GFM - The Unreached Peoples and Their Role in the Great Commission

People Group: an ethnolinguistic group with a common self-identity that is shared by the various members. The most dominant identifier of a people group is their language, but each unique people group also shares a common sense of identity, history and customs. For strategic purposes, a people group is the largest group through which the gospel can flow without encountering significant barriers of understanding and acceptance. A people group usually calls "us, us" and "them, them". In the Bible, this is the greek word "ethne" usually translated as nations.

Unreached People Group (UPG) or Least Reached People Group: an identifiable group of people distinguished by a distinct culture, language, or social class who lack a community of Christians able to evangelize the rest of the people group without outside help. The only opportunity for the people group to hear about salvation is through an "external witness." Most missiologists consider 2% of the population becoming Christ followers as the "tipping point" at which the group is generally considered "reached" with the Gospel.

It is estimated that of the 6.8 billion people alive in the world today, 2.8 billion of them live in unreached people groups with little or no access to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. According to Joshua Project, there are approximately 16500 unique people groups in the world with about 6900 of them considered unreached. The vast majority (95%) of these least reached groups exist in the 10/40 window and less than 10% of missionary work is done among these people.

Unengaged Unreached People Group (UUPG): According to Finishing the Task, there are 418 unengaged, unreached people groups with populations over 40,000, together numbering over 130 million souls that are still beyond the reach of the Gospel. These 412 are perhaps the neediest of the needy as they are unengaged, which means that no church, no missionary, no mission agency...no one has yet taken responsibility to tell them about Jesus Christ.

Matthew 24:14: "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (people groups), and then the end will come." (NIV) The greek word for nations is ethne which refers to ethnicities or people groups. We believe that Jesus was very clear in stating that His gospel would be preached to all nations/ ethne/ people groups before He would return. Therefore the simple, yet major goal of Global Frontier Missions is to assist in the preaching of the good news to every people group in order to fulfill the words of Christ!

Revelation 7:9: "...before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb..." (NIV) The apostle John gives us a glimpse of what worship in heaven will look like. The Bible has made it very clear that God will not be satisified until there are people from every people group represented in His heaven.

Jesus gave us the Great Commission, telling us to go into "all the world and make disciples of all nations". And when we accomplish this task, then He will return! Global Frontier Missions exists to mobilize, train, and multiply disciples and churches especially among unreached people groups. We would love to help you or your church "adopt" or engage one of the remaining unreached people groups of the world.

For more research and information concerning unreached people groups, please visit Joshua Project or the IMB Global Research Department. For information on people groups coming to the United States where you can search by state or zip code, check out PeopleGroups.info.