The Biblical Basis For Missions (Intro)

Mis­sions is today one of the most abused words in Chris­tian­ity. We speak of mis­sions in a sense that has long since con­vo­luted both the intent and pur­pose of the term. In a com­mon church today, you will find no dis­tinc­tion between reach­ing those who have access to the gospel (reached) and those who do not (unreached). Let me explain this difference.

Defin­ing the Reached and Unreached

Accord­ing to The Caleb Project, there is at least one church in every polit­i­cal nation of the world. Does this mean that we have reached all the nations as Jesus com­manded? No, because God’s view of nations and our view are com­pletely different.

Our mis­con­cep­tion of mis­sions and reach­ing the nations stems from a mis­un­der­stand­ing of what “nations” means. The Greek word eth­nos and the Hebrew word goÌ?y goÌ?y had a spe­cific mean­ing. We get the Eng­lish word eth­nic from eth­nos. Eth­nic groups are defined by lan­guage, cul­ture, and geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion; but it does not refer to a polit­i­cal nation. So when the term nation is used in the Bible it means dif­fer­ent eth­nic groups (usu­ally eth­nic groups out­side of eth­nic Jew­ish descent).

While there are over 200 socio-political nations in the world, The Joshua Project tells us that there are 16,010 eth­nic groups. You will often hear the term eth­nic groups used syn­ony­mously with peo­ple groups in mis­si­o­log­i­cal cir­cles. A reached peo­ple (eth­nic) group has a tra­di­tional def­i­n­i­tion of being a group that has at least 2% evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians and a self-replicating church, and an unreached group will have nei­ther of these char­ac­ter­is­tics. The unreached have no access to the Gospel of Christ. When Jesus says, “make dis­ci­ples of all nations” He is say­ing to go get a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from each peo­ple group.

The Num­bers

The Joshua Project has cur­rently iden­ti­fied 16,010 peo­ple groups through­out God’s cre­ation. Of those peo­ple groups, 6,782 are still unreached (42.4%). These peo­ple groups include 2.51 bil­lion peo­ple which is 39% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. Most of the unreached (95%) live in an area called “The 10/40 Win­dow” which is a box from 10 and 40 degrees above the equa­tor span­ning from North Africa to Asia.

There are even more stag­ger­ing sta­tis­tics: only 8% of the world’s cross-cultural Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies are reach­ing the unreached. So, 92% of all the world’s Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies are, in Pauline lan­guage, “build[ing] on another man’s foun­da­tion” (Rom 15:20). The Trav­el­ing Team states that of those build­ing on another man’s foun­da­tion, 74% of them are wit­ness­ing to nom­i­nal Chris­tians! They are leav­ing behind the Bud­dhists, Mus­lims, Hin­dus, unre­li­gious, and other expres­sions of reli­gious thought.

Lastly, the church world­wide grosses over 12.3 tril­lion dol­lars and of that less than 1% goes into reach­ing the unreached. It is quite appar­ent that some­thing is dras­ti­cally wrong in our cur­rent approach to missions.

Defin­ing Missions

Because of the lack of progress we are mak­ing I feel it nec­es­sary to make the def­i­n­i­tion of mis­sions spe­cific not ambigu­ous. Mis­sions is the act of reach­ing the unreached. This means that when we are reach­ing out to peo­ples that already have a 2% evan­gel­i­cal pop­u­la­tion and a self-replicating church move­ment we are sim­ply doing evan­ge­lism and not mis­sions. Keep in mind that of the 6,584 unreached peo­ple groups in God’s cre­ation only 24 are in the United States which amounts to .004% of the worlds unreached. Almost all of our evan­ge­lis­tic efforts in the U.S. would not fit this def­i­n­i­tion of missions.

The Bib­li­cal Basis for Missions

Many Chris­tians believe that when Jesus spoke in Matthew 28 about mak­ing dis­ci­ples of all the nations (peo­ple groups) that The Great Com­mis­sion started right then, but when we look far­ther back we will see that the pur­pose and intent of God of see­ing His name exalted through­out all of His cre­ation started back in Gen­e­sis 1!

The sec­ond part of this arti­cle is going to be a sur­vey of Gen­e­sis to Rev­e­la­tion over the intent of God with His cre­ation. When we look clearly at the Bib­li­cal record of God’s work­ing with man we will see that when Jesus spoke of reach­ing the nations in Matthew 28 He was sim­ply restat­ing a truth that had been spo­ken upon for 4,000 years.

“For from the ris­ing of the sun even to its set­ting, My name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense is going to be offered to My name, and a grain offer­ing that is pure; for My name will be great among the nations,” says the LORD of hosts.
Malachi 1:11

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