Joshua Project

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The Joshua Project is a database of the worldwide Pentecostal evangelical movement founded in 1995 to determine and present the current status of Christian mission among all ethnic groups in the world. In 2006 the project became the research initiative of the United States Centers for World Mission . The center employs various missiologists and lay people . The aim of the facility is to develop strategies to convert as many people of different faith as possible from the least Christian groups - the so-called "unreached peoples" . The Joshua Project has the task of providing missionary Christians worldwide with internet-based data (in the form of maps and tables) in order to locate the “unreached peoples” and ultimately to initiate missionary efforts.

The freely accessible database is primarily based on the ethnic affiliation of the people, who can be selected according to various criteria (countries, languages, religions). In 2010 it contained 16,350 records.

The initiative justifies its "missionary mandate" with the following passage from the Bible ( Mt 24:14  ELB ): "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached all over the world, to all nations for a testimony, and then the end will come."

The presentation of the processed data includes an evaluation of each ethnic group in the form of a “traffic light system”: A green point means “More than 2% Evangelicals”, yellow means “Less than 2% Evangelicals and over 5% Christians” and red stands for “Less than 2% Evangelicals and less than 5% Christians ”(The scale is further subdivided). The Joshua Project gives systematic instructions on how to reach the unreached peoples as efficiently as possible: linguistic, cultural and social barriers are identified and strategies are given to reduce these barriers. The ideology of the Pentecostal evangelical missionary movement is based on the unproven assumption that the absence of such barriers automatically leads to people becoming eager to become Christians.

Data quality and criticism

The Joshua Project website mentions “precise information, updated roughly every two weeks”. The corresponding data come from a wide variety of sources, for example scientifically sound information from ethnology (e.g. ethnologue ) and the UN is used for the areas of “languages” and “ethnic groups” . The project operators assume that these figures are reliable with a deviation of +/- 20%. However, the crucial role is played by the surveys of churches and mission societies, field missionaries, congregations, and individuals. In order to ensure sufficient data quality, surveys by these employees must correlate with scientifically proven figures.

The data made available are available worldwide to both missionaries and any other person - including those who do not want to missions. What is impressive is the degree of data processing technology used, which enables every imaginable combination and representation of data. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the data quality has to be questioned in part: Firstly, the freelance workers on the project do not usually work scientifically and, secondly, one can assume that the missionary ideology of the project can easily lead to misjudgments. On the other hand, there is no other database that provides such detailed information of this kind. Taking into account the restrictions mentioned, the data are certainly a valuable addition to country and race-specific data from other sources or in the case of completely missing data.

Projects like this one, which pursue a fundamental Christian “world conversion”, are viewed critically from an ethnological point of view, since they accelerate the cultural change of local indigenous communities in a strongly manipulative way: the abandonment of traditional values is encouraged; this leads to a decreasing independence of the groups and to new dependencies on the new religion - and connected with it - on western culture.

See also

Web links

  • Website: joshuaproject.net

Individual evidence

  1. a b Martin Petzke: Weltbekehrungen: On the construction of global religion in Pentecostal evangelical Christianity. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8394-2241-0 . Pp. 351-352.
  2. Martin Petzke: Weltbekehrungen: To the construction of global religion in Pentecostal-evangelical Christianity. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8394-2241-0 . P. 345.
  3. David Gibbons: Atlas of Faith. The religions of the world. Translation from English, Frederking & Thaler, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-89405-719-0 . P. 92.
  4. Martin Petzke: Weltbekehrungen: To the construction of global religion in Pentecostal-evangelical Christianity. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8394-2241-0 . Pp. 345-351.
  5. Uncontacted Races: Threats . In: survivalinternational.de, accessed on December 12, 2014.