Around 2,000 years ago, God walked the earth in flesh and blood. Jesus was both the incarnation of and preaching the Word of God. Only He through it had the power to save us. He overcame the world in life, died for our sins, and was raised again for His obedience. He promised He'd raise us, too. Before leaving, He charged His followers with the Great Commission: bringing the Gospel to all peoples everywhere. Once the Holy Spirit ("Helper") came, His disciples made a lot of progress in a short time as recorded in Acts. Jesus promised He'd return after all peoples heard the Gospel.
Around 2,000 years past. All peoples have not heard the Gospel. It's gone far and wide. We've spread it by outreach to those in our viscinity, nearby towns, and even missions across the world. There's hundreds of millions to 1+ billion Christians on the earth, depending on which source you believe. The Joshua Project records that there's still 7,406 unreached people groups. There's also groups isolated a bit from the Gospel inside areas that have a lot of it. Examples from personal experience include Native American reservations, tiny towns companies dump low-paying jobs in (e.g. call centers / telemarketers), and rural areas with lots of dispersion (and depression). There's a lot left to be done.
So, what's stopping us? It can't be numbers. There's an estimated 300,000-400,000 churches in America alone. There's so many Christians in areas that can fund a mission that each one doing one mission a piece should reach all unreached areas several times over. Now, some of these areas have a large number of people no single mission can reach. I think getting our foot in the door successfully in each area will lead to further success. We should do at least one in each area to begin meeting Christ's requirements for His return. From there, expend more resources on wherever we see people leaning into the message as Isaiah teaches us.
An organized call to action is appropriate. The Joshua Project is a start since it lists people groups that need us. I'd further classify each group by whether Bible translations exist or not for them. A web site or application can track these groups, whose doing missions for them, whose funding translations, even randomly assign them, and note whose hostile to Christians. That last part is there since I believe people should be committed to their faith and facing that level of persecution before going to such a place. Everyone involved will pray for the total mission while each church's members will pray as a group for their mission.
The project needs mass marketing. The invitations to this project would be handed out at all places where pastors, ministers, and evangelists gather. Any content they view, such as magazines or social media, is another good place. Any denomination is invited so long as their faith includes: the life, death, and ressurrection of Jesus Christ; His being fully man and God; we are saved by God's grace followed by strong obedience in love for Him and others; He returns to judge the world once everyone gets a chance to accept Him. This is the commonality I saw in the groups the Holy Spirit has been working through the most.
The next problem is Bible translation. Wycliffe already made a huge push in that regard with both fundraising and methods to speed up translation. I thank God for the results that got. I think that they're doing the whole Bible for each group may be holding us back. We might only need to do pieces of it, at least at first. I wrote this article on how we may get the core Gospel to a massive number of unreached people in the time it takes to get the Bible to a much smaller number of them. We can give them the rest over time as demand and funding comes in.
We've had a long time to do this. Jesus told us He'll return if we get the Gospel to everyone. We've gone a long way. There's still thousands of unreached people with Bible translation being costly. There's enough churches to get to all (or almost all) of these locations *this year*. Advances in Gospel translations, optionally adding tricks like mine, can help get to the rest in a few years. My prayer and goal is that all unreached areas have churches in them in next 5-20 years. Once planted, the Spirit will move them to grow as God wills from then until Jesus' return. Our obedience to His call is all He's waiting for. Let's do it!
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