Episode 4: Different Amalgams

About this episode

Globalization doesnʼt just connect the world—it reshapes it. From a Puerto
Rican Day Parade in Orlando to youth culture on the other side of the globe, Imer explores how identity is formed (and eroded) in an age of algorithms, pop music, and migration. With voices like Aaron Pierce and Aaron Renn, the episode asks a pressing question for modern missions: are we meant to protect cultures—or learn how to serve faithfully inside the mixing bowl?

People featured in this episode

Imer Santiago⁠ — Host. Puerto Rican–American trumpeter, jazz musician, and worship leader based in St. Cloud, Florida.

⁠Ted Esler⁠ — President/CEO of Missio Nexus (since 2015). Former church planter in Sarajevo, Bosnia; previously held leadership roles with Pioneers. Author of The Innovation Crisis; holds a PhD in Intercultural Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.

⁠Brian Stanley⁠ — Historian of world Christianity and Christian missions. Professor at the University of Edinburgh; has written and edited multiple books on missions history.

⁠Aaron Pierce⁠ — International mission leader with Steiger International, focused on mobilizing and equipping Christians to reach young people outside the church. Author of Not Beyond Reach.

⁠Aaron Renn⁠ — Writer and consultant based in Indianapolis. Senior Fellow at American Reformer; previously a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Managing Director at Accenture. Author of Life in the Negative World.

⁠Harvey Kwiyani⁠ — Malawian theologian and missiologist known for work on decolonizing mission and global/diaspora Christianity. Author of Decolonizing Mission.

⁠Mark Matlock⁠ — Ordained minister and author focused on youth discipleship and next-generation leadership. Founder of WisdomWorks and Senior Fellow at Barna. Co-author of Faith for Exiles (with David Kinnaman).

⁠Greg Parsons⁠ — Missions leader associated with Frontier Ventures (formerly the U.S. Center for World Mission) and William Carey International University.

Music

Adeline Paik / Left In The Rain (K-pop Version) / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
No Longer Music / Unknown live track / courtesy of ⁠Steiger⁠
Lars Eriksson / Stay True (Instrumental Version) / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
Out To The World / Axon Terminal / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
Pawan Krishna / Dark to Light / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound

Credits

Host: Imer Santiago
Produced by: Arrival Creative
Presented by: Missio Nexus

Show overview

Polyphonic: Mission After Empire is an 8-episode narrative podcast hosted by

Imer Santiago and produced by Missio Nexus. If youʼve ever wondered whether “mission” and “empire” can be untangled—or if weʼve been pretending itʼs simpler than it is—this show is for you.

Imer brings his experience as a musician and teacher into conversations with historians, missiologists, practitioners, and everyday voices—tracing what we inherited, what we missed, and what we might need to admit before we can move forward. Music isnʼt background here—itʼs the glue, the metaphor, and sometimes the argument.

This isnʼt a definitive answer guide, because we probably wonʼt get all the answers before Heaven. Itʼs a place to start listening—polyphonic in the truest sense: many voices, each with its own melody, heard together.

Host

Imer Santiag o is a Puerto Rican–American trumpeter, jazz musician, and worship leader. Heʼs from Lorain, Ohio, and now lives in St. Cloud, Florida.

He studied Jazz at Ohio State University and earned a Master of Music in Jazz Studies in New Orleans.

He serves as Director of Bands at St. Cloud Middle School and performs and leads worship throughout the year.

Transcription for this episode

Episode 4 transcription

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Episode 4, where we talk about the mixing bowl that is the world. 20 somethings often have more in common with the 20-something on the other side of the world. Through music, through, you know, pop culture.

Just digital technologies have enabled almost a new way of…

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relating on a global scale that wasn’t there, you know, 20 years ago. Is that a globalizing force that’s homogenizing and reducing some of the cultural indigeneity that we might express otherwise? Those are big topics. Have you delved into any of that? I was just, as you were speaking, I was thinking, so I teach middle school, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and…

Every year I’ve taught middle school, at least at the current school I’m at, St. Cloud Middle, there’s kids who are big fans of K-pop and we don’t live in Korea. So how are they? They don’t speak Korean, they don’t live in South Korea, ah but yet they’re following this music. so I think, like you said, the platforms, musically, whether it’s Spotify, Apple, whatever, I you can listen to music from all over the world. uh

