Years ago, my wife and I became friends with a young couple whose life ambition was to reach one unreached tribe in Papua New Guinea for Christ. Steve, the husband, believed his life would probably be shorter than most people’s (due to the conditions in which they would live) but hoped that he would live long enough to plant the Gospel in at last one tribe. Have you ever thought about investing your life in a people group who have never heard about Jesus Christ? I would like to challenge you to consider that the Lord might want you to be the pioneer who first takes the Gospel to an unreached, or even frontier, people group. Let’s start off with some definitions that I have taken from Joshuaproject.net, one of the best online resources for missionary research.
People group: “For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church-planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance.”1
Unreached people group: A people group that is less than 5% professing Christian and less than 2% evangelical.
Frontier people group: A people group whose Christian adherents comprise 0.1% or less, with no sustained movements toward Jesus and virtually no known followers of Jesus.
What I like about these definitions is the focus on people groups, not countries. A people group often transcends country borders. Some unreached or frontier people groups, due to migration, have rather large populations living in gospel-accessible countries. For example, Gujaratis have a worldwide population of over 8 million, an estimated 265,000 of which live in the United States. On the other hand, the Aimaq peoples live primarily in Afghanistan but have smaller communities in Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. I was particularly struck by the lack of Gospel progress among the Aimaq. They are estimated as 100% Muslim and 0.0% evangelical. They do not have any completed portions of written Scripture translated in their language and no audio Bible. Not even The Jesus Film has been translated into their language. Can it be that so little has been done to reach a people group numbering over 2.3 million?
How can we, as lovers of our fellow human beings, pillow our heads at night and rest comfortably knowing that with no known exception, every Aimaq man, woman, boy or girl who dies ends up in a Christless eternity? How can we, as worshippers of Christ, bear the thought that Christ has virtually no worshippers in the Aimaq language?
What would God have you to do for the Aimaq or one of the other frontier people groups in our world? To reach the Aimaq, you would most likely need to move to a country where they have sufficient representation. But, as I mentioned above, there are an estimated 265,000 Gujarati speakers in the United States. There are so many Gujarati speakers in Middlesex County (central New Jersey), that vote-by-mail ballot applications are available in Gujarati! You would not have to leave America to evangelize them or the other 33 frontier people groups that joshuaproject.net cites as living within the United States!
Surely someone reading this feels the blush of not caring, not praying, not going and would even now bend your knee and say, “Lord, look no further for volunteers. Here am I. Send me!”