Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
His peers described him as filled with “consuming passion,” to see the last
“unevangelized tribes,” reached for Christ “in his generation.” “[Flem-
ing] did not play around,” as one of his contemporaries put it. “He was
obsessed with this one great command of our Lord, to preach the gospel
to every creature.”
9
That Ayoreo-speaking groups were the focal point around which the
New Tribes Mission became institutionalized in 1943 was not due to any
particular interest in them. Missionaries, instead, “eagerly anticipated
reaching” Ayoreo groups because they were a “savage tribe that had
never heard the Gospel.”
10
The point was not their humanity but their
savagery.
They lived deep in the “Green Hell” of the Chaco wilderness and were
a “savage, nomadic tribe who had never had a chance to hear of the
love of Christ.” From its inception, the New Tribes Mission specifically
focused on “the hardest tribes,” those considered to be the most difficult
to contact. “Our first missionaries made the Ayore tribe their immediate
goal because they felt that other missionaries would never get to them.
The Ayores were infamous for their hostility.”
11
Fleming and other New Tribes missionaries believed that, like all “un-
reached people,” Ayoreo-speaking people had to learn their critically im-
portant role in God's universal plan. Inspired by Revelations 5:9 and 7:9,
Mark 16:15, and Matthew 24:14—which agree that “the end shall come”
after the gospel has been preached “unto all nations”—the New Tribes
Mission philosophy is to hasten the apocalyptic return of the Messiah by
bringing all of the world's human groups together “under the sound of
the Gospel.” The salvation of Ayoreo was merely incidental to this larger
project, “the completion of the body of the Bride of Christ.”
The body of the Bride of Christ is composed of the souls of all be-
lievers. But it will only be formed when every “kindred and tongue and
people and nation” on the Earth has heard the Word of God. “We believe
that the purpose of the Lord is that from every tribe and language must
come those who are to complete the Bride of Christ.”
12
According to the foundational covenant signed on August 1, 1942, on
the kitchen table in Paul Fleming's Chicago home, the foremost task of
the New Tribes Mission was to “work toward the completion of the Bride
of Christ until death, and to measure all our efforts in the light of this
task.” The rapture of the faithful—including missionaries themselves—
could only occur when Christ “comes for his Bride” and consummates
his union with the church.
13
From the beginning, the New Tribes Mission imagined a world in