YouTube, right, so they can watch videos of certain K-pop groups. That’s interesting. But they’re not Korean, but they’re following hardcore and some of it’s like they’re big fans of these students. Well, maybe that’s going to open up new ways for us to think about and do cross-cultural mission. With the advent of global media, social media, global music, the younger generation are increasingly…

maybe not homogenized, more homogenous than the older generation, who were perhaps more attached to more traditional cultural forms. So wherever you go in the world, you tend to find generational arguments between Christians over what music should be sung, and how it should be sung, and what instruments you should use, etc. So you get into the whole subject of

What do mean by globalization? Does globalization necessarily mean everything becoming homogenous, the same? To an extent it does, but I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s about the way in which the indigenous interacts with the global and you get different amalgams coming out in different places. On the one hand, we try to be very aware of cultures so as not to erode or dilute them.

the same time, the world has become smaller and moved toward a more global society where cultures are more easily impacted by others across the world. So, are we meant to be cultural protectors or should we just allow this amalgamation to occur? There was a very real example of this seemingly inevitable blending back at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. And stop. Good, good. If any of you get tired in the middle of the, well, you’re gonna get tired, but thirsty.

Raise your hand. We got chaperones that will be observant. They’ll try to get you water. But if everybody’s raising their hand at the same time, just be patient. Focus on the music. Band, ten, S C! Cadence, one.

So we are in downtown Orlando for the Florida Puerto Rican Day Parade, which is an annual event here in Orlando. It’s complex and also I wasn’t born on the island, so I have thoughts and ideas, but I always try to honor those who live there and have a different experience than me being here Florida. But one of the things I told my students this week, anybody could look like a Puerto Rican. And I wasn’t just trying to be comical about it, like it is true.

because of the history you had the Taino Indians, the original Boricuas who were there on the island. uh They were, you know, certain skin color, but then you had African slaves that were brought, and then European influence as well. So you could be of any skin tone and be Puerto Rican. My mother looks Caucasian. If you meet her, you’d be like, oh, she might be white. ah I am more caramel colored, you know, and then there’s Puerto Ricans that I know that look African American, very dark skin tone. So there’s that. uh

It’s a teaching moment for the students to know like, there is this mix of cultures on the island. Which is why, going back to the parade on Saturday, you have to be careful when you’re talking. You might think, oh, this person’s black and they won’t understand, or this person’s white and they don’t speak Spanish. No, they probably do speak Spanish and are as Puerto Rican as you are. You know, I would say one of the things that’s being discussed in the missions community right now is about globalization. So that process you’re describing.

essentially there’s kind of set ethnic group that represents that indigenous people anymore. But through mixing of cultures, you become kind of a new, now I don’t want to use this term in the wrong way, but let me say homogenized culture, mixing different groups together. And I think…

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One of the concerns is that globalization has been a homogenizing force or factor. And so it’s interesting that in the midst of the conversation about colonialism, now globalism is almost a new form, has been a new form of it, robbing people of their distinct ethnic identity. And there’s kind of a pushback on that, suggesting that, you know, we need to be careful about not limiting.

people’s indigenous expression. uh Anyway, uh I’d say that’s a big topic right now in global mission. Wow. Many missionaries work within a singular country or culture or people. But this discussion with Ted about potentially new cultures that emerge from blending other cultures made me want to talk to someone who functions in this type of space. So I connected with Aaron Pierce, who leads a missions organization called Stiger.

which doesn’t focus on one specific culture, but rather the global youth culture which exists in most places across the world. So Aaron, for someone who may not be as familiar with Steiger and they wanna know more about what you all do, has music been a force for good through Steiger and how they’re like, what are you guys doing with through?

with music. so we started, of course, the origin of our whole mission was essentially through a punk band. So that’s pretty unusual for a mission organization to be founded by a punk band. so music, art, creativity of various kinds has always been a tenet of who we are. So Stygers is kind of a weird word because it’s a Dutch word and it refers to the location where our ministry or eventually became a missions organization started in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. My parents were

actually the founders of our organization. They were missionaries in Amsterdam in the 80s and 90s. They had a hard to reach young people of the city that would not walk into a church, which in a city like Amsterdam is pretty much all young people. And they were just classic missionaries in that, but it was to a particular culture, but subculture in the 80s and 90s, especially in the 80s, the social movement at the time was the punk rock movement. And Amsterdam was kind of an epicenter for that.

