• Vol. 18, No.3 nternatlona July 1994 etln• Youth: Mission's Neglected Priority ccording to BryantMyers in the lead article of this issue, category in their own right. Not until New Delhi (1961) was A every third person in the world today is a youth under formal notice taken of youth as a category. The Youth Depart­ the age of fifteen, and almost four out of five are growing up in ment of the WCC identified a new phenomenon-"youth cul­ non-Christian settings. ture"-and announced: "The present-day population explosion Three-quarters of today's urban slum population-more has made our world a world largely populated by youth." than 400 million-consists of young people under the age of The Lausanne Movement has devoted some attention to twenty-four. As many as 100 million under fifteen live on city children as a focus of mission, but as Myers notes, "Most mis­ streets. There are half a million prostitutes under the age of sions focus on people groups and send adults to reach other twenty in Brazil, 800,000 under sixteen in Thailand. Every year adults." Conclusion: It is time to address the youth lacuna in upward of a million children are forced into the sex industry. world mission! Childrenin manyregions of the globe are beingexploited as child laborers in ways some of us might have supposed had ended in the last century. Wondering to what extent children of earlier generations havebeenidentified as a categoryfor specialmissionconcern, we On Page invested an afternoon in the Day Missions Library at Yale Uni­ 98 State of the World's Children: Critical versity Divinity School-and found relatively little. Edwin Challenge to Christian Mission Munsell Bliss's landmark Encyclopedia of Missions, published in Bryant L. Myers 1891, offers under the topic of "Woman's Work for Woman" a 103 The Study of Pacific Island Christianity: brief column on the education of Western children about world Achievements, Resources, Needs missions but nothing about the status of children in the world as Charles W. Forman a whole. (With satisfaction Bliss noted the enrollment in the United States of at least 200,000 in 10,000 children's missionary 113 The 1888 London Centenary Missions "bands.") James S. Dennis's Christian Missionsand Social Progress Conference: Ecumenical Disappointment or (1899)features a twelve-page review of the welfare and needs of American Missions Coming of Age? children in various parts of the non-Western world. Yet it is Thomas A. Askew acknowledged that Christian missions "have not been able to do 119 The Legacy of Lars Peter Larsen much as yet in the direction of organized effort." Eric J. Sharpe The world missionary conferences of 1888 (London), 1900 125 The Legacy of Friedrich Schwager (New York), and 1910(Edinburgh) followed Bliss in giving more Karl Maller, S.V.D. attention to the education of Western children about missions than the needs of non-Western children as recipients of mission. 131 Book Reviews Although conference reports touched on the education of chil­ 142 Dissertation Notices dren in mission lands, they failed to identify children per se as a 144 Book Notes category meriting special missionary energy and focus. Finally, in 1925,the ForeignMissionsConvention(Washing­ ton) gave attention to the issues of child mortality and the exploitation of child labor in the Far East. Jerusalem (1928) and Madras (1938) dealt substantially with the educational task of mission but again failed to identify youth and children as a major of issionaryResearch State of the World's Children: Critical Challenge to Christian Mission Bryant L. Myers his essay examines in broad strokes the state of the T world's children from the perspective of Christian mis­ DEVELOPING DEVELOPED sion. My thesis is that understanding the situa tion of children COUNTRIES COUNTRIES and youth in the world is a significant blind spo t in Christian AGE mission. If children and youth are as central to the mission task 80+ 75 -79 as I believe, then our way of thinking about mission and Males Females Males Females contextualizing the Gospel tod ay will be seen to be ina dequa te. 70 - 74 65-69 Why Are Children and Youth Important? 60-64 55 - 59 First of all, children and youth are impo rtant because there are so 50 -54 ma ny of them. On e-th ird of the world's population, 1.8 billion 45 - 49 peopl e, is under the age of fifteen. Eighty-five percent of these 40 -44 children, or 1.5 billion, live in the Two-Thirds World.' 