Unreached People Groups

Regent University Center for Missions (RCM) trains missionaries to work among unreached people groups worldwide. Classes focus on how to overcome barriers to the Gospel and present the message of Jesus Christ in meaningful ways that these people can understand. Although Christians and missionaries are needed throughout the world, RCM purposefully directs its efforts to helping the most needy and bring salvation to the least reached groups of the world.

Of the unreached people groups, the majority of the least reached fall within the 10/40 Window, an area lying between latitudes 10 and 40 degrees North and stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Indonesia in the Pacific. Northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East are all located in the 10/40 Window. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and animists are the least reached religious groups concentrated in this area. These people are not only the least reached, they are also the most resistant to Christianity and the least accessible due to religious, political and cultural barriers.

Since the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism of 1974, the concept of a people group, defined by common language and culture, has displaced the older idea of a nation-state. In 1982, a common definition for people group was adopted: "For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance." As indicated by Joshua Project, a organization dedicated to identifying unreached people groups and providing resources to evangelize them, there continues to be a discussion of whether the people groups to be evangelized should be defined to include language and dialect only (7,000 to 11,000 groups) or should also include ethnicity (approx. 13,000 groups) and culture as well (16,000 to 27,000 groups). Click here to read more.

In talking about unreached people groups, the consensus that seems to be emerging at the beginning of the 21st century is a scale of “least reached” to “most reached.” On this basis, the Joshua Project estimates that there are now over 3,200 people groups larger than 10,000 in size in which there is no witnessing church movement capable of reaching its own people. If smaller groups are included, the number of unreached people groups escalates to at least 6,500 as estimated by the International Mission Board and may total as many as 6,918 as the Joshua Project states—many with no gospel witness at all.

To learn more about this unreached people groups, check out the book Focus: The Power of People Group Thinking by John D. Robb and Joshua Project online.

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