And so my dad spent a lot of times in bars and clubs and venues where that scene was very present and connecting with people, sharing the gospel. But really felt like God uh challenged him to go to the next level by actually starting a punk band himself as a way to preach the gospel in these secular places. And God’s hand was on it really early on, started this band, tremendous favor from the very beginning. It was about preaching the cross in these venues and they saw a

bunch of people come to Jesus to the point where they’re like, what do we do with all these people? So they had a Bible study on a big red houseboat behind the central train station and they invited people there and it grew into a church. And the address of that houseboat was Pier 14 and the Dutch word for Pier Stiger. So it was called Stiger 14 and it was the address and it became the name of the church. And then eventually

It spawned really by God’s power, not a strategic plan, but it spawned this global missions movement all about reaching young people that would not walk in with church. And so that’s kind of the genesis of our mission. And of course, I grew up in that environment as a little kid in Amsterdam. ah My dad would take me and my little brother on tour with him with his band. They would go all over Europe and we’d be in some like nightclub in Eastern Europe somewhere in a tough environment.

And he would bring me my little brother on stage right in middle of the concert. And he would say, these are my sons. I love them. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them. Everything that I have is theirs. I would protect them with my life. And then he would say, and that’s how God feels about you. And he would equate a father’s love for his children with God’s love for them. And then he would share the gospel. And in that environment, I saw tough people with tears in their eyes praying to receive Jesus. And it pretty much ruined my life in the best possible way.

We celebrate when things like this happen. People come to faith. They reassess their lives and decide to make changes. Why would we expect that other changes wouldn’t follow? Why would it be wrong for a culture to change as well if it were natural? Maybe we’re segregating topics too much. Perhaps faith and culture, like Bushman said, are more intimately tied than we realize.

Aaron Ren is a leading thinker and writer on topics surrounding American culture as it relates to Christianity. I wanted to hear his thoughts about globalization and how the views coming out of America are affecting the rest of

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globalization has really scrambled the game board uh in almost every dimension because of people, uh flows, capital flows, knowledge flows across the internet. And of course the globalization of the internet now allows ideas and communication to travel across border, across the world seamlessly. So it’s certainly a very different environment than it was kind of prior to this big globalization.

push and prior to the internet. The other thing I will say that’s related to this is there really is sort of still an American cultural hegemony uh in a lot of ways, you know, in the sense that, uh you know, we had Hollywood sort of exporting American culture. That’s true. But now sort of social media, you know, exports American culture and American categories for thinking about things. And maybe

You know, some of the colonialism or post colonialism discourse to the extent that affects other countries is actually a product of US social media dissemination. One thing is like in France, there’s been some debate over, oh, people in France are adopting these US woke categories of race that we don’t believe. Those are not French ideas. Those are American ideas. And so there is a sense that what happens in America? uh I do think there’s a

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a cultural power that is projected by the United States that has a pervasive effect around the world. Even if no one does anything or even tries to do anything, it’s going to be downloaded off of the Internet. It’s going to be, you know, transmitted through Hollywood. uh The U.S. really does, I think, have an influence that we don’t realize.

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Aaron, I think that’s interesting what you’re just was taking notes about the cultural power projected, you know, from the US to the world, known or unknown. uh I know as a, I’ve served on many worship teams and I get opportunities to visit different churches. And I myself, the assemblies of God church I grew up in, in Ohio was primarily Hispanic. And so we had bilingual services, English and Spanish. And, but as I’ve visited other places over the last 20, 25 years, even in other countries,

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I have seen, it’s almost like uh Christian contemporary music, CCM, has been exported. so, for example, I go to Puerto Rico and there’s an increasing number of churches singing CCM songs in Spanish, whether they’re written by Latin or Puerto Rican, Spanish speaking artists or not. And I’m like, whoa, where are the styles, right, that I grew up listening to? I’ll give you one more example. I had the opportunity to travel to Africa almost six years ago.

