UNAWARE OF THE UNREACHED
Ignorance is bliss but it can also be deadly. One of the most dangerous misuses of Christian phrases I’ve heard recently is the overuse of the phrase, “unreached people group.” I’ve heard people use that phrase to talk about efforts to reach college campuses, friends, clubs, and neighborhoods. It is a term that has been used more and more in the Christian subculture to validate missional status quo rather than raise the alarm for people groups who are entirely cut off from the gospel.
CRUCIAL DEFINITIONS
We need to understand what a people group is and how to define what it means to be “reached” with the gospel. A people group is not a subculture, but the largest grouping of people within which messages can be exchanged without encountering major communication boundaries. Just because my seventy-year-old neighbor doesn’t have a smart phone or listen to Adele doesn’t put us in different people groups. Our slang may be different, but we both speak English and have no problems communicating. On the other hand, the family down the street who primarily speaks Spanish would be a part of a different people group because our ability to communicate is severely limited to their broken English and what I’ve learned from Dora.
A people group is considered “reached” or “unreached” based on the group’s public access to the gospel. By public access, I mean the presence of churches with the intention and ability to share the gospel with the rest of the people group. Just because there may be individuals within a specific people group who have not personally heard the gospel, it does not mean that group is unreached. There may be public access to the gospel (churches who are sharing the gospel), but not every individual has heard the message. Without public access to the gospel individuals will never personally hear the message. If we desire all people to personally hear the gospel, we should leverage our lives to plant churches among the people groups where there is currently no public access to the gospel. We can roughly separate people into three groups depending on the degree of personal hearing and public access to the gospel within the group.
