There’s More to Missions Than Unreached People Groups by Paul Akin for The Gospel Coalition
In the mid-20th century, some evangelical Christians believed we were on the cusp of fulfilling the Great Commission because there were Christians located in almost every geographical country in the world. But at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in July 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Ralph Winters warned triumphant Christians about “people-blindness” and “hidden peoples.” He recognized that some geographic countries simultaneously contain both very evangelized and completely unevangelized groups of people (e.g., China).
Winters’s recognition prompted a significant paradigm shift in missions strategy that placed the focus on so-called “unreached people groups” (UPGs) around the world. More than 40 years after his strategy-altering address at Lausanne, the conversation continues today. I want to provide some historical context, express some caution, and highlight a corrective to the unreached-people-group strategy that dictates so much global-mission strategy today.
Context
Winters emphasized unreached peoples because he believed they were being ignored and neglected. The overwhelming majority of Christian missionaries at that time were working in contexts where Christians and churches were already present. He contended, “Precisely where the cross-cultural task is the largest, the cross-cultural workers are the fewest.” So churches needed to rethink their global-mission strategy to ensure that the gospel would be proclaimed to these unreached people.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
Winters’s address set in motion a missiological shift from targeting geographical regions to reaching people groups. His notion of unreached people groups took on more definition in the years following. Various Lausanne Working Committees in the 1970s and 1980s labored to define the people-group concept and then continued to define “reached” and “unreached.”
In the end, after much deliberation and discussion over the course of many years, the missiological community (Joshua Project, IMB, AD 2000, and others) decided that once 2 percent of a people group are Christians, that group is “reached.” The 2 percent dividing line wasn’t biblically derived, but it informed strategy.
Caution
I’m grateful for Winters’s emphasis on unreached people and believe he provided a needed corrective to mission strategy. However, I want to share several drawbacks I’ve observed in the unreached-people-groups strategy in my time both on the mission field and also in working at a mission-sending organization.
