Christian organizations in a bad light by claiming that while the Indian Hindu organization, Sewa, is busy teaching refugees practical life skills, the American Christians are offering money and gifts to Bhutanese people in order to convince them to convert.  Here, I suspect, is the real motivation for Singh's writing.  This old "rice Christian" attack is a tired sensationalist strategy of isolationist Hindus which has nothing at all to do with true dharma and which hinders efforts by sincere Hindus, Buddhists and Christians to engage in inter-religious dialog and partnership for community transformation.  To be sure, there is the occasional Christian group that is guilty of this kind of religious baiting, but the Bhutanese Hindus should be insulted by Singh's suggestion that so many of them would be so easily duped by such worn out tactics.  I know many Bhutanese of various religious stripes, and precious few would fall for this kind of approach.

But, of course, Singh is just simply making stuff up.  From 2008, when the Bhutanese began to arrive in the United States, it was overwhelmingly the case that Christian organizations, agencies, and churches were the first responders.  English classes, job classes, computer training, business coaching, tutoring, family counseling, and much more were made available for free in nearly every city where the Bhutanese landed and the volunteers who provided the help were almost always directly or indirectly connecting through their local church or a Christian agency.  And, almost all of these very same agencies, churches and Christians will be the first in line to welcome the next wave of refugees be they Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Muslim.  To say that this is not the case betrays a truly blinding ideology of hatred toward the religious other that any sincere Ishwar Bhakta would quickly reject as antithetical to a Hindu worldview.

Sadly, Hindu organizations, even the very well-funded ones, were very slow to get involved with the Bhutanese refugees.  Indeed, today they largely stay aloof.  The city where I live (Aurora, Illinois) has a medium-sized Bhutanese population which is about 98% Hindu and Buddhist.  There are three Hindu temples in the city and except for one or two social events over seven years, these organization have remained entirely uninvolved in the affairs of the Bhutanese community.  Now, we see arising in almost every city Bhutanese-led organizations which are taking on the needs of their own community.  They are organizing citizenship classes, collecting relief funds, organizing development programs, applying for government grants, and more.  These associations are imperfect, but they tend to be multi-ethnic, multi-caste, and inter-religious.  Indeed, such organizations exist in Houston (e.g. http://www.bhutaneseassociation.org/), a fact completely ignored by Singh's article.

In the end, let me say that this is not the kind of article that either Bhutanese Hindus or Christians need.  It is a propaganda piece designed to invoke fear in the hearts of Indian Hindus rather than compassion and constructive engagement.  It insults the gullibility and ingenuity of Bhutanese people who have proven their resilience through years of suffering in Bhutan and Nepal (during which times India's help was non-existent, by the way).  It further denigrates the fruitful partnerships and deep friendships that have been forged between many Bhutanese and Americans which may often involve spiritual matters but which far transcend religious barriers.

The Bhutanese-Nepali peoples have survived a long journey of displacement without the help of Swarajya Magazine and will continue to do just fine without their hollow attempts at advocacy through shotty journalism.  I call upon Singh and Swarajya to retract their article immediately in light of its patent fabrications and insulting implications.

Reflections on the Past Decade of Missiological Research

Recently the International Bulletin of Missionary Research came out with their latest review of doctoral dissertations for the field of missiology.  This is something that they try to do every decade in order to try to understand trends and possibly to identify gaps in missiological research.

Okay ... so most of you are probably asleep right now.  Sorry.  This is something that I'm interested in and ... well ... ultimately, that's what I write about.  It's not like any of you are paying for this.  ;-)

Anyway, I read through IBMR's review and had some random thoughts that I felt like sharing.  Here you go:

1.  I notice that it is still the case that the overwhelming majority of doctoral projects focus on the past hundred or so years of missions.  Roughly 85% of "historically-oriented" dissertations focus on the period of time since 1800 meaning that we continue to understand very little about the first 1,800 years of mission history.  That's a problem, I think. Because, you know, history is really important.

2. There are a couple interesting nuggets about gender in IBMR's report.  In particular, three-quarters of the dissertation authors were men.  The article points out that with about half of all missionaries and more than half of the world's church members being women, this signifies an important under-representation in the field of missiology.  I want to register my personal surprise given the fact that most of my classmates at Wheaton College who were earning the MA in missions and intercultural studies were women.  It was like 4 out of 5!  But then again, whenever I'm hanging around at missiology society meetings, it tends to be a bit of a boys club.  I'm not sure what exactly is going on here.  Are women just more interested in getting to work than in research and lecturing?  Thoughts?