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And it was in South Africa and the church was majority black African. uh And they still, they were doing CCM songs. And so it was an interesting discussion. Like, can you help us understand uh those of us from different countries, but especially from United States, why? So I’ve seen that as well, where it’s like, at least with music, ah if it comes from the U S we’re going to grab that and sometimes discard our own indigenous styles because you know, we, for whatever reason, it, for whatever. Yeah.

inspires or people feel a different way about themselves. It’s interesting. Just look at the way hip hop is sort of taking over the world. There’s like hip hop artists in all these different countries, know, rapping in all their different languages. They’re rapping in Arabic or they’re rapping in French or they’re rapping in Korea. like it’s just there are uh apparently house music got huge in South Africa. You know, so there’s like a lot of things like that that, you know, these American styles get

adopted all over the world in ways that probably others don’t. Now again, sometimes things get popular from other countries. K-pop, Korean pop has gotten very popular, but I haven’t necessarily seen that other countries are creating like their own versions of K-pop that are sort of modeled on that. know, there’s, you know, the idea of these different sort of manufactured bands. That’s been around in different cultures for a while, but you know, so there is a…

There’s something about it, and of course the fact that we speak English, and it’s like so widely spoken, kind of a lingua franca around the world, it makes it easier. If you’re listening to music in a foreign language and you don’t understand it, it’s not as easy maybe to penetrate as, because there’s more English language knowledge. I can’t remember the name, this video goes viral on Twitter periodically.

I think it was in the 1970s, this Italian musician got so frustrated that English language songs were popular. He’s like, I bet if I create a song that’s just nonsense lyrics that sound like English, it will be popular. So he created this song that was literally nonsense designed to sound like English and it turned into a huge hit. so there is something there and, you know, there’s still an immense

prestige to the United States that I think we don’t appreciate. This makes me wonder. Do we as Christians need to be more careful about the way we approach various topics? What if we end up exporting nonsense ideas about culture or missions or even Christianity in general? What might be the fallout to the dissemination of those bad ideas, particularly among the youth of the

Yeah, so the specific people group that God has called our mission, Steiger 2, is what we call the global youth culture. So global youth culture are youth and young adults all over the planet that despite having various local identities and influences, whether they’re a Muslim or Hindu or Christian or whatever, they’re engaged in this global culture.

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So they’re following the same social media influencers, they’re playing the same video games, they’re listening to the same music, and they’re buying in largely to a secular ideology. And so they may identify as a Muslim, but they actually think like a secular humanist. And some of the core tenets of a secular humanist is that God has been replaced, man is at the center, and there’s no outside authority that can tell me how to live my life. It’s the era of my truth

and all identity, purpose, and morality is self-constructed. That’s kind of the worldview that you’ll hear among the global youth culture no matter where you go. So to give you an illustration of this, a few months ago, I led a team to Saudi Arabia to participate in a music festival called Soundstorm. And it’s this crazy big, highly produced festival.

And this year, or this last year, the headline band was the American rapper

Eminem. He was in Saudi Arabia, right? And here we have this crowd, 100,000 people, and there’s people jumping around. And on one hand, you have a young Muslim woman in a full hijab next to another young Muslim woman dressed like a European jumping around listening to Eminem perform. So it’s this wild idea.

of this global youth culture. And when you talk to these young Saudis, they talk like a kid at the University of Minnesota, where I’m from, in terms of moral relativism, in terms of, you know, find your identity in yourself and your own, you know, no one can tell you. And so this is that worldview that you’re describing. Now, what’s important to understand about that is that it sounds good. It sounds like freedom.

this idea of like you decide for yourself, no, my truth. But the truth is the consequences are devastating. It’s like poison wrapped in bubble gum, right? It looks all sweet and shiny in the outside, but the consequences are awful because if there is no true source of truth that I can turn to, if it’s all about me and myself, I’m left with confusion.

Or if there are no rules, it’s just do what makes you happy, do what feels good. No one can tell you what’s right and wrong. Well, I’m gonna end up sexually broken, which is true of this generation. Or if it’s all about me and doing what makes me happy, well, I’m gonna be lonely. Or if there’s no anchor to hold on to in the inevitable storms of life, I’m gonna be anxious, I’m gonna be depressed. And so you have this global generation.

even people, young Saudis that are leaving Islam for the false freedom of secularism, and what they’re left with is confusion, sexual brokenness, loneliness, and anxiety. This is the felt need of a global generation. And so that’s kind of the thing to understand. So when we communicate to this generation, whether it’s through the arts or any other form, we can speak to those felt needs because Jesus brings truth to the confused.

