May 14, 2014

The Unreached Among Us

By John Spadafora

Blog

Churches who own Jesus’ global disciple-making mandate should understand the priority on those with little to no access to Jesus — those we call unreached. Part of the good news in our changing world is that the unreached are coming to us. In this series, we’ll look at this reality and some implications for us as the church.

We often hear of the great need in our own country to reach the millions of Americans who do not know the Lord. Recently a Christian university themed its global week, “Mission to the Unreached: Reaching Americans with the Gospel.” I in no way want to downplay the need to engage a post-Christian America with the gospel. But using unreached in this context minimizes the difference between Americans who have access to the gospel and people in places where there is virtually no one to tell them about Jesus, even if they wanted to hear.

The term unreached, by missiological definition, is “a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group,” according to the Joshua Project. A people group is categorized as unreached if there are fewer than 2% evangelical Christians and fewer than 5% Christian adherents.

How does this affect our American churches? It is these peoples (who previously had little to no access to the gospel) who are immigrating to our country and reestablishing their lives at our proverbial doorsteps. As of 2013, 232 million people globally live outside in their country of origin, and about 20% of those emigrants now reside in the U.S. In addition, 820,000 international students came to the U.S. to study last year.

Sadly, most of these immigrants and international students have little contact with Christ-followers even in our country. For the most part, they live life alongside their families and other immigrants, with little influence from people who live and love like Jesus. It is estimated that 75% of international students never enter an American home.

Fritz Kling says in his book The Meeting of the Waters, “Migration is key global reality” — a reality and an opportunity for the church. An opportunity for disciples of Jesus to reach the unreached without ever moving abroad! What might it look like to welcome the stranger among us?

Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4