3. Only 3% of dissertations had a primary focus on the unevangelized world -- i.e., where missions and missionaries are needed most.  That seems sad to me and kind of wasteful.  We've long been saying that only 1 in 10 missionaries works among the unreached and this research fact makes me wonder if part of the reason for that is that too few teachers of mission are focused on pioneer missions.  If there is a hidden bright light here, it is that a number of dissertations were focused on the unevangelized living in diaspora in the so-called "World C" (evangelized) nations.  Does this reflect the fact that diaspora missiology is catching on as a new pioneer missions priority?  Does it reflect a move of the Spirit in the Church and the world to complete the Great Commission through the movement of people from everywhere to everywhere?

4. Finally, I was kind of surprised to see that over 1500 missiology dissertations were written during the past decade (roughly the same period of time that I have been involved in missiology).  Of course this doesn't count missiology dissertations completed as a part of a D. Miss or D. Min degree.  Does this mean that there are about 2000 new missiology "doctors" out there?  And if so, what are they doing?  Are they all battling for the seemingly small number of teaching positions available?  Since I still don't have a doctorate, should I be nervous that when I finally do get around to it that I won't be able to land a professorship?

Read the full IBMR report here.

[Photo by AstronomyBlog]

40 maps that explain the world

This is a cool article by the Washington Post.  If you care about global issues and global missions, you will find many of the maps here very interesting.  For example there are maps that show where foreigners are most and least welcome, maps that show which parts of the world are least racially tolerant, maps that show where people feel loved the most.  It's really valuable stuff.  Check it out!

40 maps that explain the world:

Singleness and Missions: Men v. Women

Photo by marsmetn tallahassee

My friend, Justin Long, has been doing some work on the issue of singleness in missions. What he is discovering won't be much of a surprise for many of you.  That is, that single women greatly outnumber single men in cross-cultural missions -- on the order of something like 6 to 1!

You can read Justin's first few posts on this phenomenon at The Long View here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

So, let me ask you.  Why do you think that so many more single women than single men are interested in being cross-cultural missionaries?

Scattered and Gathered in My House

We are big fans of making the most of space that we have.  Our home has been very well-stewarded during the past decade that we've been in Chicagoland.  Today was just a nice, cool example that I felt like sharing with you:

At one point today, the upstairs of our little house was devoted to training Karen S'gaw younger leaders.  Katherine (my wife, in case you didn't know) has been taking time regularly to meet with these cool folks to teach them how to take care of their church finances.  They have been eager learners and It's encouraging to see one of our diaspora church plants investing real responsibility and ministry into the next generation.

Meanwhile downstairs, TIBM's research team was busy working to finish "Stage 1" of our four-part diaspora people group research and mobilization plan for Chicagoland.  We're working on a list of priority people group clusters and multicultural residential patches (think Move In, because we are).  The list is nearly complete after today's blitz.  So, here's senior interns Abby and Andy along with my oldest son, Christopher (the one shoving a donut into his face).  Christopher rocks the missiological research pretty darn good for a 10-year-old!

People Group Mapping: Religious Centers in Chicagoland

Here at TIBM we are partnering with the International Mission Board, Send Chicago, and others to engage in a major research project seeking to identify all the people groups of Chicagoland.  Our hope is to ultimately provide the Church information about all the diaspora peoples in the metro area through an online database called Peoplegroups.info (scheduled to be re-launched).  I think that a bunch of mission thinkers are becoming increasingly convicted by the fact that the North American church is still suffering from severe "people blindness".

Currently, we are in the beginning phase of our research.  During this time we are collecting what we refer to as "people group indicators".  These essentially are signs which point to the presence of people groups.  One piece of this is to aim at discovering all religious centers in the Chicago area which have a high probability of being associated with diasporas.

We've published the results of our work in a simple, interactive map that you can view on the main TIBM website.

If you are interested in becoming a part of the larger project to map the top 100 MSAs in the United States, please visit USAPeoplegroups.com to find out more.

Lausanne Global Analysis

I don't know a whole lot about this just now, but it sounds like a pretty great resource that is coming to the Global Church in 2012 via the Lausanne Movement. Read on . . . 

Lausanne Global Analysis

Important to the development of good Communication strategy is reliable information.  During 2012, the plan is to launch The Lausanne Global Analysis: 

"The Lausanne Global Analysis delivers strategic and credible information, commentary and insight from an international network of evangelical analysts so that global Christian leaders will be equipped to address the issues impacting world evangelization."

