Hello friends and family! Password: Mango
Another update and this one will be long and informative. It is about where we are now. I cannot take credit for finding this information and putting it into words. An amazing man, Danny, who works with our squad from back home sent us a very informative email about this and then my teammate Jake helped to make it ready to be shared. So thanks to them for this info and for helping to get it out there. After I learned more about the area if the world I realized the lack of information that might be out there and thought I needed to share it! And, why try to reinvent the wheel when I can use information provided to me by others.
As of right now the whole squad is together in Tibet! That is a crazy thing to be the case, which will be explained further when I share the information provided to me. As I am writing this we have been here for no more than 10 hours and it took a 22 hour train ride to get here (that is not including the time it took just to get to the place to take the 22 hour train ride). It is crazy to learn more about the place called Tibet and all the history that comes with it. It is quite overwhelming and I am sure you will understand if you make it to the end of the blog. Here we go!
Tibet is one of the most isolated and remote places on the planet. Although currently Tibet is simply a province of the modern nation of China, (only since 1951, when communism in China spread), historically, ethnically, and culturally, Tibet has been totally separate from China, about as much as it has from the rest of the world. It was almost entirely independent for most of history, besides slight Mongol influence from Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan), and a few periods of semi-administrative control under the major Chinese empires Yuan and Qing.
Tibet is actually quite rare in this regard, as most other parts of the world have been ruled over by a myriad of different empires. For this reason, Tibet as a whole (flourishing at its prime as the Tibetan empire whose boundaries at its height reached Mongolia and Bangladesh at the end of the 700s) is the base standard of political and cultural isolationism. There’s nothing else like it in the world. No other region in the world on this scale of size that has maintained this level of self-preserved relative autonomy.
This is almost entirely due to its geography, which you could likely assume, is wild. The Tibetan Plateau, as it’s referred to, looks like this from satellite imagery. The white line on the bottom is the Himalayas, the highest mountains on earth, which are also partially located in Nepal and India. The green underneath being the foothills and eventually the Gangetic plain of southern Nepal and India. The yellow spot at the top is the Taklamakan desert in the far west of China, in Xinjiang. Most of the rest of China lies to the right of this map. You’ll notice how barrenly brown it is. The entire plateau sits higher than most everything else in the world. It’s average elevation is a staggering 15,000 ft above sea level. Pretty much every major river in the right half of Asia comes off of it; the Ganges, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze for starters. It is often referred to as the roof of the world, and it is by far the most remote inhabited land area in the world.
Here is a map of general remoteness here. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. You’ll notice the literal black hole of Tibet, juxtaposed next to the beacon of yellow that is India and Eastern China. In that black region in the middle of Tibet is the most remote place on earth (34.7°N, 85.7°E). From here, it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla, one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.
So, that remoteness helps give us context for why Tibet has been so historically isolated and autonomous, and thus also ridiculously unreached. There are several problems with Tibet in terms of the spread of the Gospel. For one it is the most closed region in one of the most closed countries in the world. No one can travel through it independently. Foreigners are not even allowed to enter it EXCEPT with a guided tour, through very specific points of entry and only visiting specific areas, and with very limited freedom while there, and the tour lasts only about a week. More extensive time is granted very exclusively. During China’s control of Tibet the Communist Party leaders have been accused by human rights groups of trying to cow the region by imprisoning Tibetan political prisoners, repressing their religion, culture, language, and keeping their spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, in exile. They have even encouraged ethnically Han Chinese to move to tibet and intermarry. Similar things have been happening with the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group in northwestern China. All this to try to stamp out their “rebellious impulses”.
In addition to this Tibet itself is very separated even amongst itself. So not only is it unreached and largely inaccessible, it is diverse and inaccessible and unreached. There are tribal lines, regional variations, and great ethnic/linguistic distinctions among Tibetans. Tibet was somewhat regionally cohesive in its prime, but it has historically also been made up of separate, disparate tribes and kingdoms because traversing the terrane there is so difficult, dangerous, and time consuming. So ethno-linguistically, we can’t really even think of Tibet as one region, but will have to compartmentalize it.
There is no “Tibetan lingua franca” for all of Tibet, aside from around Lhasa where there is some cohesiveness, the way Mandarin unites the Chinese. Look at people group and linguistic data and it’s overwhelming. For comparison, the family of Romance languages, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, etc, contains 23 distinct mutually unintelligible dialect groups, with about about 800 million romance language speakers. Tibetan languages are split among 25 mutually unintelligible dialect groups, but spoken among a total of only 6 million people.