He brings healing to the sexually broken. He brings the ultimate relationship with the creator through what Jesus did on the cross. And he brings peace that transcends understanding. So we actually have the ultimate answers to the cry of a generation. We just need to understand their worldview and also understand the false freedoms that it offers. Right? It sounds good to say that it’s all relative and that everyone can figure it out by themselves, but it leads to destruction. And so I think that’s an important thing to recognize.

It’s obvious that America is incredibly influential in the world. Aaron spoke about the Eminem concert in Saudi Arabia and the young woman in the hijab next to the woman in European dress rocking out together. It’s hard to imagine a more surprising combination of people and place. I was also surprised by something Harvey said about the importance of America and European powers maintaining their influence in the world. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Harvey’s opinions often surprised me.

And suppose it really just highlighted to me once again that these topics are not black and white. Even if you believe America to be the current imperial power, there’s likely an important role for her to play. At the moment, Europe and North America, the United States or Canada, there are a lot of things going on. But really one of the things that’s become clear is that there cannot be a void. Right?

If America steps back from its influence in the world, somebody will rise up.

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And that’s just the reality of our human existence. When the Roman Empire fell, the Byzantine Empire emerged, right? And to a great extent controlled all the land that was under the Roman Empire. And when the Byzantine

Empire fell, the Muslims, the Turks emerged. It’s the reality of human life.

In that context, think it’s where Christ compels us and gives us a compelling message that says, actually, it’s not about the empires and it’s not about the emperors. It is about Christ. builds a totally different kingdom from what you see with your emperors? If Christianity is tied down to an imperial identity,

when the inevitable happens when the empire begins to crumble.

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Influence, not empire. Culture, not laws. Perhaps even spirit over truth.

Aaron Pierce expanded on this idea further. If I’m a missionary and God’s called me to a specific culture, I want to understand the influences of that culture. I want to understand what’s shaping how they see the world. And there was a Scottish writer and politician in the 18th century that said, let me make songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws. And it’s this idea that the songs and the poets and the writers and the artists are the ones that shape the culture.

that shape how they see the world. And then if I understand what the artists and the writers are saying, then I understand where the culture is going. And so I just want to be in tune to the culture and realizing that the cultural diversity that we see in the world is just a reflection of the diversity that God made. It’s a beautiful thing. But that doesn’t mean those cultures have to stay in isolation. We can learn from each other. We can experience different things. We can mix them together in cool ways. So I think…

There’s various ways to go with this, but clearly from a missiological perspective, the arts have a powerful way of understanding a culture and understanding the influence that shaped the culture so that I can learn how to present Jesus in a way that connects with that particular culture. What’s behind these discussions about the maintenance of culture? Doesn’t it really boil down to identity? People wanting to be known. Back at the Puerto Rican Day Parade,

there was a phrase people were chanting to express their cultural identity, a very overt expression of this desire to be known. One of them you’re gonna hear today, potentially, not from us necessarily, because we’re gonna be playing, but you’ll hear like, yo soy Boricua. So it’s kind of a calm response. That’s the call out, which means I am Puerto Rican. Boricua is like a term that refers to the indigenous nation that lived on the island centuries ago. um

And so you’ll hear, yo soy Boricua, and then somebody will respond, pa que tu lo sepa, which means so that you know it. So uh it’s sense of pride, like I’m Puerto Rican, I want you to know it, you know? So you’ll hear that, another word you may hear is wepa, W E P A. There’s no direct translation in English for that word, but it’s more of like, yo, cool, what’s up, you know? Let’s go, right on, it’s all of those things mashed into one word, wepa. Yeah, so you might hear those phrases.

What other phrases would we hear in this discussion about missions and globalization? And does it even mean anything anymore? I always say one of my postures of a global Christian is the ends of the earth depend on where you’re standing. So, you know, I was in Nairobi with about 3000 college students that were kind of asking the question that we ask at Urbana. In fact, the event that we were having in Kenya actually

was birthed out of Urbana. Some Kenyan college students came to Urbana in 1987, said, we need to do one of these in our own country. And so they started an event called Commission, Callisto, Odede, and some others. And so they’ve been doing that every three years since 1988. And since I was graduated from high school, basically, and I got to go and experience that. And it’s all put on by the Kenyans for

it’s more broad than just Kenya, but to other African nations as well, but almost 3000 college students gathering there and their theme was Africa to the rest. know, like, you know, Africa used to be seen as the center of the of the missionary, like the missionary target, but now we’re the center of missions to the the unreached people of the world. And if you think about it, that’s that’s really kind of inaccurate anyway, because the Middle East is really, you know, that’s a central