Currently the idea is that the LGA will be written by teams of evangelical Christian researchers in research centers around the world.  They would be tasked with providing a monthly (2012), bi-weekly (2013) and then weekly (2014), report on socio-cultural, political, economic and religious events globally along with analysis of how these events and actions impact the body of Christ and the spread of the gospel.  These reports will provide the solid, credible information leaders need to pray, plan and work together to share Christ more effectively.  It’s our hope that the LGA will be freely distributed as widely as possible online on Lausanne.org, through social media and in print (possibly with the help of our Lausanne Regional Communications Managers).  Read Darrell’s Jackson's article. 

Pew Survey of Evangelical Christian Leaders from Cape Town 2010

The Pew Forum was on hand at Cape Town 2010 conducting a survey of the participants from around the world.  Since the survey was conducted during the most diverse gathering of Christian leaders in history, the value of the results could not be higher.  You can check out the results here:

http://pewforum.org/Christian/Evangelical-Protestant-Churches/Global-Survey-exec.aspx

But before you do, I just wanted to highlight a couple things that seem to haven't received must attention in the executive summary that is presented at the above link.

1. 4% of respondents do not believe that Christianity is the one true faith.
2. 2% believe that the Bible is NOT the word of God.
3. 3% believe that life evolved via a process with which God was not involved.
4. 7% believe that God will grant health and wealth to those who have enough faith.
5. 3% believe that it is not essential to follow the teachings of Christ in order to be a good Evangelical Christian.
6. 4% say that believing in reincarnation is compatible with being a follower of Christ.
7. 5% say that it is okay to believe that Jesus is NOT the only way to salvation.

Just a question ... WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?  How did people who don't believe that the Bible is the word of God get selected as participants to the congress?  Did they lie on their application or was the application simply ignored?  And besides that, why on earth would they even want to come?  Why does someone who doesn't believe that Christ is the only hope for the world desire to attend a congress on world evangelization?

Pretty crazy if you ask me.

What Should Be our Priorities in Making Disciples of All Nations

Okay, I want to be simple here. First, super grateful for your prayers. I thought there would be no way for me to finish this paper - to stay awake. I even got in bed.  But as I started reading, my energy was renewed. Twenty pages finished. The paper?

"World Evangelization in the 21st Century: Prioritizing the Essential Elements of the Great Commission" by Paul Eshleman on behalf of the Lausanne Strategy Working Group (LSWG).

The paper is simple and crucial. It seeks to say to the Global Church, "As we look at the work of mission in the world today, here are the things that should be our top priorities." It is specific, Biblical, and compelling.  I read it with the eyes of a pastor, church planter, missionary, and ministry leader.  If you find yourself occupying one of those roles, read this paper.  If you are a disciple of Jesus concerned about the Great Commission, read it.

There is a lot I could say here and there in response to the LSWG paper.  However, I want to limit my comments to several specific questions that came to my mind as I thought through these priorities and specific calls.  I kept asking how this related to Trinity International Baptist Mission.  What is God saying to us?  I am expecting God to speak in powerful ways to me and to my context of ministry.  So, it is important that I bring my ministry and every component of it to the table.  I challenge you to do the same with your church or ministry as you read the LSWG paper.  Here are the questions I am beginning to ask (note: TIBM refers to Trinity International Baptist Mission and all our related ministries):

1. Can TIBM recruit and deploy one team tasked to produce an "Oral Story Bible" for one of the 2,252 language groups that still do not have one verse of Scripture in their language?

2. Can TIBM drastically increase our intentional and strategic distribution and use of the Scripture?

3. Can TIBM recruit and deploy one full-time worker to go to one of the 2,365 people groups (with populations over 5,000) that are totally unengaged with the Gospel?

4. Can TIBM launch a new ministry focused on reaching out to members of a major religious group that we aren't currently engaging?

5. Can I effectively teach effective Bible storying and narrative preaching to those I lead and mentor?

6. Can the entire TIBM team get trained in orality ministry?

7. Can TIBM start more churches where there are actual needs?

8. Can TIBM become a "house of prayer for the nations" - developing a 24/7 missional prayer ministry?

9. Can TIBM form new boundary-crossing partnerships that result in extending God's Kingdom?

10. Can TIBM become for faithfully mobilized in compassion ministry?

11. Can TIBM be renewed and refilled by the Holy Spirit?

12. Can TIBM become more effective and intentional in mobilizing followers of Christ to pray, give, and go for God's global mission?

13. Can TIBM become thoroughly and constantly informed as to the status of God's mission in the world?  Can we increase our access to and use of resources like Christian World Encyclopedia, Operation World, Ethnologue, Joshua Project, People Groups, and more?

14. Can TIBM conduct regular research and produce reliable results that are helpful to the Body of Christ?

And that's it. I am particularly looking forward to the plenary session on this topic and the interaction around the tables.  Let's pray that God will give us very clear direction.