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The Bridges of God appeared in 1954, and it has since become known as the classic summons for missionaries to utilize the “bridges” of family and kinship ties within each people group thereby prompting “people movements” to Christ. This is contrasted with the “Mission Station Approach,” dominant in missionary strategy of the nineteenth century, whereby individual converts are gathered into “colonies” or compounds isolated from the social mainstream. McGavran claims that whereas the latter approach was necessary and useful in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “a new pattern is at hand, which, while new, is as old as the Church itself.”