“My constant ambition has been to preach the gospel where the name of Christ was previously unknown, and to avoid building on another man’s foundation, as Scripture says: They shall see, to whom no tidings of him came, and they who have not heard shall understand.” (Romans 15:20-21, Phillips)
Recently, I have been perusing the World Christian Encyclopedia, released in 2001. The material is not, exactly, light reading. The encyclopedia’s three volumes are filled with incredible statistics, trends, and projections concerning the Christian Church and its missionary outreach around the world.
Two provocative lists have caught my attention especially: the world’s least reached countries – arguably the areas of greatest missionary need – and the countries that receive the greatest number of missionaries. The lists caught my attention because they do not coincide.
The largest missionary-receiving country has become, ironically, the one that sends the most missionaries – the United States. In the year 2000 our country received 31,200 cross-cultural missionaries. The other large missionary-receiving countries were, in order, Brazil, Russia, France, Britain, Congo/Zaire, Argentina, South Africa, Italy, and Germany.
But the world’s least reached countries were elsewhere. Almost 90% of the world’s unreached are found in Asia. Where are the missionaries? In 38 countries, more than half of the population has yet to hear a presentation of the gospel. The largest among them were, in order, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Afghanistan, Algeria, Nepal, Uzbekistan, North Korea, and Iraq. Where are the missionaries?
Michael Jaffarian helped to produce the World Christian Encyclopedia. In a recent issue of Missiology, Jaffarian observes: “[It would appear that] missionaries are most needed in circumstances not of poverty but of wealth, not of oppression but of freedom, not where non-Christians are, but where Christians are, and not where most have not heard the gospel but where most have not only heard it but received it” (January 2002).
Jaffarian’s observation brought to my mind a similar observation made a century before. In China’s Millions, a publication of the China Inland Mission, Henry W. Hunt explained why he felt the evangelization of China was being held up: “Too much settled work, and too little systematic itinerant work; too much flocking together of the workers in certain places where the blessing has been given in a degree, and too little scattering in other places which have hardly had an opportunity” (March 1890). This is still the reason for the hold up. We like “places with the blessing” altogether too much. And we scatter too little.
Will you join us in prayer for a new generation of missionaries, willing to be scattered among the world’s unreached? Or maybe you are willing for some scattering yourself….