Uncategorized

When is a group unreached?

By Justin Long ⋅ June 19, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Can you spot the problems and challenges in the following analysis?

One of the difficulties in measuring which groups are unreached and need to be prioritized is the challenge of measuring the definition of an unreached group:

“An unreached or least-reached people is a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group.” (1982 Lausanne Committee Chicago meeting, www.joshuaproject.net/definitions.php)

“Adequate numbers and resources” is the challenge. What is “adequate”? The original Joshua Project editorial committee selected the criteria of less than 2% Evangelical Christianity and less than 5% Christian. I have likewise proposed a criteria (“Hunting microtrends: the impact of the 1 percent”, Momentum, September/October 2007:9) to identify when a group has hit its ‘tipping point.’ My criteria was admittedly unwieldy and technical, so in this article we will take a different approach to the problem.

The key to this approach is Global Diagram 15 in World Christian Trends, which quantifies the number of Christians in different categories. For our purposes we need only the AD 2000 figures as follows:

• Latent Christians (inactive in mission): 1,351,743,000
• Lay activists (intercessors, givers, short-timers, etc): 642,297,000
• Pastoral workers (bishops, clergy, pastors, chaplains, etc): 3,969,000
• Home missionaries (e.g. Americans among Americans): 925,000
• Cross-cultural home missionaries (e.g. British in England among Somalis): 210,000
• World C foreign missionaries (in Christianized countries): 306,800
• World B foreign missionaries (in World B countries): 103,000
• World A (unevangelized) foreign missionaries: 10,200

Total home missionaries (near-culture + cross-culture) = 925,000 + 210,000 =  1,135,000

Total foreign missionaries = 306,800 + 103,000 + 10,200 = 419,200

Note that this includes missionaries of all traditions and Christians of all traditions. We’ll use this as a global average. Rounded, we can see that there are 1 million home missionaries and 0.4 million foreign for 2 billion Christians,

or 1,000 home missionaries and 400 foreign missionaries for every 2 million believers
or 500 home missionaries and 200 foreign missionaries for every 1 million believers
or 50 home missionaries and 20 foreign missionaries for every 100,000 believers
or 5 home missionaries and 2 foreign missionaries for every 10,000 believers
or 2 home missionaries and 1 foreign missionary for every 5,000 believers.

“What will it take” (Momentum, September 2006) suggests we need 1 worker (foreign or home) who raises up 100 home workers who each reach 1,000 people. If we accept this as a general rule of thumb, then a people group of 1 million people needs:

• 1 (foreign or home) worker to pioneer: which requires at least 5,000 believers
• 100 home workers to fully reach: which requires at least 200,000 believers.

Now, I repeat: can you spot some of the problems in this analysis? What does this challenge mean for the church? What are the implications?

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

• How to get people to do something