That’s the birthplace of Christianity and Judaism and everything. And so this whole idea of from the West to the rest, I think is an old dated idea. And even the West is the best. uh I think what, what we’re really seeing now is more of a polycentric missiology that says it’s really from everywhere to everywhere. And that’s kind of an exciting time. And that’s really different than when I was growing up. uh

the Western cultures were really the driving force behind missions. That’s just not the case anymore. You often hear talk about the West and for a long time the phrase from the West to the rest was popular and core to the way we approached missions. But even the idea of being Western is becoming blurry in our shrinking and mixing global world. Question, when you say Western, it’s gonna sound really ignorant maybe. I know I’m Western, but would I be considered?

You’re white, I’m Puerto Rican-American. Would they look at me differently say, well, he’s from the West, but he’s okay because he speaks Spanish? Or is it like, no, you’re from the US, you’re Western. Back off. I don’t know, I’m just wondering. I don’t know, I think it probably depends if you’re wearing that USA cap or the Puerto Rican flag cap, how you might be perceived. Interesting. uh I mean, this is one of the great complexities. I mean, we live in a…

world which is so mixed and even defining what is Western is difficult these days. ah think in a world where people were not mixing like they are now, it was a pretty clear distinction. I mean, honestly, I have been in a few cities in the UK. When I stand on a street corner, look around, I am the only white person that I can see. It’s just overwhelmingly.

people from Pakistan particularly. It’s kind of a shocker. conversely, you can go to neighborhoods in Vancouver, the street signs are in Chinese. I mean, you can find that in parts of the US too. I would say less so, but you definitely see it here. So all that’s just to say, here we are in an era of

a lot of mixing. even different ethnic groups that are in the Western

Missions Movement are perceived differently on a global scale in how they approach missions and how they interact with others. I mean, an example of that could be, so you know, I worked in Sarajevo, Bosnia, right after, well, during and after the war. And we had an African American pastor who was in the U.S. military.

uh He had been a national guardsman, but he was deployed. He came over and was working with the military there, and we met him, and we invited him to speak in the International Church Service, and it swelled with Bosnians. And there was an affinity between African Americans and Bosnians, Bosnian Muslim background people, because African Americans, they felt like they were living in a culture in they were minority and oppressed.

Bosnian Muslims weren’t a Serb dominated Yugoslavia, at least that was their perspective. And so there was an affinity between these two groups. And for sure when that African American talked about discrimination, immediately those Bosnians felt like they were resonating with what he had. There was a big curiosity. There was a big curiosity too about how he could be a Christian. Because in Islam,

They look at our conversation about colonialism and they say, this is what

Christianity is all about. That’s kind of shocking when you consider that Islam itself is highly colonialistic. But that is, you know, I would say a more common global image is that Christianity is colonialistic and Islam isn’t. And so these are really, you know, super complex.

dynamics that you gotta deal with cross-culturally. Mix together extremely different people, cultures and beliefs and add in internal stakes. Good luck escaping the complexities of these discussions. But I wanted to jump back for a few minutes to a concept we’ve touched on here and there, unreached people groups. This term has been around for more than 50

years, but I was curious to hear where it came from. So I connected with Greg Parsons,

who was good friends with Ralph Winter, who coined the term. We started with a bit of his background. Early in, actually when I was early in high school, we switched to a church that really taught the Bible and had a strong commitment to missions. And we didn’t know that. I mean, we knew the Bible, we knew it was a good church. We moved from another church, it was fine, but the mission commitment of this church soon began to impact me. And one of those ways was, uh

that uh people invested in us and kind of saw us, that is the young people in the church, as people who could be sent, who could go out. Later on, another pastor later said, know, so when are you gonna go? I need someone from the church to go lead a team, you know, and go out there and plant churches. And we didn’t end up doing that, but uh that was sort of the spirit of the church. And so that got us into a lot of things.