Tibet is also an ancient and deeply spiritual place. The animistic and shamanistic local religions (some of which still exist today) mixed with Mahayana Buddhism from India/Nepal to form Tibetan Buddhism, or more broadly tantric Vajrayana Buddhisim. Because of this, Tibetan Buddhism is very diverse in its theology and practices, and can also be very dark. A common practice is deity identification, or the possession of a practitioner by a single, or several, “celestial beings”. The whole goal of Tibetan Buddhism is to use series of dedications, rituals, mantras, etc to attain personal buddhahood, in one life time or many, to reach enlightenment, or a formless oneness state, and escape from suffering. Generally Tibetan Buddhists are very devout, making pilgrimages, offerings, meditating and chanting mantras for long periods of time, laying prostrate before idols, and many becoming monks for at least a portion of their lives. The spiritual leaders, called llamas, are also the societal leaders, and historically the government leaders. Almost the entirety of Tibetan culture revolves around theological and religious practices, either more modern buddhist ones or more ancient tribal religious ones. Tibetan’s identity and culture is very much one and the same as their faith, and a conversion from their religion would be comparable to a Muslim in a middle eastern context to convert.
And thus, the importance of long years of Gospel work.
However, there is power in the short term opportunity we do have. I want to impress upon you the gravity of our time in Tibet. We will have a small window of opportunity in what is possibly the most unreached major ethnolinguistic branch ever in terms of access. A brief window of time to share the Gospel, or at least the incarnational love of Jesus, with people that may have spent the last 22 days walking from their hometown to Lhasa on pilgrimage, and will never ever ever ever have a chance of meeting another Christian.
Here’s a quote from the 161,000 Amdo Rongba people group.
There are about ten known Christians among the Rongba Amdo today… “In sending out missionaries for work among the Tibetans, candidates with a strong constitution should be chosen, as missionary work in Tibet is more strenuous than in most places. Missionaries that are afraid to expose themselves to hardship and even danger should not be sent to Tibet.”
Here’s one for the Eastern Khampa, numbering 1,600,000 (the largest Tibetan group).
“By 1922 the Protestant station at Batang had won ten converts.”
That number has likely not increased much because all the Protestant missionaries were kicked out in the early 50s and that number took 25 years to achieve.
Here’s another, from the 166,000 Golog people.
All Gologs are Tibetan Buddhists…. Few Golog have ever heard of Jesus Christ or his offer of salvation. They have been separated from all outside influence, including Christianity, for centuries. “[Gologs] live here, and other tribes of Tibetans, with whom they quarrel and fight. Yet of these local wars, not even an echo ever reaches the outside world.” In the early part of the twentieth century, some missionaries passed through the Golog area and distributed gospel literature, receiving an interested response from one Golog Head Lama. In recent years at least one mission agency has expressed interest in reaching the Gologs. There is only one missionary to this people group.
So…. Please be praying for our squad as we are in Tibet this coming week, and will remain there until early September when we will cross the Himalayas into Nepal.
Pray that as we travel overland to Lhasa, and out of it, that we would take every single opportunity we can to submit ourselves to the Lord.
Pray we would seek out His heart for these beautiful people, and have our hearts broken.
Pray we would be challenged in new ways.
Pray we would go the extra mile.
Pray we would seek out meaningful interactions, forgive grievances, and pour out our entire being on behalf of reaching the one.
Pray we would find the people God has for us.
Pray we would have freedom of mobility and that our interactions with locals would not be monitored or staged.
Pray we would bridge cultural divides, and take advantage of the hospitality of Tibetans and build relationships.
Pray we would be humble learners sensitive to the voice and direction of the Holy Spirit.
Pray we would have discernment and protection in spiritual warfare.
Pray that although our time in Tibet is brief that it would be used to frame and develop plans for seeds that grow into long term fruit.
Pray that more long term workers would be sent to Tibet, that logistical doors would be opened, and divine ideas and favor would be granted to those seeking to do full time work there.
Pray we would love Tibetans like Christ, because nobody else is really doing it…
Reminder! Please do not share any of these stories on social media or post publicly what I’m doing or who I’m with in China. If someone is interested in learning more you can direct them to my blog and my squadmate’s blogs!
