Reached or Unreached

What about the billions of people around the world that do not fall into the 10/40 window? There are many countries in the world that are considered "reached". But, many of these countries have such a low population of believers of Christ that they are really no different than some unreached countries. In many of these countries that have been reached, generations have since passed and now we have a new segment of society of either unreached people groups or devout atheists. For example, in the country of Albania, it is considered a "reached" country. But, the percentage of born-again, truly transformed believers of Christ is nearly infinitesimal (less than 1%). Right out the front door there are hundreds of people in the neighborhood who have never heard the Gospel before. But many of their parents or other family members have seen the Jesus Film many years ago. When Communism fell in 1992, missionaries from the West flocked to Albania eager to introduce millions of Albanians to the Gospel of Christ for the first time. This, after being closed off to the West for 40+ years. Every village in Albania had been essentially reached. There was even an influx of thousands of newly professed believers of Christ. And, Albania was figuratively checked off the "unreached" list by many missions sending agencies. As a result, many of these missionaries left, with little or no follow up. Many churches that were planted early on have since died out. And now we are once ­­again back to square one, a country with a very small population of believers and with a large segment of society whose generation today have never heard the Gospel.

“Church planters are renegades at heart, they are the pioneers that very few leaders truly understand. Getting together with a network of church planters is very similar to an AA meeting. We all have a lot in common, and we all need each other’s strength for the season ahead.”

At a recent seminar based on research methods on how funding of STM relates to the funding of career missions, a seminar participant shared news he had received the night before. Mark, after seminary and church planting in the US, had been sent and supported by his congregation as a career missionary to Japan, where he developed extraordinary linguistic fluency, and was an unusually successful church-planter. In our class Mark announced that his return to Japan was being jeopardized because this key supporting church that he had helped to plant years before had decided to drop his $15,000 a year support. It seems the chair of the missions committee had taken a short-term trip to Latin America, where his team reportedly
planted a church in one week, and subsequently convinced the congregation to redirect their mission resources to their own members on short-term mission trips to Latin America and the Caribbean. Mark, a paradigmatic career missionary, a gifted polyglot (fluent in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and increasingly Korean), church planter and missiological strategist, came very close to not being able to return to the field for purely financial reasons.