As we got into college then, um we heard that this guy was going to speak. So this is in Silicon Valley around the San Jose area. A guy named Ralph Winner was going to speak at a student conference at Stanford on the weekend. And so another guy and I who were sort of the leaders of the college within the group uh said, hey, let’s take a bunch of students up and hear what he has to say. You know, we didn’t know much about him and what all of them.

So we got up there, was Friday evening, it was not a great set up, you know, in terms of all that. There was overheads, if anyone in your listeners know what those are, and uh hand drawn about the world and what was going on. was not professional in that sense at all, but what he shared just shocked me and my buddy, both of whom were, again, praying through this world thing, but we didn’t realize you can pray through country after country.

But what do you do when you get into that country and you realize there are different cultures, different peoples or people groups as they’re known now? And that’s what Ralph Winter was talking about. And he said, you know, we could reach out our hands as far and wide as we want, where the gospel is gone, in the cultures where it’s gone, and we’ll still have over half the world’s population that’s untouched.

So we could challenge the church to reach, to do evangelism forever and still never touch the unreached because by definition, the unreached don’t have a viable witness among their culture and among them. Somebody who wakes up and thinks about who doesn’t know about Jesus and then people who wake up and they don’t know that…

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that God has visited the earth and the person of Christ. No, I thought that was great. I know like, I could just share a little bit from my perspective. There’s times when I hear unreached people groups, I think of, this must be a place where the gospel has never been shared, right? uh A group of people, maybe it’s a nation, I don’t know. Could you help maybe clarify? um Is there another definition? And maybe you’ve kind of already hinted at this.

for unreached people groups? Cause it sounds like there could still be Christians amongst the people group and they maybe might still be considered unreached. Yeah, well, that’s a good, great, great way of shaping the question uh and honing it. um I mean, and there are a lot of things in here where we just don’t know. And so let me just back up on this whole thing and say, these are man’s best humans, I should say, I don’t mean just man, man’s best definitions.

for what we understand the scriptures to teach when it talks about in Matthew 28, pontata ethne in the Greek, that this will be spread to all the nations. That didn’t mean countries. So it has to mean something else. Now that doesn’t mean countries aren’t important. Kingdoms, not in Jesus’ version, but in the rest of us, kingdoms, the British Isles or the British…

you know, whatever, that’s a kingdom in a sense. you know, less control when you get out of England than maybe they would like or others more than others would like. But anyway, that’s something that the Bible cares about too. And you mentioned, you know, peoples and some people now say unreached peoples and places. And I think there’s a sense in that, that hasn’t really been defined.

But I think there’s just a sense that when we go out, as best we can read a situation spiritually when we travel and go to different places where there’s just less, it seems to us, humanly speaking, spiritually even speaking, best we understand it, that there’s less of Jesus followers in that place.

then you say, place needs more attention. That’s really the main thing that this is about. Where should we give some priority? It doesn’t mean it has to be everybody’s priority to go to say the past Hindu world of India, which very, very few people are doing. Even Indians are rarely doing it. It doesn’t mean that that’s everyone’s priority. In fact, a lot of people would not be good at doing that. They aren’t ready or able or…

connected enough to figure out how to really talk to a Hindu about Christ. Would most of us be ready to talk to a high caste Hindu about Christ? Would we know enough about their culture or their worldview to say anything meaningful? Does it matter that they’re from an unreached people group or an unreached place? Isn’t the Bible enough? In this world that is constantly mixing, sometimes a culture transcends geography.

For the global youth, social media trends, pop music, and the morals du jour often trump their parents and grandparents’ local religious and social cues. Though they may look different, a young Muslim from the Middle East and a teenager from the Midwest might have more in common than their aunts and uncles. And speaking of the way people look, we can’t any longer assume anything based on skin color. Puerto Rico is a small example of that, where you might have someone who looks white

the same family as someone who looks black and someone else who has a caramel complexion. Or neighborhoods in the UK which are dominated by people from South Asia or places in Canada where East Asians make up the majority of the population. The way we look and even where we come from is becoming less and less tied to our identities. In light of all of this, how should we move forward with missions? It may sound simple, but it seems like we just need to work

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But is that possible? And what would that look like? Maybe a newer concept known as mutuality holds some answers for us.

38 51 Polyphonic, Mission After Empire is hosted by me, Imer Santiago, and produced by Missile Nexus and Arrival Creative. Thanks for listening.