GFM - The Unreached Peoples and Their Role in the Great Commission

People Group: is an ethnolinguistic group with a common self-identity that is shared by the various members. The most dominant indentifier of a people group is their language, but each unique people group also shares a common sense of identity, history and customs. For strategic purposes, a people group is the largest group through which the gospel can flow without encountering significant barriers of understanding and acceptance.

Unreached People Group or Least Reached People Group: is an identifiable group of people distinguished by a distinct culture, language, or social class who lack a community of Christians able to evangelize them without outside help. Their only opportunity to hear about salvation is through an "external witness."

Unengaged Unreached People Group: According to Finishing the Task, there are 639 unengaged, unreached people groups with populations over 100,000, together numbering over 535,000,000 souls that are still beyond the reach of the Gospel. The 639 are perhaps the neediest of the needy as they are unengaged, which means that no church, no mission agency...no one has yet taken responsibility to tell them about Jesus Christ.

It is estimated that of the 6.7 billion people alive in the world today, 1.2 to 1.4 billion have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. According to Joshua Project, there are approximately 16000 unique people groups in the world with about 6600 of them considered unreached. The vast majority (95%) of these least reached groups exist in the 10/40 window.

Matthew 24:14: "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come." (NIV) The greek word for nations is ethne which refers to ethnicities or people groups. We believe that Jesus was very clear in stating that His gospel would be preached to all nations/ ethne/ people groups before He would return. Therefore the simple, yet major goal of Global Frontier Missions is to assist in the preaching of the good news to every people group in order to fulfill the words of Christ!

Revelation 7:9: "...before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb..." (NIV) The apostle John recorded what worshipping God will be like in heaven. And it is very key to see who is there to worship the Lord. Again, the Bible has made it very clear that God will not be satisified until there are people from every people group in heaven.

Jesus gave us the Great Commission, telling us to go into "all the world". And when we accomplish this task, then He will return! Global Frontier Missions exists to train and mobilize disciples of Christ to multiply themselves focusing especially on unreached people groups.

For more information, please visit the Joshua Project site or sign up for our free GFM missions Ebulletin.