It is estimated that of the 7. Watch this brief video to learn more! The most dominant identifier of a people group is their language, but each unique people group also shares a common sense history and customs. For strategic purposes, a people group is the largest group through which the gospel can flow without encountering significant barriers of understanding and acceptance. Guess which missionary received increased support from the church? Among Muslims in the Horn of Africa, the rate of people who come to know Jesus is approximately one per year per church-based evangelical agency.
What is the key to our service here? Certainly not a harvest, or even the promise of one. Is a harvest of souls contrary to the will of God? Absolutely not! But focusing on the fruitful or harvest areas of the world, to the detriment of those who have never heard of Jesus, is not balanced or biblical. Many of the unreached dwell in enemy-held territory with few, if any, churches, pastors, Bible studies, etc.
Couple this with an inherent Western desire to transfer Christian attributes to nonbelievers who have never benefited from exposure to a Christian environment, culture, or country, and the risk of spiritual burnout is high.
Often I have seen the heartache of my colleagues who wanted nonbelievers to exhibit the attributes of love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, and so on, when those people had never known, or been around anyone who knew, the author of those attributes. Institutions grow and perpetuate themselves by generating funds through the promotion of their programs and personnel. How then do sending boards, seminaries, and mission publications handle ministries they cannot talk about?
The need for institutions to promote themselves at times exceeds the needs of the ministry. How does one publish the baptism of a former Muslim businessman when doing so may cause his death? Yet how does the ministryraise funds, recruit personnel, and garner prayer support? What a tension! Many agencies cannot handle such ambiguity and therefore avoid the areas that cannot accept traditional methods of church planting and reporting.
Seventy percent of the believers from one of our target groups have regularly been extracted from their environment by well-meaning evangelical agencies. Yet 60 percent of believers left in such a setting experience extreme persecution up to and including death. Colleagues have come to me in despair as new converts are beaten, expelled from families, shot, and killed. How can you emotionally and spiritually justify the fact that the consequence of witness is often more serious for the one receiving the witness than the one giving it?
The apostle knew that those without access to the gospel were top priority. The answer is, they cannot. We must send more workers like Paul to reach those without any Christian witness. We pray for revival in our nation, but what if revival is tarrying until we embrace our missionary call to the world?
We should never give up on the cause of the gospel at home. After earning his M. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter. We use cookies to improve your experience on our website.
Please read our privacy policy to find out more. Skip to main content. He has spoken, I believe very clearly, to that question. The book of Romans is kind of like a missionary support letter.
We have an entire book written to persuade the church to take the gospel to people who have never heard the name of Jesus. The book of Romans then has huge implications for how we understand any answer to this question. God has made revelation of himself continually and clearly known to all people. Every single man in the African jungle, every single woman in an Asian village, the Eskimo in the forgotten tundra, everybody has knowledge of God the Father; everybody in all history knows God.
We all have an inherently sinful nature that is prone to worship creation rather than the Creator. This is not an indictment of that Indian tribe. We are all prone to worship creation rather than the Creator, who alone is worthy of all praise. We worship ourselves, worship things, worship idols, whatever it is, we have rejected true knowledge of God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. When we talk about mission, we have this picture that there are innocent people all over the world waiting to hear the gospel.
Do you think it would be just, or fair, for God to condemn someone to hell for not believing in Jesus when they never even had the opportunity to hear about Jesus? I think the answer to that question is clearly no. It would not be fair.
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