Peoples and Places: How Geography Impacts Missions Strategy

Jesus’s final command to his disciples was to make disciples of all nations. But who are the nations? How do we know we are being obedient to the task? Do our current lists of ethnolinguistic people groups sufficiently answer the question? For the last fifty years, missiologists and missionaries have discussed this topic, but much of the conversation has been focused on definitions that give little attention to biblical theology. When we explore how the Bible describes “the nations,” we find some other categories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or set aside in the development of missions strategy. Geography is one of these categories. However, this is not simply bringing current geo-political entities back into our missions strategy. Instead, Matthew Hirt is calling on missiologists, missions researchers, and missionaries on the field to discover how people groups identify their own geographies and, in turn, how that geography contributes to a people group’s identity.