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THE
MISSING LINK!
Today, there are over 4,000
known evangelical mission agencies sending out 250,000 missionaries
from over 200 countries. This is up from 1,800 known mission agencies
and 70,000 missionaries in 1980. It is remarkable progress and
a powerful demonstration of global vitality and vision in the
evangelical movement.
At the same time, less than 10% of these missionary resources
are focused on the world's 2.7 billion living among the world's
unreached peoples. The result of this imbalance is that over 3,000
unreached people groups remain without any missionary presence.
Additionally, hundreds of large unreached people groups are still
woefully under-engaged, leaving vast population-segments without
any significant missionary activity. Since almost all of these
same groups and population segments were unreached and unengaged
30 years ago, it is safe to say that an entire generation of millions
was left without any indigenous witness of the gospel.
Today, we have less excuse for not fulfilling the Great Commission
than at any other time in history. We know who these 3,000 unreached
and unengaged peoples are, where they are, their latest population
and demographics, what languages they speak and where the closest
believers are in neighboring peoples. There's no mystery in it.
There's just one thing missing! The Missing Link : Agents of the
Kingdom seeking to do something about it!
The global presence of followers of Jesus has opened up incredible
possibilities for accelerating the full engagement of all peoples,
perhaps even in the next decade. Equally, the global diaspora
of peoples (both unreached peoples coming to live among reached
peoples, and hundreds of thousands of evangelicals being sent
by their companies to work in areas such as the 10/40 Window),
give unprecedented opportunities for equipping the entire Body
of Christ to participate in reaching the final frontiers of the
Great Commission.
At the same time, the gradual and steady breakdown of cultural
and linguistic barriers between peoples is allowing new opportunities
for the gospel to spread. In a recent case in South Asia, an American
believer saw a movement to Christ among a totally unreached Muslim
group by simply discipling two seekers, using only English and
a translator. Ten years later there are now over 100 fellowships
of Muslim-background believers.
In many areas of the world, new paradigms such as this are resulting
in incredible harvest. The traditional role of the missionary
as a church-planter who spends years to learn the language and
culture is giving way to the role of a catalyst who trains and
disciples local believers to initiate house-churches, lay-led
movements among extended families and social networks. To be sure,
such new paradigms are fraught with many challenges and risks!
But at the same time they also hold great promise, and the potential
for equipping millions of believers to act as such catalysts for
Kingdom movements is growing with every new successful engagement.
American agencies now send out over 2,000 ?tentmakers, but obviously
much more could be done, not just in the US but around the world.
We are only equipping a fraction of the hundreds of thousands
of evangelicals who have already been sent overseas by multi -national
corporations and companies. For this reason, one of the strategic
purposes of the GNMS is to encourage the development of new mission
networks and communities that will concentrate on recruiting,
training and mentoring of previously untapped missionary potential
such as this.
For example, might the next wave of new agencies and missionary
orders specialize in equipping entrepreneurs for mission work
in frontier regions? Imagine an agency that primarily recruits
and facilitates Christian businessmen to start new companies overseas
in the 10/40 Window. As has been proven in many cases, these companies
can themselves become communities of faith when a spiritual breakthrough
happens among them. In one such case, a businessman started a
factory which began employing hundreds of people in the city that
no one else would employ. Soon many came to faith in Christ, and
a church was started right in the factory itself. And though technically
no new churches could be legally established in this city, the
community was so impressed by this company that hired the unwanted,
they honored the effort instead of shutting it down. Though a
new paradigm for some, such developments are actually very close
to how the early Church reached the Roman Empire in the first
century. In those beginning years, ekklesias' were not only spiritual
communities, but economic communities as well.
The church today has in its hands myriad means and resources to
reach untapped missionary potential. We need to be become more
aware of how to creatively match the missions harvest force with
the ripening and ripened fields of the lost, unreached and unengaged
communities so that we might arise to our destiny to be the children
of light moving in Jesus love to transform communities across
cultures!
Adapted from Envisioning
A Global Network of Mission Structures
by David Taylor
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