639 Untouched People Groups
ChristianPost.com
"...According to Dan Grether of Mission Spokane, "Finishing the Task" was inspired by a Billy Graham conference held at Amsterdam in 2000. During the conference, the Rev. Graham challenged 500 people gathered from 120 nations to complete the Great Commission and to charge forward at a rate quicker than in the last decade.
After nearly 2000 years of missionary work, there remain in the world 639 people groups with populations of 100,000 or more that do not have anyone communicating the Gospel to them.
At the Amsterdam conference, a group of seven mission organizations that were seated at Table 71 - by which the group is now known - were challenged by the large number of people groups as of yet unreached by the Gospel.
"It became apparent to us - especially to Steve Douglass - that two thousand years after he gave us the Great Commission, we still haven't gotten the Gospel to every people group," Grether said.
The seven missions organizations - Campus Crusade for Christ Intl., Youth With A Mission, Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, Mission Spokane, Walk Thru The Bible, and Dawn Ministries - have since then come up with the idea of inviting larger churches (congregations of 2,000 or more) to a conference to encourage church planting movements among the last frontier of people groups.
"Part of our thinking is that there are churches part of the United States of America that are already mission-minded and have a lot of resources. Through this conference, our group wants to invite the pastors across the U.S. to come and be challenged to adopt one of those large last frontier people groups," said Grether.
The organizations will offer their well-known and much-used resources, including special oral biblical teaching resources, Nov. 14-17 at The Cove in Asheville, N.C., to a select group of mission-minded pastors. A little more than 50 pastors have signed on. There is room for 25 more."
Español | Deutsche | Français | Italiano | Português
Google Transl. by: Online Business Journal
1 Comments:
To clarify: The headline and the text within the Christian Post article are somewhat misleading, though undoubtedly not intentionally.
It would be perhaps more accurate to say the last 639 large untouched or unengaged groups. "Unreached" is a technical definition that has more to do with response than with whether there is someone working among them or not. An "unreached" group is an ethnic group that lacks the physical and spiritual resources to evangelize itself to its borders without outside, cross-cultural assistance (e.g. missionaries).
By this more classic and broadly accepted definition, there are literally thousands of unreached groups. There are hundreds that have more than 100,000 members (over 200 with over 1 million members alone).
What this article is really about - and it is important! - is that this group wants to focus on the "last 639" that have no workers among them. This is a laudable goal and the next step in the overall task of world evangelization, but that task is far from complete when that is done.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home