by Jon Konnerup
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Luke 2:10
Right here in the story of the birth of the Savior of the world is the Great Commission. Notice this “good tidings of great joy” was for all the people of the world. Jesus, the Son of God, was born in Bethlehem, lived a sinless life on earth, came to seek and save the lost, died on the cross for the sins of the world, and rose again three days later, giving hope to the people of the world lost in sin, every one of us. That is the gospel — and it is to be shared with all people.
Since 1992, missiologists have defined people groups as “… the largest possible group within which the gospel can spread as a viable church-planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.” Then they came up with the term “unreached people groups.” This is a people group where a church planting movement does not exist, or at least is in an infant stage, where it cannot reach its own people without cross-cultural missionary assistance. This group would have only about two percent who have been reached with the gospel.
Now there are the unengaged, unreached people groups. These are groups where, as far as is known to researchers at present, there are no full-time missionaries attempting to do evangelism and church planting.
One thing Jesus told us to pray for in regard to world evangelization is more laborers. Researchers and the experts say there should be at least a minimum of one full-time missionary to every 50,000. So in a group like the Lunia, in India, with a population of 3.1 million people, there is a need for 62 missionaries in order to engage them adequately. By this standard, many people groups scattered around the world are extremely under-engaged.
There is one main reason to go to every people group — Jesus commanded us to go and make disciples of ALL nations. It is God’s heart to care about the one lost sheep, one lost coin, and the lost son. The burden of our Fellowship should be that yet another generation will live and die in these groups of people who are still unreached and unengaged. One way to change that is to get at least a few more people committed from our churches in reaching out to these unengaged people groups in this generation.
We are told there are 570 unengaged people groups that have populations of more than 25,000. Of those, 402 have populations of more than 40,000 people. Many of them are in difficult, hard-to-enter countries, but that doesn’t change the Great Commission given to us. Some of these groups are in countries we already have missionaries in. Let’s make the year 2013 the year of reaching the unengaged.