Tarahumara woman – Samachique, Mexico
The beautiful, vast Copper Canyon (Barranca del Cobre) wilderness of western Chihuahua state contains canyons deeper than any found in the United States. Its native inhabitants, the Rarámuri (or Tarahumara) Indians, sought refuge here from Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century. Today they number from 50,000-100,000, although no one really knows. The Tarahumaras typically live in small earthen dwellings scattered over hundreds of miles of some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain. Though collectively known as ‘Tarahumara’, they actually span a vast cultural landscape with numerous distinct languages and ethnicities. The Tarahumaras have gained much renown worldwide for their near-superhuman ability to run for days at a time without a break, and became the chief subject of Christopher McDougall’s recent best-selling book, Born to Run.
The Tarahumaras run everywhere!
Tarahumara man – Samachique, Mexico
Unfortunately, their fame as hunter-runners still far overshadows their access to the truth about Jesus Christ. Very spiritual people, they worship a variety of demonic spirits and deities. Their degree of spiritual separation from our Heavenly Father is further magnified by their notorious reclusiveness and high suspicion of outsiders, most of whom have come to exploit them and their land. Their languages are also very difficult, and only a couple of Bible translations have been accomplished. And to top it off, the remote, lawlessness of this region has in recent years made it a refuge for Mexican drug traffickers who grow and harvest their illicit crops, even along the main roads, with near impunity.
- Please pray for the Tarahumara people; that the gospel can penetrate their hardened culture. There is a small Christian movement among them; I learned of small groups of believers who regularly travel (run) for hours at a time to meet for a church service.
- Pray for their physical needs. Their corn and bean crops have largely failed due to extreme drought conditions, and they face the potential of widespread famine. A cold winter is setting in and a local missionary hospital is already receiving severely malnourished Tarahumara children and seniors.
Drake and Dave with the missionary candidates and leaders of the training center.
Etnopedia currently maintains profiles of the various Tarahumara tibes in Spanish. English translations are available upon special request. If you would like to help us translate profiles, please email me.
We recently made the 20-hour trek from Oaxaca to the village of Samachique, deep within Tarahumara country. Our objective: teach a group of students at a missionary training center to conduct research into unreached ethnic groups. The center, run by the Assemblies of God, offers an intense, six-month missionary curriculum in Spanish. Our students, all from Mexico, included seasoned field missionaries temporarily removed from their posts to hone their skills, as well as new missionaries-in-training. One of the students is herself a Tarahumara Indian; her desire is to make disciples within her own tribe, while pressing further into other Tarahumara nations, some of whom have likely never even been identified. It’s precisely within such context that our course serves and equips the cross-cultural missionary-in-training.
Missionary candidates preparing for a long trek to spend the weekend with Tarahumara families deep in the mountains.
So what do we teach? Well, in an attempt to sum up a 30-hour course, it’s important to recognize first that our ‘enlightened’ western culture teaches us to associate research into cultures or ethnic groups with the science of anthropology. And while some aspects of this science are useful to learn a new culture, an anthropology degree is not essential to become a missionary (it may even be a hindrance). We focus rather on the core issue of the spiritual separation that exists between unreached ethnic groups and God. To illustrate this, imagine a simple scale of 1-10 (1 being God). On the scale, estimate the spiritual distance of an unreached ethnic group away from God based on factors which have kept them in the dark all this time: false religions, highly-complex languages, extreme geography, etc. The students begin to identify these constraints in a spiritual context, realizing that the enemy uses each of these as tools to keep entire nations from the truth. With this in mind the field missionary can more effectively assess the overall spiritual need of an unreached ethnic people group.
Dave instructing missionary candidates how to do research among unreached people groups.
Against this background, the course delves into practical aspects of field research: creating ethnic people lists, database development, field survey design, mapping, and many dos and don’ts of entering unreached villages. Our own field experiences, especially our mistakes, are essential teaching points. The students themselves brought much experience with them as well, making for a thoroughly engaging and productive course. We left Samachique at the end of the week fully blessed having helped equip and encourage a remnant of the Church willing to leave the comforts of home to make disciples of the unreached nations.
I pray this account serves to bless you as well.
In Christ, Drake