35-39 The population pyramids for the develop ed and developing 30 -34 worlds reveal a stark contrast (Fig. 1). In the so-called developed 25-29 world the bulge-such as it is- represents the twenty-year-olds, 20 -24 Compare this to the Two-Third s World, where almost half the 1S-19 population is under the age of nineteen. This is not our experi­ 10-14 ence in the West. When Western folk wa lk down their streets, 5 -9 they see roughly equal numbers of children, youth, adults, and 0-4 older folk. But in the Two-Thirds World , every other person one 300 200 100 0 100 200 300 300 200 100 0 100 200 300 POPULATION (in millions) POPULATION (in millions) The situation of children Fig. 1. Adolescents aged 10-19 in the population age pyramids of developing and developed countries.Adapted from "World and youth is one of the Population in Transition," in Population Bulletin (Washing ton, most significant blind spots D.C.: Population Reference Bureau, April 1986). of Christian mission. tians betw een the ages of four and fourteen. According to infor­ mation in Lionel Hunt's Handbook on Christian Mission, impor­ encounte rs is under the age of nineteen . We in the West need to tant, life-shaping decisions are made when people are young recom pose our me ntal image. (Fig. 2). This has been confirmed by informa l research done by Wh en we examine the number of children and youth in the Frank Mann of Child Evangelism Fellowship an d by eva nge list countries of the wo rld as a proportion of their population, Africa Harry Trover.' stands out. More than 45 percent of its population is under the The third reason children and youth are im portant is that, age of fifteen.' The di sprop ortionate number of youth w ill inten­ according to MARC estimates, 78 percent of the world's young sify as Africa's high population growth rate increas es the num­ people-1.4 billion of the 1.8 billion-are growing up in non­ ber of young people, at the same time that their parents are dying Christian settings ." This situation reflects two factors: 1) A sub­ from AIDS. The Middle East, Mexico and Central America, Bolivia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan also stand out. If we examine the abso lute number of children and youth in the wo rld, there are many countries with large numbers of young "The nominal Christians of people. Coun tries with more that 25 million children und er the yesterday beget the non­ age of fifteen include the United States, the former USSR, most countries of South Asia, China, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil.' Christians oftoday." The second reason children and youth are important from a missiological perspective is that by far the great majority of peopl e, at least in the No rth American context, becom e Chris- stantial portion of the children in nominally Christian countries live in nonreligious families, and 2) over the last twenty years the BryantL. Myers is VicePresidentforMissionand EvangelismforWorldVision growth rate of Mu slim and nonreligious populations has out­ International and DirectorofMARC (Missions AdvancedResearch and Com­ paced the gro wth rate of the world population as a w hole (Fig.3). munication Center). He is currently serving as Chair of the Strategy The expanding number of nonreligiou s is largely a Western WorkingGroup of the LausanneCommittee for World Evangelization. phenomena. A recent church census revealed that of the 1,000 98 I NTERNATIONAL B ULLETIN OF MISSIONARY R ESEARCH -----~ -- - _ . ~ - -- - -~--- people leaving English churches every week, 700 were under the International Bulletin age of twenty one. We do not have far to look for the reasons. A Catholic study on family values and transmission of values in of Missionary Research Europe showed, not surprisingly, that "in the majority of cases, Established 1950 by R. Pierce Beaver as Occasional Bulletin from the childrenadoptthe religious attitude of their father and mother."? Missionary Research Library. Named Occasional Bulletin of Missionary A Church of England study recently concluded that "the nomi­ Research 1977. Renamed INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH nal Christians of yesterday beget the non-Christians of today.?" 1981. Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by Who Are These Children? Overseas Ministries Study Center Many of the world's children are dying. Every day almost 40,000 490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, U.s .A. children under the age of five die,?If we examine child mortality Telephone: (203) 624-6672 Fax: (203) 865-2857 rates around the world, children are in danger in Africa, Brazil, the Andean countries of South America, the Middle East, South Editor: Associate Editor: Assistant Editor: Asia, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Looking at children whose lives Gerald H. Anderson James M. Phillips Robert T. Coote are at risk from another perspective, halfof the world's 36million refugees and displaced people are children." Contributing Editors Mostofthese children arelivingin cities in theTwo-Thirds World. Catalino G. Arevalo, S.J.