is a stripped-down and popularized version of my WEC colleague and co-author’s thorough anthropological survey, Peoples on the Move.

  • How do you get a church on the back of a camel? How, if you don’t put it on the back of a camel, can you carry the gospel to peoples on the move?
  • Gypsy people may be responding to the gospel more enthusiastically than any other people in Europe. What is their story?

Nomads squeeze a living from the most marginal landscapes in the world, Arctic tundra or stoney desert. They crop up in unusual places: many of India’s blacksmiths, for example, are the nomadic Lohar peoples. Nomads are easily ignored, frequently despised.

Yet Abraham, founder of the great monotheistic faiths, was a nomad. Nomadism is the background to much of the Old Testament. John’s gospel uses a nomadic term when it says that Jesus in coming to earth ‘camped’ among us. The first people to hear the news of Jesus’ birth were nomads, bivouacking in the fields around Bethlehem.

Further reading

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This is my co-author’s unique and thorough survey of the nomadic peoples of the earth.