Unreached, unevangelized and other stages

by: Justin Long

It has amazed me at several conferences and other events that people still say things like "I'm a little tired of all this talk about unreached peoples." Such a statement is nearly always said in a way that implies the focus on the unreached is a passing fad - a marketing ploy - and now other things should be given attention.

I am all for subjects getting the attention they deserve. Still, to lump the concept of unreachedness in with the latest Coca-Cola ad campaign is a little bit extreme to me.

The concept of an unreached people group or an unevangelized people group is fairly simple. It gets back to a single proposition: that Jesus told us to go into all the world and preach the Gospel, baptizing people and making disciples. Unreachedness is not a marketing ploy. It is a simple test: have we obeyed this command, or not?

The term "unevangelized" deals with the first part of the question. Have we preached the Gospel in all the world or not? A person has either heard the Gospel, or not. If he (or she, just assume from now on) has heard it, then he can choose to accept, reject, or wait (which is effectively the same as rejecting, but a different motivation). Whatever his decision, if he has heard the Gospel then the first part of our responsibility is done: we can say he has been evangelized.

The folks at the World Christian Encyclopaedia (with whom I worked many, many, many moons ago) are probably the foremost researchers in the world focused on this first question of evangelism. Their current estimate is that at least 25% of the world has yet to hear the Gospel even once. (Mind you, this 25% does not include all those people, like Protestants or Catholics, who - depending on your particular affiliation - are not "true believers." So we're saying that, setting those differences aside, there at least 25% or so of the world's population is completely out of touch with any vestige of Christianity.)

I would say that the term "unreached" deals with the second part of the question - making disciples. The technical definition of an unreached group is "a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without requiring outside (cross-cultural) assistance." To be reached requires that a significant amount of the group has been discipled and is reaching out to the remainder of the group, and they could feasibly evangelize the group (note the connection between reachedness and evangelism there) without any outside cross-cultural missionaries.

Measuring reachedness is difficult for the simple fact that there is no magical formula as to "how many disciples are 'enough.'" Is it enough for 10% of a people group to be Christian? (Each Christian then reaching out to 10 others and converting them.) How about 25% (with each reaching out to 4 others)? I think we could easily say that if a group is more than 50% Christian, they are reached. (Of course we can then get into arguments about "more than 50% of what kind of Christian," but let's not go there in this editorial.) You see my point. Certainly every unevangelized group is also unreached (which means at least 25% of the world). Probably most of the "World B" groups (majority-evangelized, minority-Christian) groups are likewise unreached as well, upon inspection. World C groups are all more than 60% Christian, and its likely that we could generally say these are "reached."

In any event, this editorial is really to illustrate that the concept of the unevangelized or the unreached WILL NOT GO AWAY until the task is finished. The fact that there are unevangelized and unreached peoples, cities, provinces and countries is a simple statement of the fact that we have not yet finished the task.

In order to finish the task, these peoples will have to be evangelized and reached. To say that we should stop focusing on unevangelized/unreached areas is to say that we should not worry about doing what Jesus said. He called us to evangelize and disciple the whole world.

Focusing on unreached peoples is simply a matter of bringing resources to bear on them that have not yet been brought to bear. There are many areas of the world that have tremendous amounts of Christian resources - this much is obvious. All that advocates of UPGs are saying is that some significant portion of these resources... perhaps a tithe? perhaps an equal share? ... should be brought to those who have nothing.

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